Music Notes

MUSIC NOTES ROBYN HUBBARD

Open Heart, Open Hand He leans forward, elbows on blue jean knees, face in hands, silent. With eyes clamped in a squint, he appears to be waiting for words that will not come.

I am interviewing singer/songwriter David Wilcox, an artist whose work I have relished for 15 years, a man from whom a river of poetry flows unhindered — at least when on stage or in the midst of a song. I’m wondering now if I’ve asked the right question.

When he finally speaks I am surprised by the space between his words.

He seems to be mining his depths to bring forth rough diamonds. I begin to consider Wilcox more as a sculptor than a poet, a man who chooses raw material carefully and works precisely, chiseling away all that impedes beauty.

The singer’s winsome appeal on stage — his easy laughter, natural poise, and genuine offering of love to his audience — must spring from this commitment to the truth. His willingness to dig, prod, question, and contemplate the deepest places in his soul is the reason his songs resonate with so many earnest truth seekers. Sitting now with this gentle, pensive man who searches for words like a mountain climber feels for a foothold, I glimpse the arduous process behind Wilcox’s seemingly effortless songs.

Wilcox describes his concerts as conversations beginning with ordinary small talk and moving on to deeper content, “to the things that really matter.” He builds trust with his audience by considering where he is with them after each song. He often makes spontaneous decisions regarding the songs he will sing next, depending on the connection he makes with his listeners. “The

audience thinks it’s me, and I think it’s them! Not like I have to prepare them for what I want to say, more like I have to get out of the way to allow for the right song at the right time for the right person.”

Audiences in small venues across the United States appreciate these intimate conversations, Wilcox’s candor, sense of humor, and his sudden outbursts of hysterical laughter. He cocks his head and appears to be listening to instructions in his heart as he deftly plays with his guitar until he finds the place to start. I feel “a little pull in my chest that says ‘speak.’ If I trust it and say the thing on

the tip of my tongue, I have a sense that I am listening and being present with what this moment requires. If I doubt it and ask where it’s going, it can suddenly stop and I have no idea where I’m going!”

Wilcox’s transparency can make you feel as if you know him and he knows you. He puts language to your longing and pain where before tears and ache were their only expression. He strokes his guitar and you are comforted. Songs like “Rise” (Into the Mystery, 2003) whisper the possibility of hope following a crushing loss.

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I know that a heart can just get buried/Stone by stone, crushing hope until it dies/Far away, but the message somehow carries/Beloved, it is time for you to rise up/ With a sudden sense of wonder/Though the promise goes unspoken/As the joy comes to your eyes/When the joy comes to your eyes/From the burden you’ve been under/For your soul was never broken.

But this easy familiarity comes with a price. Listening to “Beyond Belief ” (Open Hand, 2009), Wilcox’s confession that “Jesus called me a hypocrite,” you can sense the uneasiness of being known too well. Where once you delighted, “He’s singing to me!” you now hear yourself saying, “Uh-oh, I think he’s talking to me.”

Jesus called me a hypocrite/when I said I’d spread the word/He said, “How can you teach of love/unless you live what you have heard?/Faith can’t be your fortress/arrogant with pride/ Come walk here beside me with the humble ones outside/And be the mercy, all my people need the peace/This fightover faith won’t bring them relief/ I love them beyond belief.”

Wilcox declares himself “lucky” to have grown up in a family without a faith tradition. Both his parents were weary from the weight of their own traditions, he explains, and in their desire not to burden their son, they erased the lines and structures of institutional religion. But Wilcox recalls his growing awareness of the spirit, a sense that there was more to life than meets the eye. “I had no language for my experience of the sacred. I would wonder if anyone knows this sacred truth and if so, why isn’t anyone talking about it? Then I heard stories about this crazy carpenter and I began to realize that there was a lot of company for this mystic journey!”

As any visitor to his website can see, Wilcox loves a challenging journey.

Whether shooting down the highway in his silver bullet Airstream trailer in

search of the back roads of America or touching down on the ancient soil of the Holy Lands in search of his “true home,” Wilcox has a hunger to explore the broader vistas. Like the red-haired heroine of the title track of Open Hand, Wilcox prefers to stand breathless at the edge of a cliff where “she can feel the wind right now wash away her tracks and plans, if you really want to live this life, gotta hold it with an open hand.”

Wilcox’s music encourages, by its own risk-taking and curious nature, an allout search for the grace and mercy of God. “God is not ashamed to speak in the language we understand. Where you search is where you are searched for,” Wilcox tells me. “We struggle with how to describe the feeling of being fully human, fully alive. Our hearts say, ‘Come on,’ somehow engage with the part of you that has this sacred yearning, a hunger that doesn’t end with you and your

selfish desires. There is a bigger life that we are part of, that we are made for.”

Wilcox fans will attest to his ability to set your heart on fire for great adventure.

Wilcox refers to his music as medicine, an antidote for our common longings. And on his website he literally prescribes songs for various ailments of the heart. Need strength for getting through a shattering experience? Click here to listen to “Perfect Storm.” Need a song that can bear you up after the loss of a loved one? Try “Vista.” How about some fun songs about kids and parenting? Play “I Saw You First.” If you need mercy, forgiveness, or to get free of addiction; if you’re depressed or too hurt to love; if you need to appreciate either “your beautiful quirky self ” or “this wild world”— there is a song for you. And then there are the songs for “the adventure of faith”— for when you’re losing it or are just fed up with

religious institutions — a simple click and the medicine flows.Wilcox’s generosity with his music is another reason he’s so lovable. Treat yourself to a selection of his favorites before you buy a CD. The whole song is yours to enjoy at DavidWilcox.com.

On stage or off, David Wilcox invites us to adventure alongside him. His songs are a passionate exhortation to lace up our boots, trudge the path, wind our way through the wonder and paradox of life with our eyes and hands wide open, enjoying “the high view and the muddy miles, the free wing and the earthly trail, the deep heart and the endless sky.”

I’m in, how about you?

