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Monday, March 24, 2008
IN CHURCH
M83
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Souls
Mute : 2004
[Buy It]
Yesterday, I set foot in a church for the first time in over a decade. My younger brother just graduated from college and took a job in California. He's leaving next week, and while I'll miss him, I'm very glad for him - he's been needing to get away from this place for a long time. My mother, feeling understandably sentimental, asked me about a month ago if I would go to church with them on Easter sunday, so we could be there together as a family one last time before Andrew heads out to the West Coast. When she asked me, her eyes were downcast and her voice quavered. She was nervous. She knew she was asking me to do something I would not want to do.
WILD PACKS OF FAMILY DOGS
Modest Mouse
The Moon and Antarctica
Sony : 2000
[Buy It]
At first, I said "no" outright. I explained again my issues with institutions, and particularly my resistance to the institutionalization of the spirit. My father said, "Think of it as something you would be doing for us." In that light, I reconsidered. I told them I'd think about it. A couple weeks later, when I saw my parents again, they didn't mention it. They knew that trying to get me into church was like approaching a skittish deer - it had to be done with caution, or I'd bolt. I knew this was important to my parents. A major element of of my initial resistance was the element of guilt-tripping tacit in the way my mom asked me to go, which I know she didn't intend, but which manifested in her body language anyway. I have always been a prideful, haughty young man. Those who would assert their will upon me - cops, politicians, bosses, religious zealots, and sometimes, even parents - are my enemies. But once they asked, they didn't ask again. Absent this pressure, I told them I would do it - I would go.
MIRROR SPEAKS
James Blackshaw
The Cloud of Unknowing
Tompkins Sqaure : 2007
[Buy It]
As I shaved that morning, I looked in the mirror and thought, "I am getting ready for church." The words turned to ash in my mind. I couldn't really square them with my reality. I wondered if I were about to betray myself on some fundamental level, or if I were making much ado about nothing. In fact, I was just going to see my family in an environment that is meaningful to them. That's something I could get my head around. Still, I flipped into "observer" mode. I don't know about you, but I have a little switch in my brain that I can flip to remove myself from social situations. (I recognize the artifice of this idea - I mean that it is a psychological mechanism by which I can feel this way, even though I'm still playing my part as a social actor.) It's a mode I enter into when I go to write about live music or events - no longer a participant, I become a disembodied eye, floating through space, noting and recording data. This is my favorite kind of writing to do, because I think it's the kind I'm best at, and because I enjoy being in that state - a lightness attends it, and a sense of solitude that I cherish. Sometimes it worries me that I find myself slipping into this role - the observer, the amanuensis - more and more often in my everyday life, as my "real world" unfolds between my ears. But maybe that's just my calling in this world. Some of us go about the messy business of living so that others can write about it.
BECALMED
Brian Eno
Another Green World [remastered reissue]
Astralwerks : 2004 [originally released in 1975]
[Buy It]
I felt calm as I pulled into the church parking lot. I'd set my intention to wreath myself in a shield of good energy that could be hardened in the blink of an eye, should anyone attempt to exert control over me. I was there for my parents, but I had no intention of of justifying myself to strangers who claimed some stewardship over my soul. But flare-ups of anxiety had plagued me, periodically, over the preceding weeks. The event loomed with great drama in mind. Would I freak out? Would I make a scene? Would I be flooded with panic or rage? Would I walk out halfway through the service, embarrassing my family? Most terrifying of all, would I feel something - some stirring, or pull toward the religion I'd made a definitive escape from so long ago?
TOTAL SEXY CHURCH
Panther
14 Kt. God
KRS : 2008
[Buy It]
In fact, none of this happened - the event was rather anticlimactic. My parents attend what you might call a "progressive church." It used to be Baptist, but dropped the affiliation years ago, when the Southern Baptist Convention was getting too scary and malevolent for any sane, compassionate person to have truck with. People were dressed casually, in polos and open-throated dress shirts; there were rows of modern office chairs instead of pews; the building more resembled a convention center than a church. I sat amid rituals that felt at once familiar and strange, trying to understand where they might possibly connect with what I personally regard as profound spiritual experience.
MUDDY HYMNAL
Iron & Wine
The Creek Drank the Cradle
Sub Pop : 2002
[Buy It]
What struck me most about the service was the music. On stage (yes, there was a stage), when I arrived, I saw a piano, a violin, a couple keyboards, a bass guitar, an electronic drum kit. Most of the instruments were taken up by casually "churchy" looking people, although the bass player was a young guy in a hoodie and a knit cap with a brim, turned rakishly to the side. My parents' church doesn’t do hymns - they do "praise music," a modern version of Christian song that strives to make hymns into pop music, in a gambit to freshen up the church's stale image and lure in the young. I understand what they're going for. But it strikes me as disastrously wrong-headed, and gets at the fundamental reason why the organized religion of my parents is not for me. The thing is, the old songs are just a lot better than the new songs. Even the most turgid, moralizing old hymn seems to me to have more power than this "praise music" dross. Praise music is characterized by uplifting platitudes, and to address one's creator with platitudes seems to me to verge on the blasphemous. I know we can all use a little cheering up these days. But the spiritual experience is not, to me, a blandly happy one. Songs of redemption, songs of praise, sure - but where are the songs of misery and ruin, of desperation, of terror and ecstasy? Where are the songs that make the soul tremble in fear, as it should in the presence of its benefactor? I felt not a stirring in my breast as I listened to this Christian version of the worst that 80s pop had to offer, with its splashy electric tom fills and lite-rock bass flourishes.
ARTICULATE SILENCES PART 1
Stars of the Lid
And the Refinement of The Decline
Kranky : 2007
[Buy It]
Maybe this music does something for other people that it doesn't do for me; I can't say. The paths to the presence of sprit are many and diverse (that I truly believe this, while the Church believes exactly the opposite - that there is only path for the righteous to tread - is another reason that I can't be involved in it). But I wonder if this music is, in fact, a bulwark against the sort of extreme spiritual experience that most Christians I know don't seem to prize, preferring instead the humming emotional flatline of suburban life. I can't hear anything of God in a song that sounds like an ad jingle; that sonic context immediately flips my listening mode to one of skepticism, guardedness; I become wary of what I'm being sold. This is putatively spiritual music that seems designed to cork up any of the fissures through which spirit might emerge. It made me feel empty, and seemed a metaphor for how the church works as a whole - a sterilization of the spiritual wilderness. God can't get a word in edgewise amid all the chatter. To me, the most profoundly spiritual music has no overtly spiritual content, since moralizing is the work of men who presume to know the mind of the god. The music that helps me come into the presence of spirit curries a vast, deep, still silence; a hole in the layers of social and organiazational interference that keeps a soul away from itself, through which the voice of god might begin to speak. Proverbs leave me cold; a quivering soundwave decaying in the air fills me with an awe that can verge on divine supplication, cues up a reverent and wordless dialogue with the world that feels like prayer. This is a wild, visceral, personal experience that cannot be institutionalized. My spirit is a garden that I have to tend alone.
posted by Brian
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