catapult magazine

catapult magazine
 

Vol 6, Num 5 :: 2007.03.09 — 2007.03.23

 
 

Returning to the why of music

The soundtrack of a life

They say that smells are the strongest sensory cues for eliciting memory; music must surely run a close second. It only takes hearing the opening piano notes of ABBA’s “S.O.S” and I am transported to a different time and place. Outside a thick, but brightly lit, monsoon fog hangs in the air, condensing moisture on the pine trees, dripping down to flow in tiny rivulets down a Himalayan foothill. I sit in a sunroom with windows on three sides. The immersion heater boils the water, ready to be made into strong, dark tea which will be tamed with sugar and powdered milk. And the mono cassette recorder belts out the rolling piano part which crescendos into the chorus of “S.O.S.” Where are those happy days, indeed?

The tape recorder was our family’s first, and the album was actually hip at the time. ABBA was the hottest group on the planet, and our family, along with most of the music listening public of Pakistan, relished the lovely melodies and harmonies of the foursome from Sweden. It did not seem to matter that the lyrics, well, often left something to be desired both poetically and morally. “Honey, honey how you thrill me” is hardly a sentiment of which the missionary community in Pakistan would have approved, not to mention, “And now I know what they mean / You’re a love machine / Oh, you make me dizzy.” Either we were not listening or we were listening on a truer level, a level that was to escape me somewhere in the coming years.

ABBA was by no means my only introduction to the world of music. No, Jan and Dean, the William Tell Overture, Patriotic Songs of America, Sing Along with Mitch, and the Sound of Music were all among the records which made the rounds on our next audio system, a snazzy “three-in-one,” a turntable, radio tuner, and cassette recorder all together in the shape of a briefcase, with a top consisting of two detachable speakers. It looked a bit like an archaic turntable for an itinerant rapper, or else a suitcase bomb. But back then, it was oh so cool and happily spun accompaniment as we sang along with fraulein Marie or the coy, but lovely, Leisel. I can tell you about the Sewanee River, the barges on the Eire Canal, and the origins of a Davy Crockett all because of several 12 inch pieces of vinyl, one with a bite-sized chunk missing out of its edge. Oh, and in case you were wondering about Davy? He was born on a mountaintop in Tennessee. Yeah, one with lots bears on it.

Somewhere along the way, though, my largely unexamined appreciation of music ended. Two things happened. First, I grew up, and a certain amount of reflection appropriately flowed out of my maturing mind, both naturally and in response to good modeling. My first epiphany that criticism, in the technical sense of the word, could and should be applied to entertainment and art was prompted by my eldest brother. We had just watched Back to the Future and I am certain my mind was off soaring like the De Lorean at the end of the movie. Virgil, though, asked whether the reversal of the fortunes of George McFly and Biff as they were depicted in the movie did not present a distorted view of individual worth vis a vis success and possessions. To borrow a catch phrase from the time, I was like, wow, you can actually do that? You mean you should ask questions about entertainment? I do not think I actually relished the prospect at the time, but if you are the sort of person who has an analytical genie inside and you’ve awakened it somehow, there’s really no getting it back in the bottle.

The second reason my appreciation of music fundamentally altered was less positive. I renounced the wider music world and entered the cloister of Contemporary Christian Music. Though, really, the metaphor of a classic European ghetto is a better one, as it was an entire cultural ecosystem unto itself, paralleling and poorly parroting the secular mainstream, its trends and, paradoxically, even its values. To be fair, my introduction to CCM came by way of a collection of artists, some of whom I still value, whose music tended toward a category I would call “sacred music,” which is appropriate for corporate and devotional worship and reflection. The songs of Keith Green and some of the early songs of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith fit this category, and some of these have justly joined the songbooks of many churches. Other artists who fit this category for me were Michael Card, Twila Paris, and Rich Mullins.

Ah, Rich Mullins. Winds of Heaven; Stuff of Earth, with a still rather shiny and clean Rich with his dog, Bear, on the album cover, was one of the first CCM tapes I ever owned, and Rich would ultimately be one of the artists I would keep with me as I would leave the ghetto many years later. In fact, I believe that his personality, his increasingly iconoclastic posture toward CCM, and his honest artistry were a precursor to some of the ways in which “artists who are Christians” are beginning to reconfigure the landscape of Christians in the arts today.