Robyn Hubbard is an in-home therapist working with at-risk kids and their families in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Since she spends a lot of time driving to appointments, she often takes David Wilcox along for the ride.

tin roofs now. Srey Pek is gone. Her father died of AIDS late last year. In January her mother took her and moved away against the wishes of her grandfather. Srey Nao’s father died of AIDS years ago, and her mother has worked hard ever since earning a dollar a day. Srey Nao dropped out of school last December and took a job in a shoe factory. She earns $45 a month, so her family can count on having food on the table.

Transformation is one of Hang’s favorite words. With his limited English vocabulary, he talks about bad people who have become good, like the volunteers who help build the houses.

Some were formerly troublemakers, drinking heavily and gambling, but now they exude strength and dignity as servants and leaders. He dreams aloud about the village no longer being known as a bird’s nest but as a community of peace and hope.

The mango rain is not a suffering rain. It is a gift of life that transforms the fruit. For the people of Andong Village, Hang is like a mango rain, a tangible gift of God’s love in a hard season, and the fruit of it is sweet. Q

Mango Rain continued from page 21. runs.You can hear it when the Bible is read and songs are sung with a simple message of Jesus as the way, truth, and life.

But this story is not a fairy tale, although the homes of Srey Nao and Srey Pek — along with 40 others — have sturdy

Andrew Gray is a founding director of Project Friends (ProjectFriends.org).As international staff with Church Resource Ministries (CRMLeaders.org), he and his wife help volunteers from Japan connect with partners in Cambodia to serve in simple ways, to lose their illusions, and to encounter life-transforming love.

Students and Andong Village friends Srey Nao (left) and Srey Pek.

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MUSIC NOTES

The Minister of Aesthetics

But in a Christian music market that rewards mediocre musicians just because they convey familiar ideas about Jesus, true Christian art — art that explores, tries to open new windows on a divine vastness that remains opaque to most of us — is a rare commodity.

As worship scholar PaulWestermeyer The Asthmatic Kitty Records staff roster lists Sufjan Stevens as the “Minister recently wrote, “The church’s estabof Aesthetics,” and I have to wonder lishments are often nervous about musicwhether it’s a tongue-in-cheek salute to making and musicians. The reason is millions of fans who count him among because music and musicians have to those rare artists whose music doubles do with a kind of remembering that both as Christian ministry and as some- will not fit categories that can be easily thing notably beautiful. Writing in The controlled.”

Art can be dangerous, which explains Other Journal a few years back, Seattle musician John Totten told of a friend why the church has sometimes rejected who introduced Stevens as a “Christian bands like U2 and Over the Rhine for the doubt and carnality that humanize artist who is actually good.”

“The madness of this claim motivated their music. In Stevens’ case, he uses lofty, high-minded string, brass, woodwind, and me to buy the album,” Totten wrote.

Now, I can appreciate this sentiment; vocal arrangements or emotively played it has been better than a decade since I folk and rock instruments to convey some got excited that Third Day sounded like of the most distasteful experiences of Hootie and the Blowfish on one album human existence.

Take his song “John Wayne Gacy and Pearl Jam on the next, or that Jars of Clay was getting radio airplay. I share Jr.” for example. He coaxes tension, the widespread belief that the CCM dynamics, and energy out of a spare folk ending up on evangelical teens’ iPods arrangement of acoustic guitar and piano. arrives there because it rips off whatever mainstream music is popular at the time, wrapping rote Christianese in contemporary packaging. Seeking something deeper, I find spiritual sustenance in the music of U2 and Over the Rhine, songs that puzzle over Jesus as much as they praise him, or even Death Cab for Cutie, with their curious tales of heaven and hell, soul and body.

Enough with the disclaimer.Why all of this matters in a column about Sufjan Stevens is that this guy has managed both to articulate a clear gospel message in a manner that doesn’t seem trite and to make music as brilliantly beautiful as anything on the new century’s pop landscape — and, in fact, to combine those two godly goals in the same songs. If I were talking about Bach 300 years ago, that would be a pretty ho-hum statement.

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The guitar’s steady bass line rises and falls in volume, like an ocean wave that lifts you off the sand and threatens to drown you all at the same time.The high guitar arpeggio mimics a person running — which is what I want to do: run toward the source of this music and run away, all at the same time.You see, John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer in Illinois, the Midwestern state whose stories fill Stevens’ signature 2005 album, Come on, Feel the Illinoise. Stevens and background singer Shara Worden deliver his lyrics in soaring harmonies: “Look underneath the house there, find the few living things rotting fast in their sleep, oh the dead, 27 people, even more.”

Random, sometimes dissonant piano notes grow more frantic and then fall silent as their voices climb in desperate prayer, his in a clear, throbbing falsetto he holds longer than most pop singers can. “They were boys, with their cars, summer jobs, oh my God.” The song is a factual account, almost journalism as poetry. “He took off all their clothes for them. He put a cloth on their lips, quiet hands, quiet kiss on the mouth.”

While I’m torn between the beauty of the music and the savagery of the images, Stevens hits me with the moral of his fable, the truth that suddenly has a name and a face: “In my best behavior, I am really just like him. Look beneath the floor boards, for the secrets I have hid.”

The song ends in a low, rumbling piano chord, the tension resolved; Stevens’ mea culpa is the last word.

Herein lies his lyrical evangelism: revealing the dignity — dare I say, the divine image — in our weaker brothers, or at least the depravity we all share. Greetings from Michigan (2003) includes songs with these titles: “Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)”; “For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti”; “They Also Mourn Who Do Not Wear Black (For the Homeless in Muskegon).”

In a Doors-like rock arrangement, “The Upper Peninsula” tells a working-class

Denny Renshaw

Jesse James DeConto

story of Payless Shoes, unemployment, and a broken home, with Megan Smith singing an octave above Stevens, perhaps because the narrator’s estranged lover suffers just like him: “I’ve no idea what’s right sometimes. I lost my mind. I lost my life. I lost my job. I lost my wife.”

