Music from a tumultuous year

Music from a tumultuous year - some sourced from 'Best music of the worst year':

Mavis Staples shared a new collaboration with Jeff Tweedy, “All in It Together,” with all proceeds from the track going to charity. “The song speaks to what we’re going through now — everyone is in this together, whether you like it or not,” Staples said in a statement. “It doesn’t matter how much money you have, what race or sex you are, where you live…it can still touch you. It’s hit so many people in our country and around the world in such a horrible way and I just hope this song can bring a little light to the darkness. We will get through this but, we’re going to have to do it together. If this song is able to bring any happiness or relief to anyone out there in even the smallest way, I wanted to make sure that I helped to do that.”

On Lockdown Songs Nashville heroes Buddy and Julie Miller collected nine topical songs, beginning with Public Service Song #1: Stay Home, that they wrote and recorded during the tumultuous year that has consumed all our lives. This collection includes the beautiful The Last Bridge You Will Cross (For John Lewis).

Michael McDermott's What In The World delivers a propulsive punch that reflects anger and passion hurtles out of the starting gate as Subterranean Homesick Blues meets We Didn’t Start The Fire. He rattles off lyrics about a new world order with “walls along the border/Kids in cages/Executive orders/Welfare for billionaires/People hungry everywhere”, dropping in references to James Joyce, Paul Revere, the President and Iron Eyes Cody, as he presciently declares “Dark days coming for the U.S.A.”.

H.E.R., "I Can't Breathe." Backed by a spare beat and atmospheric choir, the 23-year-old R&B star sings with a soulfully aching, yearning voice and adds potent spoken-word passages about generations of pain, fear and anxiety.

Sounds of Blackness, "Sick and Tired." After five decades of preaching positivity, the Twin Cities ensemble got fired up post-George Floyd, adapting civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer's classic 1964 refrain into the fiercest, most powerful song in their repertoire. This horn-blasted, gospel-infused call to action is the perfect sound coming from Minneapolis in 2020.

Mickey Guyton, "Black Like Me." Sonically, this piano ballad could fit seamlessly on contemporary country radio. Her heartbreak is about being different in a small town and in Nashville. "If you think we live in the land of the free," the Black country vocalist croons with pain in her voice, "you should try to be Black like me."

Rosanne Cash, "Crawl Into the Promised Land." The oft-outspoken singer-songwriter serves up a haunting, hopeful, swampy acoustic blues anthem. "Deliver me from tweets and lies/ and purify me in the sun," she sings.

Lucinda Williams, "Man Without a Soul." With its warbly, slashing guitar, this slow-burn blues tears into a certain president without mentioning his name. The song has more dignity and soul than its target.

Jim White made a video for The Divided States of America, the final song from his new album, Misfit's Jubilee: "I'm typically not the political type but these times we're riding out here, they're anything but typical. At this moment in our collective history it makes sense that voices normally content to remain silent should be lifted in outrage, howling, exhorting our minds and hearts to focus on a singular goal---higher ground for all, not just the rich folks."

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Jim White - The Divided States Of America.. 

Continuing fight for step-free access at Seven Kings and Newbury Park stations

'After learning Crossrail is still searching for ways to fund step-free access at Seven Kings, campaigner Ron Jeffries, 80, said he feared he would never see lifts at the station in his lifetime.

Mr Jeffries, of Aldborough Hatch, said: “Redbridge will miss out on step-free access and I think that is wrong - I do believe that Seven Kings should be step-free.”

Mr Jeffries, chairman of residents’ community group Aldborough Hatch Defence Association, has campaigned tirelessly, with all three political parties, for Crossrail to rethink its plans for Seven Kings.

“I was not put at ease by Matthew White,” added Mr Jeffries. “I am not at all satisfied.
“We will keep the campaign going and we will not be giving up.”

Mark Kennedy, a committee member on the Seven Kings and Newbury Park Residents’ Association, echoed Mr Jeffries’ words and insisted the groups would “fight on”.'

Read the full story in the Ilford Recorder by clicking here.

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Over The Rhine - Meet Me At The Edge Of The World.

God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You (4)

As Robert Beckford pointed out the history of rock & roll is shot through with divides or splits between sacred and secular, flesh and Spirit but the artists we have thinking about in this series are saying that there are no splits and are bringing these unneccesarily divided concepts back together. They look towards the reconciliation of opposites, towards wholeness and affirmation, but recognise that, although we know of the existence of wholeness because of Christ, we are not yet whole ourselves. 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.” One band who exemplify this approach to raising issues of faith in their music are U2.