The more insidious effects of the ghetto mentality of the CCM subculture have been documented by others more knowledgeable about its social history and musical and theological shortcomings than me. However, what is interesting to me, specifically, is the primacy of the words in CCM, the privileging of lyrics over music. It was this that would have a profound effect on my thinking. This privileging manifested itself both in the need for Christian songs themselves to have lyrically edifying content, which seemed to preclude reference to personal struggles and questioning that were too dark, and in the eschewing of certain secular songs or groups simply because of their perceived poor lyrical content, irregardless of the artistry of the music. Furthermore, not only did the lyrical content of songs have to pass muster, but so did the lives of the artists who sang them. Christian bookstore shelves resembled the Soviet Union a little bit, where an artist could colorfully populate its shelves one day, only to be gone without a trace the next. Just ask Michael English.

What I internalized in this period was that words, preferably simplistically crafted and straightforward , should trump the agency and mystery of the music every time, that music is principally a vehicle for carrying the message. In CCM, this belief, paradoxically, would lead to the “Christianizing” of all sorts of musical genres, genres in which clearly the music is very much part of the message or, indeed, is the message. “Christian death metal” seemed to me to be an oxymoron of the highest order, yet it could receive the Evangelical imprimatur if the hoarse, indecipherable screaming was about Jesus or if the anger was against abortion or some other sin.

The primacy of the words over music seems to me to be the endpoint of one of the thousands of roads that divided off in the Reformation. It seems to be some poor, bastardized reflection of sola scriptura, which kept American Evangelicals from truly embracing both art and music. It may be that I am just projecting my own fears at the time, however, it seemed that the CCM culture was suspicious of the music even as it played it, realizing that it had great power, power which needed to be carefully tamed and managed. It seemed as if a very simplistic understanding of Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things,” and a woeful neglect of the range of human emotion expressed in the Psalms were the guiding principles and the rule.

And a rule it was, indeed, with a “shoot the wounded” and “weed the wanting” mentality that could be oppressive. In 1987, in her appropriately titled, final album as a Contemporary Christian Musician called The Turning, Leslie Phillips sings:

You lock me up with your expectations
You lock me up with your expectations
Loosen the pressure you choked me with
I can't breathe
I can't breathe

You stripped my heart with your accusations
You shut me into an affectation
Loosen the pressure you choked me with
I can't breathe
I can't breathe

Let me pull down on your high ideals
To sweet earth honest and wide
Tumble with me in an undoubted craze
Don't hold back the tide

You might get caught in sweet captivation
If you let your mind take this aberration
Loosen the pressure you choked me with
I can't breathe
I can't breathe

You lock me up with your accusations
You lock me up with your accusations
You lock me up
You lock me up
You lock me up

Leslie then took on her childhood nickname of Sam and lit out for the territories, to carve out trails of authentic beauty and art, to find for herself a home in the strange frontier of a Christian in the arts.

Thankfully, the path that Sam Phillips took has taken by others. And today, many others do not feel the need at all to begin their trip with a sojourn in the Mecca of Nashville. In a process that has been going on for quite a while, the walls of the ghetto are being breached both from the inside and out. “Christian artists” in the industry seem to have more freedom to express the full range of human emotion, to express the struggle of faith. Others simply choose to be identified as “artists or who are Christians,” with their Christianity as perhaps a foundation, perhaps an afterthought, but never simply a set of credentials or an accessory. I am not certain of the reasons for these changes, but I suspect it is a function of many things both negative and positive, including: a general decentralizing of authority in the church, an increasing appreciation of the role and power of the arts (which is perhaps a corollary of the desire of many to return to ancient traditions of the church), and the increasing ease of both producing and disseminating music. All of this creates a sort of messiness, but it is a messiness in which artistry can flourish, in which mental and spiritual muscles must be exercised as we listen and watch and create.

The tearing down of the walls of my own personal ghetto, which was patterned on the “heavenly” ghetto of CCM, was also a gradual process, but one which was ultimately more thorough. And, as the title of this essay suggests, it has been a return of sorts. As with many changes of thought in my life, this change, too, was a result of modeling, call me malleable, and of struggle. To pinpoint a beginning of the return would be rather arbitrary, but there are vignettes along the way. In the autumn of 1992, a friend of mine from Scotland, Keith, and I shared a bachelor pad as we both taught English and hung out with the students of my high school alma mater, a small boarding school in the mountains of Pakistan. It was nothing that he said that affected change, but who he was, a rather good looking chap who was theologically conservative, loved God, and liked his music. Our cold, dank house rang with the sounds of R.E.M’s Automatic for the People and C. C. Penniston, and They Might Be Giants’ Flood. And I began to hear again music for the music’s sake. After all, what does one do with “a blue canary in the outlet by the light switch, who watches over you,” except to “build a little birdhouse in your soul” and receive it with joy.