The finale, an angry, confused, unfettered electric guitar solo, expresses the loss of stability, the lack of control.

I’d like to think Stevens’ giving voice to the least of these, those blessed ones from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, is the thing that has endeared him to Christians these past several years. But I suspect it has been those songs that sound more like straightforward worship, those loaded onto 2004’s Seven Swans and 2006’s Songs for Christmas and sprin-

kled into Michigan. I fear they may be disappointed going forward, as Illinoise moved away from the biblical and toward concrete stories of UFOs, wasp stings, and road trips. The artist’s latest recording was a soundtrack to accompany documentary footage of the BrooklynQueens Expressway in New York— arranged not as an album of songs but more like an orchestral symphony. He recently told Paste magazine that the highly focused endeavor had “sabotaged” his creativity, causing him to dismiss the four-minute pop song and 40-minute record as remnants of a vinyl era. “I no longer have faith in the song,” he said.

And, in fact, he hasn’t released a new one since 2006.

It seems Stevens the artist has expelled

Ain’t I a Human? continued from page 38.

Stevens the minister, if ever he had given much thought on how to deliver the gospel to an audience needing to hear it.

People do still like to listen to songs, even if their length and packaging are arbitrary. A minister would give them what they understand as a means of giving them what they need. But as an artist, Sufjan Stevens has stumbled onto a truth he needs to explore, much as he has always done; the past results were probably the outcome of who he is rather than any purposeful religious calling. Let’s hope his creativity survives the latest journey.

We need a Minister of Aesthetics now more than ever.

Jesse James DeConto is a writer and musician living in Durham, N.C.

were heads of state, and women comprised only 8 percent of cabinet ministers.The majority of the 1.5 billion people living on $1 or less per day are women, moreover, and on average, women earn slightly more than 50 percent of what men earn worldwide.21 Poverty is not measured only in terms of monetary income.

Poverty must be measured in lack of basic human rights, including safety from violence and exploitation, availability of food, housing, health, education, work, and access to the benefits of social progress — the things whose absence can indeed make prostitution seem like a tool for survival. A cruel illusion.

Most people who turn tricks view it as a “temporary” thing, but “temporary” lasts forever — spiritually and psychologically — when you’re identified as a toilet or a hamburger. Ain’t we humans, too? n

and even death, can ever be seen as a rational solution. This is the crux of the issue, that these two things, “possible death” and “rational solution” are not mutually exclusive. I submit that this crucial paradox is key to reconciling current either/ or debates about prostitution. Prostitution involves a both/ and — not an either/or — dilemma. Hence proposed policy changes must equally and simultaneously address both the overwhelming violence of prostitution and the overwhelming need that drives women into the grinding jaws of the sex industry in the first place. In other words, dismantling the institution of prostitution involves much more than de-legitimizing the sex industry itself. Perhaps more challenging than implementing legal reform is the task of changing women’s sociopolitical realities — poverty, lack of equal education and work opportunities as well as equal political input, attitudinal changes about women’s roles. Further, we must dismantle the massive use of female sexuality as a major marketing tool.

Art instructors who teach drawing tell us that you can get a better representation of an object if you concentrate on the spaces around that object, not the object itself. Similarly, I suggest we can’t understand prostitution by looking only at the problem itself; we must also study the sociopolitical space around it. At present, nearly two-thirds of the world’s illiterates are women; during the first part of 2000, only nine women

B. Julie Johnson (drbjulie@comcast.net) experienced, as an adult, prostitution on a full-time basis for a year and a half; she remained in the industry intermittently for another four years. Her story refutes claims that “sex work” for adults is harmless if women “get centered.”

Johnson has a master’s in public health and a PhD in literature.

She has taught and lectured at various colleges; worked for non-profits in animal advocacy; and consults as a prostitution expert with teachers, legislators, and nonprofit directors.

(Editor’s note: Due to space limitations, the endnotes for this article have been posted at ESA-online.org/endnotes.)

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MUSIC NOTES j.d. buhl

Let That Girl Boogie-Woogie

on temptation, she replies, “It’s too late Daddy I already did.” When her mama tells her she’ll forfeit eternal life unless she’s sorry for her sins and mistakes, Birch is sure that “heaven’s gonna be one lonely town.”

The singer has suggested that it is One of the world’s most influential the very constriction of a “Bible belt” musicians was one of 11 children born tightening around her that ultimately to a sharecropping preacher in the squeezed out these songs of freedom Mississippi Delta. After 14 years amidst and heartbreak:The whole album is one the sights and sounds of African American big sigh of relief. The world again benchurch music, John Lee Hooker fled to efits musically from the strict upbringhis stepfather Will Moore’s home ing of a preacher’s kid who bolts from because his own daddy wouldn’t allow the church, exchanging the body of a guitar in the house and considered the Christ for the body of her current lover.

Such transference of passion, rooted in blues to be the devil’s music.

Moore actually played the blues him- Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman,” conself, and it was at his knee that Johnny tributes to a pop humanism that, while learned everything he knew, because, as inviting compassion and a commitment he later said of his stepfather, “I was to human rights, often works at crossinto him just like he was God.” In his purposes to Christianity. Gospel songs are archetypal “Boogie Chillen,” Hooker about acceptance; pop songs are about sings about hearing his stepfather tell his rejection. Notwithstanding the euphoric mama, “Let that boy boogie-woogie. union that begins the cycle, the majority ’Cause it in him, and it gotta come out.” of pop songs cover post-coital boredom, Something else that’s in him — and betrayal, and neglect.

We all face sin. A good pop song in many others from conservative religious families — is the feel of gospel depicts protean examples of the stuff music, and often it comes out at the with heroic characters’ efforts at containment; these same characters then go same time.

One can imagine the above conver- on to commit more, and a new song is sation taking place between the missionary born. Pop humanism places the capacity parents of Diane Birch, a soulful singer- for redemption squarely within each of songwriter in her early 20s who has us, directing the natural drive to worship learned much from the hymnals and songbooks of their travels. From Michigan to Zimbabwe to South Africa to Australia to Oregon, Birch’s folks had ample opportunity to watch a performing personality develop in their daughter and decide whether or not they would let her boogie-woogie.The result is Bible Belt, a 2009 success of such warmth and artistry that you almost wish it was about something other than failed romances.