In their songs, U2 celebrate the possibility of becoming one, of building a bridge between the sea and land, of coming home, of going where the streets have no name and, of believing in the Kingdom Come when all the colours will bleed into one. Theirs is a spirituality in which everything can be affirmed because everything can be transformed by grace. But they also affirm the ugliness and failure in our world, and in people like themselves. So, they sing of falling down, of being out of control, of losing their way in the shadows where boy meets man, of falling from the sheer face of love like a fly from a wall. In common with the Psalms, they mourn and rail at the pain and division experienced in the world - Ireland’s bloody Sunday, El Salvador’s bullets in the blue sky and Argentina’s Mother’s of the Disappeared.

In their hands these two poles are not opposed instead, both are embraced. The Edge has said that: "We never did resolve the contradictions … And probably never will. There's even more contradictions now ... but it's a contradiction I'm able to live with". Contradictions that you are able to live with. This is where U2 take us - to an affirmation of both the goodness and fallen-ness of human beings. Into the still centre at the heart of the storm of contradiction to give a different take on reconciliation. Bono echoed the same theme in talking about their albums Achtung Baby and Zooropa: "I decided that the only way was, instead of running away from the contradictions, I should run into them and wrap my arms around them and give 'em a big kiss".

Their song The Fly was written as a phone call from Hell, a description of the world as we know it - in darkness, the stars falling from the sky, the Universe exploded because of one man’s lie. In this dark world we live in the middle of contradictions with much that we’d like to rearrange although often all we achieve is to kill our inspiration and sing about the grief. In performance on the ZooTV tours these contradictions were magnified through the projection of aphorisms onto monitors symbolising the overload of information we receive in an IT age.

This embrace of contradiction reflects our age and challenges it, at one and the same time. U2’s idea is to use the energy of what's going against us - and by that they mean popular culture, commerce, science - to defend ourselves. Rather than resistance in the hippie or punk sense of the word, we try to walk through it, rather than walk away from it. To describe the age can be to challenge it. The job of artists is to describe the problem, the contradictions, "to describe what's going on, describe the attraction, and be generous enough not to wave your finger at it as it’s going by". U2 look for 'diamonds in the dirt', shining, transcendent moments; sex and music as places where you glimpse God. They trawl through the state of confusion that is the contemporary moment - reflecting, mocking, embracing, describing, describing your attraction to it - in order to glimpse God, resist or mock the devil and be a harbinger of grace. To cling to the face of love and shine like a burning star.

“Rock & roll was born in the American South,” writes Bill Flanagan, in his book Written On My Soul: “The whole history of rock & roll could be told in southern accents, from the delta bluesmen and country troubadours to the Baptist gospel singers and Okie folkies.” The contradictions between sacred and secular, flesh and Spirit that Jerry Lee Lewis and Al Green felt and which U2 embrace derive from the American South because, as Flannery O’Connor wrote, the South “is Christ-haunted.” To see the extent to which this is true watch the film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus in which alt. country singer-songwriter Jim White takes you on a tour of the South as he knows it.

Jim White shows us 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 here, he claims, you also feel the presence of the Spirit – it’s alive and awake and in the blood of those who live in the South. The musicians that we have thought about in this series have taken this understanding of Christianity, with its divide between flesh and Spirit, secular and sacred, and instead of falling into that divide, as people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley did, have used its strengths to speak powerfully about the reality of sin, the holiness of the ordinary and the partial reconciliation of contradictions. In doing so, they have taken the route that T. Bone Burnett signposted of writing more about what you can see by the Light of Christ than about the Light itself.

How have the musicians mentioned in this series made use of the cultural understanding of Christianity that they gained from the American South in their music?

Do you think they have used that cultural heritage to present a more nuanced understanding of Christianity than that that is commonly found in the American South?

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U2 - The Fly.

American Music

"Do you like American music?" the Violent Femmes asked on their fifth album, Why Do Birds Sing?. Well, do you? The Femmes answered in the affirmative - "We like all kinds of music but I like American music best, baby" - but the reason they gave seemed a pretty wierd one: "every time I look in that ugly lake it reminds me of me".

