catapult magazine

I had an interesting conversation with a musician friend of mine at JPUSA. He plays flamenco guitar and considers Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon one of his favourite albums. He is also a trained Freudian Psychoanalysist and an ordained Pentacostal Pastor who speaks in tongues and believes in charismatic outpourings of the Holy Spirit.

He asked me if I had heard Keith Green. I told him I had but really disliked it. He said, "anybody can write a song but only the Holy Spirit can give testimony". He then explained that the testimony of the Holy Spirit is what he experiences when he listens to Keith Green.

Is it possible that God works through tacky, cheesy music? Maybe we who interact with popular culture regularly require music to have more armor. Music that comes out of sheltered communities sounds weak to me. It sounds defenseless. It lacks the strength of Johnny Cash or Kanye/Common collaborations. Is it possible though, that music from a Christian community that focuses on praying, reading the Bible, and fellowship more than reading The New York Times, watching MTV2, and hanging out at a bar, could be more full of the Holy Spirit than the ‘great’ artists that we all like?

Sounds like an interesting guy!

I think that music testifies about the culture that produced it and the culture that appreciates it. So for me it’s not a question of whether or not Keith Green music is good or bad, cheesy or sophisticated. It’s a question of what Keith Green’s music says about him, his community, and the community that appreciates his music. There are many Christians who experience his music with reverence and awe, not so unlike how others experience Jeff Buckley, for example. Jeff Buckley does not speak to many of my fundamentalist friends at all. They can’t relate. Keith Green…that’s another story. And someone who finds rapture in Jeff Buckley finds Keith Green cheesy. Maybe the holy spirit is working through both artists speaking different languages to different people?

There has to be some standards though. I really don’t think just any kind of music is good for people. Maybe we need music to get us out of our contexts. Marvin Gaye’s "ain’t no mountain high enough’ is a good example of a song like that. Jeff Buckley is a searching spirit and I feel that. Sometimes we need music we can empathize with. I think we can also agree that there are songs that come out of contexts of greed, violence, sexual destruction that aren’t good for anyone. My question is if there is a measure for how good/full of Holy Spirit a musical composition performance is. I think maybe there is a universal measure. It has to be experienced though. To me the Bible is the full measure and everything relates to that.

Nick Caves "No Pussy Blues". Maybe thats close to the Bible. I feel it but I’ll have to pray a bit more about that one. Johnny Cash’s "Cocaine Blues" or "I’m Goin to Jackson" from Live at San Quentin, "Ain’t no Mountain High Enough". That’s Holy Spirit.

don’t forget keith green’s ‘so you want to go back to egypt’ (Manna burgers, Manna bagels, Fillet of manna, Manna patty, BaManna bread!) and ‘Only by following Jesus’ (The kingdom come now, The devil is on the run now, And you can live for eternity, But only by following Jesus).

joel, i think the holy spirit speaks to you through johnny cash because johnny cash speaks your language. there are millions of christians who don’t get johnny cash and the holy spirit has to speak keith green language. maybe the faith of those people is more naive, but maybe not. maybe its just a different kind of faith thats less intellectual, less cerebral. Maybe their spiritual experience is simply on a different plane than yours. This might also explain why people like joel and anton don’t generally speak in tongues and experience spiritual orgasms in church, and why keith green-lovers are more likely to do those sorts of things. it’s almost like its a different religion.

A very interesting discussion, guys. Taste is not the only element that determines what makes something good, right? Maybe this is what Joel is getting at. How can we say something is good for people, while taking their tastes into account?

It helps me to think of music and taste in terms of food. If we think of music as food, a large population of Americans might say hamburgers and french fries from your average fast food joint can be considered "good" food. But does that make it so? Unfortunately many Americans have been raised on a particular diet and have adapted to it, thus calling it "good" because they don’t know any better. This can easily happen to a people if all they hear on the radio is Top 40 programming or all that’s offered to them as "Christian" music is CCM, which has its own biases toward music with a youth-oriented focus on individual evangelism (just as fast food has its own biases toward meeting the "needs" of people with on-the-go lifestyles).

The case of this guy who loves Pink Floyd doesn’t fit this scenario, however. He clearly has heard other stuff and does appreciate it. So It doesn’t bother me that he likes Keith Green just as it doesn’t bother me that people (including myself) occasionally eat hamburgers in fast food restaurants or cotton candy at carnivals. But if we are reducing the diet of Christians to sentimental songs of meditation and praise, that goes against the rich diversity of God’s creation. Doesn’t sound like this guy is suggesting all music should be like Keith Green.