Birch’s songs recall further parental discussions.When the preacher in “Don’t Wait Up” warns against opening the lid PRISM 2010

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toward one of two unworthy objects: the self or the beloved. In “Forgiveness,” which comes near the end of the album but often opens her shows, Birch exhibits an honest resiliency en route to that redemption:“Your love, no, it ain’t worth cursin’ / Your heart, it ain’t worth hurtin’.”

What makes an artist leave the security of Christ for the rough and tumble of the bedroom? “Love makes the price good enough to wanna pay,” sings Birch in “Fire Escape”; however, “it don’t make the hurt go away.”

Already too many names have been used to describe the familiar comfort of Birch’s sound: from Carol King and Laura Nyro to Lucinda Williams and Amy Winehouse (“minus the dysfunction”). As flattering — and accurate — as these comparisons may be, such “soundslike” wallpaper makes a true artist feel trapped, as if she is little more than an extension of her record collection.There are many mansions to Birch’s voice, not a single room. She has the openness and innocence that makes a song indelible, and after enjoying several available performances (I highly recommend her appearance on Live From Daryl’s House at LiveFromDarylsHouse.com), I have never caught her oversouling.

Birch finds her true peers among such unaffected singers as Alison Krauss, Carrie Rodriguez, and Jacqui Naylor, women who through a number of musical styles — all with some gospel roots — lend those good-news chords of the church to the bad-news chorus of human frailty, failure, and even forgiveness.

John Lee Hooker boogied to his death, leaving behind five decades of insight on the human condition that might have amazed his preacher papa.

In heady flight from her religious upbringing, Diane Birch is doing some work that may also someday make her parents proud.

J.D. Buhl is a regular contributor to PRISM’s music column.

MUSIC NOTES Josh Tremill

The Best of the ’00s As we wrap up the first decade of the new millennium, it occurs to me that we might counteract what some of us were doing 10 years ago — cowering in our basements surrounded by a year’s supply of bottled water and creamed corn and waiting for the Y2K disaster to hit — by celebrating the best music of the decade.

Here’s my overtly subjective list of what I will still dare to call the top 10 albums of the ’00s. #10:Andrew Peterson, Love andThunder (2003). Okay, so the guy sounds like Kermit the Frog, but the beauty and tightness of his lyrics coupled with his pared-down folk musicality more than compensate for the nasal singing. One of the few CCM artists who offer lyrics of profound faith that don’t sound cliché or insincere, Peterson covers everything from the beauty of human creativity to the basics of grace to the reality of suffering and the hope of redemption. If you think CCM is beyond hope, this is worth a listen.

Pauline”), Case spends the bulk of her album probing the relationships between romantic love, death, nature, and the divine.

Her by-and-large haunting melodies and psychedelic guitars lend themselves well to her tightly crafted, poetic lyrics. And “John Saw That Number” is one of the best songs to rock out to, period. #8: Iron & Wine (Sam Beam), The Shepherd’s Dog (2007). This album did for Sam Beam what Graceland did for Paul Simon. Already known for his homespun, wispy, guitar-driven folk, Beam built on some of the percussive elements he introduced on his Woman King LP to create a work of art that combines his airy vocals and combinations of acoustic and steel guitars with a heavy dose of hand drums.

The end result is a rhythmically eclectic album with the thoughtful meditations on love, God, and death that Beam’s fans have come to expect from him.

#7: Nickel Creek, This Side (2002).

One of the most tragic band casualties of the ’00s, Nickel Creek left its listeners with a solid trio of albums. Of the three, This Side best captures the talent and potential of the band’s bluegrass/rock fusion sound.

While maintaining the tight harmonies and heavy use of acoustic guitar and mandolin from their first album, their second is a mix of traditional bluegrass #9: Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the and guitar — and, yes, violin-driven rock.

Flood (2006). With one of the best set of Their cover of Carrie Newcomer’s “I pipes in the music industry, Case brought Should’ve Known Better” epitomizes their her powerful vocals and vintage rock sound virtuosity. Rhythmically grounded in to bear on her strongest album to date. choppy chords and riffs from guitar and Establishing her usual dark, contemplative mandolin, the song features Sara Watkins’ mood on the first track (“Margaret vs. rich crooning and an occasional burst of

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violins.With such a diverse, high-quality sound, one can only hope for a Nickel Creek reunion in the ’10s. #6: Beck, Sea Change (2002). Beck had made a name for himself with his unique rock/rap/trip-hop sound, so the pensive, pared-down folk of his fifth album was, in fact, a “sea change” in his musical career. Driven by slow acoustic guitar and haunting synthesized sounds, his songs brood on lost, hopeless loves and a deep, personal sense of emptiness — a far cry from the playful absurdity of his previous work. One of the most beautiful albums of the decade, Sea Change stands as a testament to Beck’s personal depth and versatility as an artist. #5: The Decemberists, The Hazards of Love (2009). Continuing to draw from the folk ballad tradition that inspired the bulk of their earlier albums, Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy spun a folktale of his own and turned it into a rock opera.

And boy, does it rock. Instead of sticking with the mainly acoustic folk/ rock sound of their previous work, this album has songs that range from slow, guitar-/accordion-driven love ballads to hard and heavy guitars riding on power chords.

Top all this musical virtuosity off with the band’s usual tight archaic lyrics and some powerful guest vocals from Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, and you’ve got a masterpiece. #4 Kanye West, The College Dropout (2004). The relative sexism of “The New Workout Plan” withstanding, this is an extremely creative and thought-provoking

album. The sheer variety of beats on cal parameters of a Sufjan Stevens album.

Dropout is mind-blowing. From the syn- On Illinoise he brings his eclectic craft to copated drum machine behind “Get ‘Em bear on the 21st state of the Union in an High” to the guitar/beatbox combo of album full of humor, beauty, and diversity.