The idea of American music as a lake reflecting an ugly self isn't the only strange definition that's been given though. This is the picture of traditional American music conjured up by Bob Dylan in 1966: "Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes from legends, bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. ... All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. .... I mean, you'd think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact ... In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. ... It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy."

Greil Marcus has pointed out that this 'traditional music' - the ancient ballads of mountain music, songs like Buell Kazee's East Virginia, Clarence Ashley's Coo Coo Bird or Dock Boggs' Country Blues - are what Dylan and the Band tapped into when recording The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and The Band, music which Marcus describes as a "kaleidoscope of American music". "The "acceptance of death" that Dylan found in "traditional music"", says Marcus, "is simply a singer's insistence on mystery as inseparable from any honest understanding of what life is all about; it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back." Or a lake that reflects an ugly self?

But maybe that's only one half of the picture. Anything that comes from bibles and where swans turn into angels can't be all void and ugliness, can't be all bad. In 1985 Dylan expanded on the fundamental impact of the Bible on America and on his work: "... the Bible runs through all U.S. life, whether people know it or not. It's the founding book. The founding fathers' book anyway. People can't get away from it. You can't get away from it wherever you go. Those ideas were true then and they're true now. They're scriptural, spiritual laws. I guess people can read into that what they want. But if they're familiar with those concepts they'll probably find enough of them in my stuff. Because I always get back to that." Maybe what you get in traditional American music is that combination of sin and salvation that Peter Case said characterised his debut album.

Dylan maintained back in 1966 that this kind of American music was not going to die so where can we find it today? There are a loosely affiliated group of bands and songwriters - T.Bone Burnett, Peter Case, Mark Heard, The Innocence Mission, Maria McKee, Julie & Buddy Miller, Sixteen Horsepower, Violent Femmes, Gillian Welch, Jim White, Victoria Williams - for whom fear and threat, mystery and enamour - the twin poles of American music - again and again show up in their music and in relationships. The affiliations between these artists branch out in a way that cries out for a Rock Family Tree mapping production, songwriting and session credits together with personal relationships.

In this way too they take us back to Dylan, The Band, The Basement Tapes and Greil Marcus' surely incomplete statement that they show "the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back". The whole point about The Basement Tapes was that a bunch of mates sat around making the music they loved the way they loved it and when they liked. If Dylan was staring into a void then he wasn't doing it alone. And wasn't this true too of the music that they drew on, that it was more the music of a community than of individuals. We talk more about Appalachian traditions or the bluegrass Bristol area of Tennessee and East Carolina than we do about Dock Boggs or Clarence Ashley. A relational approach to work and life seems important to Williams, Burnett, Heard and the other musicians that share their musical vision and this is so although their relationships feature brokenness, pain and loss. Relationships and a community of music makers seem a vital part then of this tradition of American music.

So there we have it. Fear and threat on the one hand, mystery and enamour on the other - the twin poles of American music. Legends, bibles, plagues, vegetables and death, roses growing out of people's brains, lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're all in the mix. These are songs of sin and salvation as sung by the wild, unshod, soot-covered orphans of God.

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16 Horsepower - Black Soul Choir.

How (Not) To Speak Of God

I'm part way through Peter Rollins' book How (Not) To Speak Of God (thanks again to Huw). The book is an exciting and fresh discussion of how Christianity can speak into and about our postmodern condition. Brian McLaren seems right to rave about the book in his Foreword as "one of the first and most hopeful expressions to date of Christian theology being done in a postmodern context."

Several of Rollins' arguments are synergous with ideas expressed by Nicholas Mosley and Walter Brueggemann and the theological conversation that Rollins is engaging in can only be enhanced by the ideas that Mosley and Brueggemann bring to the discussion.

Rollins writes of the way in which our approach to speaking of God:

"must be a powerless one which employs words as a way of saying that we have been left utterly breathless by a beauty that surpasses all words. This does not mean that we remain silent - far from it. The desire to get beyond language forces us to stretch language to its very limits. As Samuel Beckett once commented, we use words in order to tear through them and glimpse at what lies beneath. The desire to say nothing, to create sacred space, opens up the most beautiful type of language available - the language of parables, prose and poetry."