So, from my perspective, contrasting Keith Green and Nick Cave is not an issue of whether the Holy Spirit is in it or not. It’s an issue of the music’s intentionality, what its intended use is. Clearly Nick Cave is not trying to set a tone for prayerful meditation with "No Pussy Blues" and Keith Green is not trying to make music to shock people out of their moral comfort zones as Cave clearly loves to do.

Going back to our food metaphor, even though there might not be any McDonalds in heaven, the Holy Spirit could be in a Happy Meal and a Big Mac if it’s shared between a dad and his son after a soccer game . If that was its intended use handed down from McDonald’s corporate headquarters, all the better. But perhaps corporate headquarters only wants to make a buck with ground chuck, this didn’t stop the Spirit from working in the lives of the father and son.

Now back to music. The Holy Spirit is too big a phenomenon to be contained only in a the intention of an artist’s work or preserved in the song itself. There’s the performance of the crafted work, the interpretation of the listeners, the way it’s used in different historical moments by different groups etc. I don’t like linking the Holy Spirit too much to an individual person’s taste. That seems problematic on so many levels.

I’m not sure the food comparison works very well. Someone who eats only McDonalds will become unhealthy and die early. Someone who likes only cheesy pop music might be perfectly healthy in every way, including spiritual and mental. I think this idea that ‘easy to swallow’ music is bad for people is elitist and unrealistic. For people who make music a central part of their lives (like joel and grant, for example) I think we should have a different standard than for people like me for whom music is fairly peripheral. It’s really a bit much to expect your average church-goer to appreciate Nick Cave. It’s like expecting your average person on the street to enjoy the academic history book I’m reading today. The holy spirit may be speaking to me through the book, but it’s not going to happen for the next guy. It’s not so much a matter of taste as it is a matter of expertise and interest. Personally, I am no longer interested in investing a lot of effort into ‘difficult’ music because there are other parts of my life that are difficult and I don’t want music to be one of them.

Very interesting discussion …

Just a brief thought to throw in at the moment: perhaps we don’t expect enough out of people (or, rather, people don’t expect enough out of themselves). Too often, people don’t think music is important or influential; therefore, they expect nothing from it or expect that it requires nothing of them—both of which are incorrect.

I think "Ain’t no Mountain High enough" can touch anyone. I agree that I’m talking about a certain expression of the Holy Spirit but I think it can apply to anything. Frank Loyd Wright’s Unitarian church is a good example of something considered good taste but screams control. It looks like a military barracks or something. The Church across the street is a bit frilly but there’s joy around it.

i don’t agree that johnny cash will speak to anyone. his music is culturally situated just like everything. there will still be plenty of people that will hear his songs and shrug, or dislike it outright, or find that it sounds weird and outdated.

isn’t this a case where the holy spirit has spoken to you through a particular song and you can’t imagine she wouldn’t speak to everyone else through the same song?

Here’s "Ain’t no Mountain High Enough". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz-UvQYAmbg

I agree that everything is culturally situated as am I. Perhaps African tribesman or members of the Berlin Philharmonic will not understand where Marvin Gaye is coming from. I think there is a spiritual common ground that threads through all cultures though that we can recognize to some extent. I’ve heard a similar spirit in Johnny Cash’s "Cocaine Blues", Marvin Gaye’s "Ain’t no Mountain", Rostropovich’s version of the Bach’s "Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1", Nick Cave’s "No Pussy Blues" and some Malawian Church Choir recordings I heard.

Here’s the Bach
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU_QR_FTt3E&feature=related

Here’s Nick Cave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuDP7c3Zd8I

Thanks for those links! Very nice. Yesterday I heard a wonderful recording of Cree hunters singing with their drum and I found it moving and intriguing , but I don’t think I have the musical or cultural vocabulary to be moved in the way that a Cree person would be. that would take time and effort. Similarly, what does Bach have to say to the average American today? Some people will find it pleasant, others annoyingly classical, but I suspect for most it will considered suitable for background music. As tragic as that may be, I don’t think we can put our head in the sand about what kind of music speaks to the majority of people today. as much as we think people ‘should’ like bach, i’m not sure there’s much you can do about the fact that most people don’t give a shit.

i think the holy spirit chooses to meet people where they are rather than trying to bring them to a predestined meeting spot. i will even venture to say that the holy spirit can speak through celine dion, and often does.