Pop rock has been so far from my mind for so many years that I still speak of Kurt Cobain as hot contemporary. Necessity, however, is often the mother of retro, and nothing speaks of necessity louder than being in an isolated area without normal gadget connections. Of course I speak of the region in which our little cabin is embedded up nort,’ where I found myself a few weeks ago driving, quiet and alone on the curvy road along the Lake Superior coast. My modern mind confused by the inactivity, I reached for the dusty dials on the car radio and clicked on the FM button, and then the search buttons. Country, country, county auction, NPR, obscure preacher, and then, finally, pop rock. Not Classic, but rock favorites that extended well beyond Sweet Home, Alabama, landing me in unknown, post-Grunge territory. I listened; the beat was good, the guitar scintillating, the production way beyond anything from days of old. I listened more and ferreted out the lyrics: “Give me a word/give me a sign…Whoa, heaven let your light shine down!” A search for heaven, my kind of stuff!
And on it went, good, good stuff, so good that later, back in civilization, I put forth enough information to raise the song on Spotify. It is called “Shine” by Collective Soul, and it was even better on the ear buds, so good that I might have given myself a heart attack at the gym as I pedaled on the stationary with the song blasting so loudly I couldn’t even tell how exhausted I might be. In those few minutes I felt the thrill of youthful invulnerability which was so wrong back then and even more wrong now, but so satisfying that I could believe that life went on forever with one adventure after another. Ah, stupid, arrogant, fun youth!
It was then that I found out about another modern convenience from the Spotify entertainment center: that they would take a song from you, categorize it, and add a long, long list of other songs that somehow paralleled the original piece. Suddenly, I was inundated with all sorts of post-early 90’s pop music and groups. I listened. I skipped over about half that I simply did not like, but listened to a dozen or so that I did. What I found from this delve into recent pop was anything but comforting.
“Shine” had a glow of optimism to it, as if paradise were just around the corner waiting to be discovered. Most of the rest, however, including those by Collective Soul, were not so hopeful. In fact they were dismal. One, “Loser” by Beck, was fun and bouncy with an incredibly seductive beat, but spoke basically of its title. The singer (the object of the lyrics) and his girlfriend and whoever else was entangled with him were all useless losers, getting by on drugs and food stamps and possible grifts in Vegas. Says the refrain, “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” Yikes. There was no redemption in the lyrics.
Another by Collective Soul, “December,” was a harder, grittier plunge into existential worthlessness. Speaking, it seems, to his girlfriend, the refrain grinds out, “Turn your head and spit me out!,” which I interpret as an allusion to an unartistic and non-reproductive act of sex, with the implication that she is spitting ALL of him out. More, he asks her, “Why follow me to higher ground/lost as you think I am?” The two are close, they are co-dependent, but disdainful of each other, sterile in both collective soul and body.
But oh, the clincher is a simple and genuinely beautiful ballad that draws from a dark underground of unabashed neo-paganism. Titled “Lightning Crashes,” by Live, it contains versus like these: “Lightning crashes/a new mother cries. Her placenta falls to the floor. The angel opens her eyes/the confusion sets in.” Then, “Lightning crashes/an old mother dies. Her intentions fall to the floor. The angel closes her eyes/the confusion now belongs to the baby down the hall.”
With the music, the dark intensity of this begins to tug the heart from the chest, only to reach a greater height with, “Like rolling thunder chasing the wind, forces pulling from/the center of the earth…I can feel it, I can feel it!” Wow. It is the force of nature, its greatness, its mystery and darkness, its depth, and its seeming pointlessness (‘confusion sets in’). Powerful and unsettling, to say the least.
To say that these songs represent the youthful mind would be an unproven excess. I know, however, that these represent a large element of people at least a generation younger than I. Maybe I can compare them with the rock hits of my era, the late 60’s and 70’s, which spoke primarily of drugs and sex and earthly paradise. We all didn’t believe it and we all didn’t act largely on this shallow philosophy, but we were all effected. Whether through cause or effect, it was then that premarital sex became the norm, which was then followed (necessarily) by legal abortion, and then, quickly, by the watering-down and emptying of the churches. What we could see back then in the music and the lyrics could quickly be matched with the remake of Western culture.