“All Falls Down” to the haunting chant The songs range from pared-down finger that drives “Jesus Walk,”West manages to picking, to rollicking power chords, to keep his rhythms hopping and varied. And repeating recorder melodies, and all are in spite of the album’s exaggeration of the full of Stevens’ well-crafted poetic lyrics. “uselessness” of college degrees to blacks, One of the most unique and musically West makes many poignant critiques of satisfying albums of the decade, it leaves how the American education system has listeners hoping Stevens will make a song failed the black community. The content about their state. and the music reward multiple listens. #1 Andrew Osenga, Photographs (2002). #3 Wilco, A Ghost Is Born (2004). This Who? What? I know, I know — unless album captures Wilco at their most exper- you’ve been following indie CCM for the imental — and, I would argue — their best. past decade, you’ve never heard of the Building on the progressive rock trends guy. But trust me, this album’s fantastic. of their 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Using an array of guitars and synthesized A Ghost Is Born continues to toe the fine sounds, Osenga has shaped a multi-textured line between rock standards and exper- pensive work of art. His textual painting imental rock but makes better use of their is spot on — from the rolling guitars and talented cadre of instrumentalists. Not choral sounds in his first track, capturing only does the band give more leeway to the essence of the river near his homeits guitarists, but it also does a better job town, to the crashing symbols and wailing of utilizing their keyboardist by includ- guitars that accompany his tale of a heeding a couple piano-driven songs, even less romp in Vegas.This thoughtful musibringing out a hammer dulcimer on a cality, along with his poignant lyrics on few tracks. While their experimentation life, love, and faith, lend the album such does go a bit too far during the ear-grat- artistic weight that it remains one of the ing screeching sounds of the last few few CCM records that’s actually accessible minutes of “Less Than You Think,” the to people who don’t identify as Christians. overall payoff — from the slamming bass It really is this good — I promise. and guitar sounds on “Kidsmoke” to the beautiful dulcimer work on “Company in So, wanna come over for a listen? I still have My Back” — makes the occasional mis- some creamed corn left in the basement that we could break into. step well worth enduring. #2 Sufjan Stevens, Illinoise (2005).

Combine folk, rock, and Philip Glass, and you’re getting pretty close to the musi-

Josh Tremill is a freelance writer and an active part of Reconciliation United Methodist Church in Durham, N.C.

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MUSIC NOTES JD Buhl

It’s the Song, Not the Singer A song is but a little thing, and yet what joy it is to sing!

Paul Laurence Dunbar Nowhere is this more true than on American Idol. What joy it is to sing is suggested in the face of each contestant; their every grimace, groan, or grointhrust refers to an ecstatic state. But that little thing, the song, is further diminished by competitive attention to performance. Such tattered flags as “I’ll Be There” or “Without You” exist now for the sole purpose of wowing crowds hellbent on celebrity.

Earlier this year, Associated Press entertainment writer Derrick J. Lang noted what a Christian appearance Idol was taking on. At that point in the show’s eighth season, more than half of the 11 finalists were regular church singers, with three of those six employed as worship leaders. Reminding readers that several finalists have gone on to make gospel albums, Lang wrote that like this season’s Kris Allen and Danny Gokey, “many contestants throughout the past seven seasons of Idol have been Christian and either overtly or subtly showcased their faith.”

What an unfortunate choice of words.

American Idol is itself a showcase, a spectacular display of the earnest insincerity that so often defines America itself.

Though Idol has hosted its own songwriting competition, the broadcast that fills homes weekly is that of singers abusing songs once endowed with their own weight and meaning as a way of drawing attention to themselves. In a rare lead vocal on Pearl Jam’s No Code, guitarist Stone Gossard sings, “It’s all just inadvertent imitation ... all across this

nation/It’s all just inadvertent simulation, pattern in all mankind/what’s got the whole world fakin’ it.”

Subtlety is rare where histrionics are the norm. The Idol-inspired tendency to over-emote, a phenomenon known as “over-souling,” is inadvertent, almost innocent. One can feel sympathy for those straining to replicate something — call it soul — they may have only seen imitated, and doing so before millions of voters. Not content to be moved, viewers are in the position of calculating exactly how moved they have become.

It is here that the song is a little thing indeed. I get the feeling that performers on Idol hold words and melodies in suspicion, as if no combination of these arts can be trusted to do the job. The singers are not there to deliver the hard work of songwriters, to let that work speak for itself; they are instead there to deliver themselves. And it is not just the amateurs. During this season’s finale, Rod Stewart, once the greatest rock ‘n’ roll singer since Elvis, prostituted his “Maggie May” one more time. What began life as a poignant and pointed lyric, charting with concise details that confused region between passion and ambivalence, has become just another sing-along. Rod’s appearance was about Rod’s appearance, not the song that once broke hearts with its depiction of a dissolute schoolboy and the less-thanvirtuous woman he loves.

This subordinating of song leads to a loss of soul. Linford Detweiler of Over the Rhine wrote in Image that “soul can’t be reduced to a formula or nailed down or explained or quantified, but every music lover knows when it’s missing.” My fear is that by voting for the most convincing simulation of soul, those who consider themselves music lovers are willingly contributing to its trivialization; they have signed off on the latest attempt to formulize and quantify this essential element of human communication. Detweiler goes on to say PRISM 2009

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that “soul gets tangled up with suffering, darkness, hope, forgiveness, awe — the slippery stuff of life.” The difference between a singer with soul and the “soul singers” one finds on Idol is “the difference between having sex and making love: physically, the same thing is being accomplished, more or less, but one invites the spirit in.”

What’s got the whole world fakin’ it? This leaving the spirit off the guest list. I would sound as stupid as Simon Cowell if I were to say that every Idol contestant’s life is devoid of suffering, darkness, hope, forgiveness, and awe.

But few if any know how to give voice to these human experiences by trusting a song to guide them. They are so busy over-souling that the possible succor of the words and music, their very intention of addressing these beauties, is lost.