There would be other friends, too, who would pry open my heart and pour in the music. There was Kenn, with more R.E.M. and so much more, who became such a good friend, partly because we were, and are, on the same journey, of broadening our minds and souls while holding onto our faith. With Julie, it was a genuine case of William Blake’s “opposition is true friendship,” which I was only to see the results of much later in the changing of my attitudes to a host of things which before I had tightly proscribed. A little peace offering of a classic mix tape which she gave me one Christmas, completely underappreciated at the time, introduced me to at least one of the songs that now makes my melancholy/beautiful list.

My early thirties found me in a second adolescence of sorts, or perhaps a first one as far as music was concerned. I began to pick up and try on different artists, to inhabit genres for a while. And while I did not develop an affinity for everything I tried, I did begin to understand why someone might like something; I began to live and let live. I now get punk, for example. I happen to think it is a bit like driving a car perpetually in third gear, but sometimes that might be what one needs to do, to get out all that energy or rage, to clean out the carburetor of the soul. Ultimately, what I came to understand was that music mediates things that words cannot express, things which the cognitive mind may not be able to fully grasp. And if you grow up in cessationist, word-centered, emotion-wary circles, that can be a little scary. You begin to understand why people want to control it.

Ideally, the words to a song and its music should work together, but this seldom happens perfectly. Sometimes I am rather nonplussed to have Googled the lyrics to a song only to find that they nowhere near match the power of the music. This bothers me, but not nearly as much as it once would have, and unless the lyrics are completely inane, I can generally continue enjoying the song. It is both disconcerting and encouraging to realize that sometimes an artist who produces a piece, may not truly understand her work, nor be the best critic of it. 

I am not well versed enough in the principles of music to explain how it works, nor am I a relativist, believing any meaning ascribed to a song or text is equally valid, but somehow music carries powerful messages in and of itself that can move the soul, no matter what the words are. Take for example, the “Londonderry Air,” which seems to move people equally effectively as “Danny Boy” or with the lyrics “I cannot tell why he whom angels worship should set his love upon the sons of men. Or why, as shepherd, He should seek the wanderers, to bring them back, they know not how or when.” If you have sung the latter in church sometime, reflect for a moment from where its power to move you comes. I think you will find that the answer is not simple. And that is OK.

And so, finally, to echo Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, along with the great power of music, comes great responsibility. We do have the responsibility to ask questions about all aspects of music, to determine its truthfulness and helpfulness to our souls, or lack thereof, to determine, even, whether music which is “permissible” in the Pauline sense, is at any given time beneficial.  I chose to give away Coldplay’s album Parachutes (and tossed in A Rush of Blood to the Head for good measure), because it pulled heart down to the depths like an anchor. And I have since repurchased both albums, because I can appreciate the music both cognitively and emotionally, but yet still stay afloat.

This responsibility for intellectual and emotional discernment is, indeed, great for those of us who simply listen to music, and perhaps even greater for those of you who create it. But isn’t that what the working out of our faith at large is truly all about? Christ has set us free from our sins, not to be conformed to the world, yes, but not to run from it either. Rather we are to be transformed, individually and collectively as a church and then transform culture in the process. This does not mean, though, to simply steamroll it into tepid a Christianity that denies beauty and art, but rather to take up the threads of truthful beauty and art wherever we may find them and accept them as being of a piece with the truth of the scriptures. It may be that we also have a responsibility to try to create and consume a greater quantity of good art, like we should eat more nutritious food as opposed to junk food, but more qualified writers than I must make that point

My musical adventure continues. My family and I still spin the CDs ABBA Gold and, yes, More ABBA Gold, and I feel I have come full circle, back to where I began. In the great myths, though, the hero never returns home from the epic adventure unchanged, otherwise what would be the point of the journey, the dragons defeated, the temptations endured, the darkness passed through. Like the heroes of myth, I, too, have come back wiser, with wisdom that mirrors but is more solid and multi-dimensional than that of childhood. I am still not sure if I will ever be a true devotee of strictly instrumental music, of classical or of much electronica or of jazz. I may be too much of meaning constructing, logo-ist for that. And, I am not sure I will ever let music course through me enough to really make my body move in dance. “Dancing Queen?” No, thanks. However, I am very nearly out that adolescence that began one day in the spring of 2001, as I passed through my college cafeteria and heard the single, chimey guitar that begins Coldplay’s “Yellow.” 

As if in a scene from a movie, I walk across the cafeteria, meandering through the empty tables, eyes transfixed on a television. The now pounding guitars wash over me like waves, as a gangly, as yet to be Gwynethed, Chris Martin sings, with a backdrop of a dark sky and pinprick stars. The camera is fixed on him as he walks down the beach, mouthing the words, the sand and surf gradually lightening, until the song ends with a final, soft “Look at the stars / Look how they shine for you / And all the things that you do.” And then it pans to the ocean where the sun gloriously rises from the waves.

Brilliant.

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