Applying a similar rule to the new pop, what came AFTER the counter culture and sexual revolution of the 60’s and 70’s could be said to be almost catastrophic. What is described in the lyrics is not romantic sex or even Hair Band-style reckless and wild sex. Rather, it is sex that is cynical and shallow and meaningless, something that leads to nothing more than broken relationships and resentment. This is something that one might expect from two or more generations suffering from high divorce rates, or no married or even cohabiting parents at all. Turn your head and spit me out. And if you do it the old-fashioned way, the resultant child might not even know the father. As if that should matter.
Even more importantly, we can see the frightening depth of meaning and searching in the last and heaviest song mentioned, “Lightning Crashes.” Here, life is not a cheap voyage of drugs and welfare checks, but is recognized for what it is: an experience extending from the depth of the earth upward to the wings of the angels. The songwriter fully recognizes the reality beyond the quotidian and superficial, but he cannot find coordinating meaning. That is, he cannot make sense of this depth. Rather, “confusion sets in,” from birth to death. The depth is unknown. In the language of the ancient cartographers when referring to unknown lands, “Here Dragons Be.” Mystery and darkness, pain and death, and ultimately fear; real fear, not like losing your house but losing your very being.
All this is commendable for its honesty, but also expository of the other part of the cultural revolution of the 60’s. This is when the churches were changed - and then emptied out. Before then, mystery had long been identified, along with evil and birth and death, but the coordinating part had been figured out. This unabridged explanation of existence is really why, more than conquest and domination, that the Christian religion spread so quickly and widely.
The ancient pagans were no dummies, nor were they squeamish about the truth of the natural world. We are born in pain and fear, live in episodes of more pain and fear, and then die in pain and fear. Back then, some sacrificed human life as propitiation to a creator or creators who obviously were heavy-duty, demanding dudes and dames. All the old pagans did something intense and startling to reflect the startling and intense reality of their lives.
It was Christianity that figured it out and put together all the pieces, from death and evil and boundless mystery to the spectacular and eternal life in another sphere. It is all there: fear of eternal damnation (the heavy), but also hope of eternal salvation. More than that, there is a plan. The intensity of life and death does not bring about life-long confusion. Rather it all – sex, family, life, death, suffering – has a place and a purpose.
Without this plan, we see a pit before us that ends in the horror of bottomless darkness.
As a contrast to the aura of these tunes, I later listened to what I consider (in my relative ignorance) to be the greatest song of grace ever made: “Spem in Alium” by Thomas Tallis (from the Elizabethan Era). Through its many parts (the version with conductor David Wilcox is the best. Peter Phillips is also good), it answers all the questions posed by the current pop-rock musicians. With its vast array of musical parts, it speaks to the infinite variety of life; and with its mood shifts, from near-frightening to the cheek-strokes of angel wings from on high, it encompasses both the frightening and the jubilant, both the birthing mother and the dying mother.
At its end, there is no room for confusion. That is the key. Here we find perfect order made from chaos and imperfection, and a perfect destiny for all who are born into ignorance and who fight against meaninglessness. The Elizabethan Era was cruel and dirty and often brutish and vulgar, but for all who questioned and sought, there was an answer. And all, or nearly all, accepted that answer, whether they wanted to conform to its teachings or not. In the time when there were many dragons, there was ultimately nothing to fear. We had purpose and a destination. Whether or not we took the right road was up to us, but we could all see the sign post and knew which way we should go.
There is no going back, except to what was left us in artifacts. We are different now and can never be as we once were – and that is probably a good thing. But it has been figured out for us. We don’t have to sing of bitterness and fear. Rather, it is time to put up the old sign post in a new language. It is time for a new Thomas Tallis. We don’t have to go the way of modern pop-rock, although I’ll take the beat. We have to admit, in spite of everything, that some things have gotten better – which might have been the reason for our confusion all along.
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