In a conversation with Bay Area writer Lee Hildebrand, gospel star Hezekiah Walker spoke of his role as judge in a choir competition. Although technique, dynamics, and choreography were among the criteria, “spirit makes the difference.”

Gospel performers are bringers of the good news, “and we have to communicate that and make sure it translates. It can only translate with spirit.” Spirit is what Christians might call soul, and we all know how it hurts the heart and the ears when a gospel singer feels he or she has more of it than somebody else.

Precautions were taken to make sure that Walker’s event would not become anything like American Idol. Hildebrand was told by a sponsor spokesperson that judges were “not going to make fun of anyone or make anyone feel bad.”

Humiliation is central to Idol’s appeal.

Yet BeliefNet blogger Joanne Brokaw believes that “the fact that the line between Christian music and the mainstream is becoming more blurred makes it OK for people who are involved in worship to audition for a show like this and not feel like they are selling out or will be criticized.” Central, too, is sex

appeal. Kris Allen’s pastor, Brandon Shatswell, told the reporter Lang that he understands the “moral balance” his worship leader must assume for his antics, “especially after Paula Abdul gushed ... that Allen was ‘adorable/sexy’ and Cowell teased the smiley newlywed for introducing ‘the wife’ so early in the competition.” Pastor Shatswell, at least, has no problem with this.“He’s a good-looking guy ... [and] I was aware people were going to notice that,” he admitted. “If it gains him votes and favor, then I’m all for it.”

What is the real idol worshipped here? Self-expression. Even though many contestants and their fans are content to cover their bodies (what part of their bodies that they do cover) with brand names, they insist on self-expression as their primary right. Ours is a culture where the self and its needs are placed above all others, and the means to selfexpression — especially spoken and written English — are subordinated even further. In the realm of popular music, a certain set of body postures, facial expressions, vocal inflections, and melodic manipulations have come to represent a soulful self being expressed.

For the Christian, two risks present

themselves when entering this particular realm of “the worldly world”: inauthenticity and presumption. For Kris Allen, say, to go from leading worship to singing Michael Jackson — or even the National Anthem — on TV bestows upon him a certain authenticity. I think behind Brokaw’s brushing-off of criticism is the misguided effort to show the world that Christians are just like everybody else, a harmless subset of tattooed and toothy singers who just want to have fun. Such ingratiating integration of called-out ones, especially for those in their teens, often leads to more confusion than confidence. To what gods are their hopes, dreams, and desires being directed? Those of popularity and cleverness? It’s hard enough for kids to keep their identity rooted in Christ without their adorable/sexy worship leader singing in an overblown talent competition.

The presumption is that the Holy Spirit, that A&R man of the Trinity, follows ambitious Christians into whatever temple of self-expression they wander. The Spirit follows no one. Such foolishness is what Karl Barth warned against when writing of a church that “presupposes [the Spirit’s] presence and action in its own existence ... as though it had hired

The War Abroad and the War At Home continued from page 22.

him or even attained possession of him.”

Or worse, such presuppositions fuel an unconscious effort to Christianize such secular pursuits. So we have Christians belting hymns to lust and loneliness with the same intensity as they offer praise to the Almighty.

And there is only one vote that matters. Gokey’s pastor, Jeff Pruitt, said at the time, “Honestly, we believe it’s in God’s hands. Danny is in a place in his life that he is trusting the Lord with everything .... He prays ‘Lord, I will go as far as you want me to go.’”Apparently that was as far as Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” In her book Free Range Kids, Lenore Skenazy reminds us that the job of television is “to terrify and disgust us so that we’ll keep watching in horror.” In that case, all is well. Another season of American Idol will bring its usual desecration of all this music-loving Christian columnist holds dear, sending me in search of theological ear-plugs. Created in God’s image we are; but not all of us are created in the image of Aretha Franklin.”

JD Buhl is a freelance writer based in the Philadelphia area.

in the mountains of Afghanistan, what is stolen is not only their lives but also their future. Young people need more to show for their lives than a flag-draped coffin or an altar of flowers and teddy bears on a street corner. Christian peacemakers must put as much effort and ingenuity into addressing the causes of violence at home as we do into challenging the wars abroad. To focus on one while ignoring the other is to ignore the incontestable connection between the two. n

Peacemakers” on page 22 for more information on the groups mentioned here.) Efforts like these need to be deepened and expanded to involve people of faith in efforts to address militarism and urban violence at their cultural core.

To do so is to live as people of hope.The prophet Jeremiah spoke into a particularly desperate situation in the history of ancient Israel. Like so many of the urban poor today, the exiled Jews of Jeremiah’s day saw little hope for change in their circumstances.Yet Jeremiah came proclaiming that God had promised them “hope and a future.”When young people die or are maimed, whether on the streets of an American city or

(Editor’s note: due to space limitations, the endnotes for this article have been posted at esa-online.org/Endnotes.)

Drick Boyd is an associate professor of urban and interdisciplinary studies at Eastern University, Philadelphia, Pa.

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MUSIC NOTES Al Tizon

Four Strings and the Truth

consider cute at best and more appropriate for a back-to-school luau than a rock-and-roll stage.

And not only rock, but folk, classical, disco, country, bluegrass, and funk—in the hands of Shimabukuro, the ukulele can do it all. Four strings and the truth On a cold, drizzly night at the Baby are apparently all this guy needs (with Grand Theatre in Wilmington, Del., the apologies to Hendrix and U2).

“Of course people think I’m good,” star of the evening walks up to the mike as casually as he’s dressed and says play- he says humbly at one point in the fully, slowly,“Aaaaaloha,Wilmington”— evening. “When they come to listen to and then proceeds to treat the audience an ukulele player, expectations are so to an unforgettable night of hypnotic low I can only go up.”

Shimabukuro’s latest offering, Live, charm, down-to-earth humor, and some captures the laughs, the background to badass ukulele.

