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The Fashion Of The
Christ
Impressions of the Top Four Songs about Jesus from the First Six Months of 2004
ARTS COLUMN by Jason Kirk
The hysterical coverage of Mel Gibson's recent cinematic slasher, The Passion
of the Christ, turns each of us into the small, frail, bookish six-grader with
glasses in a public school game of dodgeball. It's amok (though this, too,
shall pass). The prattle of pundits, one in a thousand slinging ingots of
genuine wisdom, slathers every form of media—lock, stock et al. No one is
immune. Not even the musicians. I won't pretend that every artist who borrows
a Jesus reference does so in conversation with The Passion of the Christ, or
even that the following do. I offer the humble list below because I, too, have
of late been inured with a man whose abiding magnetism pulls together such
idiocies and brilliance, both powerful and prevalent, in the American
imagination, among other reasons.
***
"Christ's Blues"—The Dying Californian (We Are the Birds that Stay)
My baby will probably be born this weekend. We plan to name her Seneca, unless
his middle name is Samuel. The tulips I planted this year have just begun to
reach through the dirt and feel sunlight; everyone else's were well into a
full, thrusting bloom last week. Their petals sag. Their colors fade. For no
better reason than my own syrupy laziness, my tulips just today took tentative
steps toward a shade of green worth writing home about. And yet no ferning.
Venturing further from my seething immediacy, Nathan and Andrew Dalton lead
The Dying Californian's pulsing bar-rock tribute to derivative megalomania.
Four-chord lamentation introduced by a walking piano and bass duet hasn't
sounded this good in months. "Through the bleeding heart and the sweaty brow,"
the "Blues" pull forth from among the available. The mood may never change,
the plodding grain remain the same, but the best blues is the saddest because
of its rapt attention to and deferential pictures of the sincerely
celebratory.
The late bloom. The bloom at all. Gives the desolation competition. As The
Dying Californian sings, "That's enough out loud."
If Jesus Drove a Motorhome—Jim White (Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell
Me What You See)
Maybe the Christ dug surfing. When movies portray Jesus as a place where
simple symbol-laden sexual obsessions coalesce, what does He think? What does
He feel? There are only so many times you can spend three hours on a Good
Friday afternoon listening to Jesus Christ Superstar before a lot of
opportunities to adventure idly grow.
"Here's a little waltz that I very seldom play because very few people like
it," the narrator begins. Of course, no waltz follows. Whatever the faults in
Jim White's horndog schmaltz, his unabashedly sexy voice is the perfect
harmony to the ghost of Roy Orbison infecting his nearly ludicrous
songwriting. Toss in a trumpet solo, turning perfectly reserved cartwheels
straight out of textbook floor exercises for high school gymnastics teams.
Knead gently.
All in the name of a ruminating "what if?" replete with Bob Dylan motivation
tapes, Waffle House, and "bona fide, motorized" messiah. Message of peace
included. I don't play my tricked out Christ waltz often either.
Jesus Christ Alrighty—Brian Woodbury (Variety Orchestra)
The Gospel of Mark's beginning with Jesus' baptism is to Weird Al Yankovich's
"Like A Surgeon" as Mel Gibson's Kill INRI : is to : the bottled Creole tang
of Brian Woodbury's horn-driven funk-lite septet. Like wedding bands hired for
dry receptions, the ladies and gents behind the instruments lack something of
the gusto this music should have, but if you picture 12 men of assorted ages
and in identical dusty robes, beards, sandals and double thumbs-up, the humor
in it seeps through.
As long as someone remembers to change the water into wine, I can forgive the
distance between this track's mediocrity and the vastly more ambitious and
shamelessly ironic work on Woodbury's ...And His Popular Music Group and All
White People Look Alike. 'Tis the season, anyway, and it's always easier to
treat other people as you who have them treat you when the air smells like wet
cell division and the days lengthen.
Call it a standard bouquet: bass, trumpet, trombone, tenor sax, drums, guitar
and organ. Just add water. Raise to a predictable key. Return. But not Mark.
I Have Forgiven Jesus—Morrissey (You Are the Quarry)
It's been a long time since I had any childish delusions about Jesus' paying
special attention to my little plight. Just a drop in the empire, I began to
have adult delusions early. Of course Morrissey trumps that with melodrama to
spare. With only two drops of trauma and a rubber band, the man's songwriting
could feed the void of inspiration in 5,000 mewling undergraduate poets, with
enough left over to fill 12 baskets and a two-hour episode of Oprah.
Now, from time to time, I too have felt like the real me was wrapped in
self-deprecating meat so that God could have something to laugh at in those
inevitable moments when omnipotence gets mildly tedious. Never have I thought
to blame it on Jesus, much less to forgive. Whether you think of Him as a
prophet or a pauper, son of a bitch or the Son of God, the man was flesh.
Perhaps His most redeeming quality was His incarnation. It's not every corner
of the Trinity that leashes its essence to electrified rot. It takes a
gambling man.
"Jesus, do hate me?" Moz cries out in a voice could launch a thousand
shipwrecks. The song is lovely; in the sense of eliciting love by moral or
ideal worth, Jesus remains my favorite exemplar, and songs about Him continue
to lash at my attention. Morrissey's, the third track on his first album in
seven years, wallows languorously in the fantasy of a Christ implicit in the
necessary suffering a living thing by its nature inherits. The song's
post-chorus intones: "Monday, humiliation / Tuesday, suffocation / Wednesday,
condescension / Thursday is Pathetic / by Friday, life has killed me." That's
one way to look at the Passion of the Man Who Never Goes Out of Fashion.
But for me, fashion holds about as much lasting interest as hypothetical
quandaries about His Father's ability to build big boulders. I'm otherwise
occupied—and the way I see it, if Jesus saves, He doesn't do it alone. If He
doesn't save, at least I'm not the first to indulge in the possibility when it
suits my preoccupations. Or needs. Either way, in these last days before
fatherhood, before the compulsions and priorities informing the way I relate
to others irrevocably changes, Jesus compels a thirsty curiosity from the
uproarious flux of my mixed anticipation, screaming fear, and frantic
happiness. At least I'm not alone. |
