Jim White writes songs that could have been sung by the characters who people the stories of Flannery O'Connor. Like the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s novels we are, at best, incomplete – even the good, she felt, has a grotesque face, because “in us the good is something under construction.” The holy interpenetrates our world but we also see in life distortions which are repugnant to it and the problem for the novelist with Christian concerns is to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, the film about the American South that Jim White narrated, has this double sense of the holy in the grotesque and the grotesque in the holy. The film shows desperate people with a hell-fire religion and a God who will whup the ass of those prefer the sinful flesh over the Holy Spirit but, at the same time, you also feel the presence of the Spirit; alive and awake and in the blood of those who live in the South.
Transnormal Skiperoo takes us into the same locale. both musically and lyrically. Take Me Away a boy, who appears to be mentally disturbed, steps into the path of an oncoming train crying, "Take me away." As he does so he sees a stranger calling him in the voice of an old friend. White deliberately leaves us pondering the significance of the stranger and of the boy's cry to be taken away.
In A Town Called Amen he laments our lost innocence and in Blindly We Go reflects on our inability to penetrate the mystery of life. At one turn a plywood Superman becomes a symbol for our inability to achieve our dreams but at another pieces of heaven can be seen in "photographs of you and me."
Jim White is, I think, the pre-eminent bard for the postmodern Christian but he achieves this by going back in time to the old-time religion of the American South and the mystery and manners of Flannery O'Connor's stories and characters.
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Vigilantes of Love - Resplendent.
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