That’s right, an ukulele (it’s not a certain songs, and of course, the unique typo; we do need to say an ukulele since skills of arguably the greatest ukulele it’s properly pronounced oo-koo-LAY-lay) player on the planet. His extraordinary —a two-octave, four-stringed instrument covers of Bach’s “Two-Part Invention that makes one think of hula dancing, No. 4 in D Minor” and Michael Jackson’s grass skirts, and big-boned men playing “Thriller” demonstrate the range of his disproportionately small instruments on musical interpretations, while his own a tropical island rather than a crowd of compositions —“Let’s Dance,” “Five wild-eyed fans in a swank, East Coast Dollars Unleaded,” and “Me & Shirley music hall, whooping and hollering at T” are some of my favorites—display a playfulness that reflects a musician truly the end of each mesmerizing song.

There’s a reason that Hawaiian-born enjoying his craft. Live albums are a virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro (pronounced funny thing, though—they often pale in she-ma-BOO-koo-row) is called “the comparison to the actual live show, but Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele.” This guy they’re worth having in your CD colwails on his instrument with the passion, lection. Live is no exception; it should intensity, and bad intentions that would be in your stack, but not without his make Hendrix proud, a talent made all 2006 studio release, Gently Weeps the more remarkable for being per- (Hitchhike Records), and not without formed on something rock snobs would seeing him in person the next time he blows through your town.

I remember the first time I gave Gently Weeps a listen. It was my day off, and I had a stack of borrowed CDs, which included this one, to keep me entertained. I glanced at the unassuming cover and saw a name I had a hard time pronouncing. World music category, I thought. Strike 1. And the title suggests he’s going to try to cover a classic Beatles song. Good luck with that.

Strike 2. For some reason I threw it on anyway and went about my business. As the first track got going, I realized I was PRISM 2009

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listening to an ukulele. Strike…“Hmm,” I thought, “George Harrison would be pleased with how clear an interpretation this is.” I listened more intently.

“This is pretty good.”Then, clarity gave way to magic as the melancholy song transformed into desperate intensity.The sounds coming out of that lone ukulele could only come by way of lightningspeed hands, the left maintaining the melody (and therefore the integrity) of the song, and the right mercilessly pummeling the strings. It became Shimabukuro’s song, going beyond Harrison like a runner with a second wind surpassing the rest. The ferocity lasted for a breathtaking minute or so, but then as the song crescendoed toward the finish line, he slowed it down, as if out of respect for the originator. Yes, this was George Harrison’s song, but Shimabukuro covered it like no one else I’d ever heard. Harrison’s widow, Olivia, confirmed the power of Shimabukuro’s rendition by telling him backstage, after a performance in Honolulu, that she felt George’s presence as he played the song.

It was his cover of “Gently Weeps” that catapulted him to stardom, after his 2006 performance of the song in Central Park was circulated via YouTube. The sheer number of hits (1.5 million to date) from all over the world changed his life, he said. Playing the ukulele for him went from personal obsession and local

fame to record deals, world tours, and appearances on national TV such as NBC’s Late Show with Conan O’Brian.

Personally, his music has opened my mind to the truth that beautiful, wordless music in and of itself can lead one to the throne of God. Listening to Shimabukuro is a spiritual experience, which is weird coming from someone who relies heavily on thoughtful, spiritual lyrics even more than catchy melodies. A tune may be inviting, but my guarded self asks, “What is the singer or band telling me?” before I judge a song to be worthy or otherwise.

Lyrically dependent, I have shown little patience for instrumental music,

unless drum solos or electric guitar interludes amidst long songs count. For the most part, instrumentals bore me to tears.

From classical to Kenny G, it all sounds like elevator music to me. Admittedly, even when he plays softly and sweetly, as he does in some of his songs, I reflexively start yawning.When he keeps the intensity level high, however, lyrics would be distracting (especially since he admits he can’t sing).They would get in the way of the upward journey toward Mt. Zion as one is swept away by the pure sounds of Jake Shimabukuro and his amazing ukulele.

So is there change afoot? My deep enjoyment for what this unlikely virtuoso can do gives me hope that I can in fact

sense the presence of the Almighty by way of wordless excellence. A beautifully played set of chords really can be worth a thousand words.Truth really can be conveyed by something other than speech.

While I suspect I won’t be saying, “Hallelujah! Wasn’t that Schubert piece simply marvelous?” anytime soon, perhaps now the door is ever so slightly open.

Al Tizon wishes at times he could be Jake Shimabukuro. But most of the time, he is quite content to be assistant professor of holistic ministry at Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa., director of ESA’s Word & Deed Network, and regular columnist for PRISM Magazine.

a common scenario: divorced with two kids and a mortgage.

She could not afford the mortgage payments, and her house was put into foreclosure. Margarita filed for bankruptcy and hired “justice gap.” In partnership with the Philadelphia Christian the cheapest bankruptcy attorney she could find to assist her in Legal Aid Society, Ayuda provides one-hour sessions with the process, but the attorney overestimated Margarita’s income practicing attorneys free of charge; beyond that, clients can as well as her ability to make her monthly bankruptcy agreebe placed on a referral list and, in many instances, Ayuda ment payments. Margarita’s inability to navigate the legal attorneys choose to provide complete legal representation. system and understand the jargon put her at a grave disadCurrently, Ayuda’s Free Legal Clinic sees between 200 and vantage. The banks could offer her no help, and the attorney 250 cases a year, from home foreclosures to immigration simply stated there was nothing more to be done. assistance. Their client base consists of individuals who canIt was at that point that Margarita stepped into Ayuda’s not afford an attorney but do not qualify for assistance from Free Legal Clinic and met Kellermeyer, who had experience a publicly funded clinic, which is partially based upon with foreclosures. After 20 hours of phone calls, he discovered income. More than half of Hunting Park residents live at 200 that the bankruptcy lawyer had filed Margarita’s papers incorpercent of the poverty line, while 44 percent fall below the rectly; just two days before her house was scheduled to be poverty line. auctioned off, the mortgage company rescinded the forecloRoughly 10 percent of the Free Legal Clinic’s cases are sure, the judge approved it, a restructured file for bankruptcy focused on immigration issues. Of every 10 cases involving was opened, and her payments were adjusted. Two years later immigrants, about three are undocumented and seven docu- Kellermeyer and Margarita still keep in touch. She still lives in mented. One of the primary foci for the undocumented the same house and has been keeping up with her payments. immigrants is acquiring legal status to remain in the United Ayuda’s efforts are time-consuming but unflagging, guided States.The documented immigrants, conversely, want to move by their clear mission statement: “to reveal Jesus’ mercy, restoraon to the next step of maintaining their legal status, for exam- tion, and justice in Hunting Park so that families and neighple, transitioning from worker visa status to green-card status. borhoods are transformed…through community development Other ways that the clinic serves the immigrant population efforts, direct services, and advocacy.” include acquiring benefits for their children, helping families stay in their homes, and attempting to reunite families by bring- Learn more at ayudacc.org. ing remaining family members into the country.