Similarly, Mosley writes about the need to "hear for ourselves what might be going on just behind our words, off-stage" and to:

"evolve a language which will try to deal not just with facts, with units of data, together with the patterns, connections, that such data, together with the minds that observe them, make - in particular a language that can deal at the same time both with the data and with the language that is traditionally used to describe them. By this, apparent contradictions might be held. This language would be elusive, allusive; not didactic. Some such language has been that of poetry, of art; also of love ..."

Rollins goes on to argue that the emerging conversation:

"is demonstrating an ability to stand up and engage in a powerless, space-creating dis-course that opens up thinking and offers hints rather than orders. In short, the emerging community must endeavour to be a question rather than an answer and an aroma rather than food. It must seek to offer an approach that enables the people of God to become the parable, aroma and salt of God in the world, helping to form a space where God can give of God."

Similarly, Brueggemann has argued that "the task of the Christian minister is not to construct a full alternative world but to fund - provide the pieces, materials and resources - out of which a new world can be imagined." Our responsibility, he says, "is not a grand scheme or a coherent system, but the voicing of lots of little pieces out of which people can put life together in frsh configurations":

"Over time, these pieces are stitched together into a sensible collage, stitched together, all of us in concert, but each of us idiosyncratically, stitched together in a new whole - all things new."

One of the Ikon services described in Rollins' book speaks about our experience as Christians being the experience of Holy Saturday; "that 24 hour period nestled between Good Friday and Easter Saturday, between crucifixion and resurrection." A reflection from this service by Ikon says that Holy Saturday "speaks of the absence of God and is as much a part of the Christian experience as the day before and the day after." It asks: "Who among us does not find ourselves dwelling, from time to time, or perhaps at all times, in the space of Holy Saturday?"

Brueggemann also writes of this perception of Holy Thursday citing George Steiner as writing:

“There is one particular day in Western history about which neither historical record nor myth nor scripture make report. It is a Saturday. And it has become the longest of days. We know of that Good Friday which Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of it as well. That is to say he knows of the injustice, of the interminable suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending … We know also about Sunday. To the Christian, that day signifies an intimation, both assured and precarious, both evident and beyond comprehension, of resurrection, of a justice and a love that have conquered death. If we are non-Christians or non-believers, we know of that Sunday in precisely analogous terms … The lineaments of the Sunday carry the name of hope (there is no word less deconstructible). But ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation of rebirth on the other.”

In my In Between collaboration with Alan Stewart, from our time together at NTMTC, we used the three days of Easter as a paradigm for our own experience as Christians arguing that, in our Christian journey we experience: rebirth (an Easter Sunday experience); suffering (a Good Friday experience); and tension, from the now and the not yet of the Kingdom (an Easter Saturday experience). We structured our material non-chronologically because we wanted to leave people in the tension of the now and not yet which is where we thought we spend most of our time as Christians and illustrated this with the quote from Steiner.

Several of the meditations that we wrote for this collection also express ideas that have synergy with those developed by Rollins in How (Not) To Speak Of God:

in between

Between the action and its consequence
Between knowledge and its understanding
Between the invitation and the party
Between the longest day and the last day

The stone not rolled away
The tomb still guarded
The friends still scattered
The promise known
but not understood
The body still still

The still time
The still waiting time
The time between times
The last times
In between

Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste
and the dream of liberation and rebirth, ours is the long days journey of the Saturday.

are/are not

We hear you
and
do not.
We are with you
and
are not.
Through whom,
with whom
and in whom,
we are – what?
We are one
with what
we are
not.

No voice is audible,
yet we hear.
No hand touches ours,
yet we feel.
No eye has seen the glory,
yet we kneel.
What you are,
who you are
is and
is not
clear.

Knowing
and
not knowing.
In
and out
of touch.
Out of mind
yet
mindful.
Out of sight
yet
insight.

We are
in relation
to much
that is excess -
beyond
comprehension
and expectation –
being
night
and light.

These are among the In Between meditations that I will be reading at the opening night reception for Visual Dialogue on Friday 5th October.

Rollins' book comes out of and develops an emerging conversation about ways to speak of, with, and to hear from, God. Mosley, Brueggemann and In Between are part of that conversation of which there is much more still to be said. Some further thoughts on the significance of Mosley, Brueggemann and others can be found by clicking here.

A final thought is that Jim White is the bard of this emerging conversation. To see what I mean, check out the lyrics to Static On The Radio and 10 Miles To Go On A 9 Mile Road or try this video.