Kellermeyer tells the story of Margarita, an immigrant Rosario A. Díaz-Cintrón works as the administrative and public woman who came to the United States in the hopes of pro- relations assistant to the president of Esperanza, one of the largest viding a better life for her family but ultimately found herself in Hispanic evangelical network in the United States.

Go and Do Likewise continued from page 33.

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MUSIC NOTES J. D. Buhl

Mavis Staples— She’ll Take You There That’s all right. Released on Election Day, Live: Hope at the Hideout is party enough.

This personable and passionate performance lays the necessary groove for Obama’s embodiment of the African American rhetorical tradition and the songs that accompany it.When he needs to re-familiarize his staff with “We Shall Not Be Moved,” he can turn to this CD. Recorded one June night in a Chicago blues club, the gravelly, growly Rock and Roll Hall of Famer led a three-piece band and a trio of vocalists through 13 songs for a weary land. Hope is not something pasted onto the present. It is a hard-won and proudly worn history of faith, perseverance, and voices raised in praise.

Mavis is an American treasure. No leftist leftover or hippie has-been, this woman has protested injustice and called Christians to worship since her daddy —Roebuck “Pops” Staples, distinctive guitarist and activist—taught her to sing his arrangement of the Carter Family’s “Will the Circle be Unbroken” in the early 1950s, and she always sounds new.

Until Pops’ death in 2000, the Staple Singers were a gospel group of great range and great soul. They could have church with the best of them, as evidenced by their live tracks for the VeeJay label. It must have been easier for an engineer to set up microphones in a sanctuary somewhere than try to capture that spirit in the studio. They could also see the potential in a pop song like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” or the Talking Heads’ “Slippery People” and take that to church.

The former opens Hope at the Hideout, serving as both introductory vamp and

mission statement: Something’s going on here, and hope, not paranoia, is the way to meet it. Staples’ purpose is to encourage, and she states that up front. “We’ve come tonight to bring you joy, happiness, inspiration, and positive vibrations.”

Where other artists might allow for an “inspirational moment,” taking a friendly one-song break from their usual concerns of sex and power, Mavis is not afraid to gather it up and present it in bushels.

From the first “Keep your eyes on the prize” to the last “I’ll take you there,” this is made-up-my-mind, I-won’t-turn-around, elder music of conviction and determination such as only becomes popular when things are really bad. With all the vigor of Bruce Springsteen leading his Sessions Band through civil rights rave-ups, this 69-year-old grandmother gets down with the good news: “We gonna get the prize one day, if y’all just keep holdin’ on.”

Five of the evening’s songs can be found on the essential Staple Singers collection, Freedom Highway. Part of Sony/ Legacy’s The Gospel Spirit series of 1991, the 18-track CD presents recordings made for Epic in the mid-to-late-’60s.

Pops’“Why Am I Treated So Bad?” is one of the group’s most memorable songs, and Mavis’ slowed-down version here supports a great rap about her grandmother’s moaning all the time.When the little girl asks why, Grandma replies,“Well, darlin’, when you moan, the devil don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

There is necessarily crossover also with the 2007 We’ll Never Turn Back, the Ry Cooder-produced collection of spirituals and civil rights anthems that gave this live performance its context.With drummer Jim Keltner, his regular collaborator, Cooder puts down for Mavis a deep, rippling groove like the surface of the Mississippi, along whose banks many of these songs came to be. Using only bass, drums, guitars, and voices—Ladysmith Black Mambazo and members of the original Freedom Singers—such essentials as “(Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody) Turn Me PRISM 2009

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Around” and “99 and a Half (Won’t Do)” regain their zip while losing none of their serious intent.The title selection sounds like a Bob Dylan arrangement. Cooder, at once relaxed and restrained, compliments Staples’ I’ll-sing-the-next-wordwhen-I-get-to-it timing.

Two Staples/Cooder originals give We’ll Never Turn Back its unique personality.

“My Own Eyes” is Mavis’ autobiography set to a Pops Staples guitar figure that drops into a Keith Richards rhythm. Her narratives hit highlights like the March on Washington, and such grumbling lowlights as the post-Katrina abandonment of New Orleans. “I’ll Be Rested” boasts music by Cooder’s son, percussionist Joachim. Here Mavis recites the names of the fallen, both civil rights activists and important figures in gospel music, relishing the day she will join them,“when the roll is called.” During the fade of “My Own Eyes,” Mavis chuckles that she could “write a book about it.” Perhaps some day she will. For now, these two lengthy narratives will serve to address her past as well as our nation’s future.

Never Turn Back ends with Mavis adding, “He already died for your freedom, tell him what you want” to the most insistent, celebratory version of “Jesus Is on the Main Line” that I have ever heard.

“He will answer!” she shouts. “Call him up!”

Both albums include Cooder’s Shadows of Knight arrangement of “This Little

Light of Mine.” Reverbing fearlessly, guitarist Rick Holmstrom lays down a template at the Hideout for garage bands to come. Mavis plants herself in the new lyrics: I ain’t gonna fight no rich man’s war That ain’t what God’s gonna use me for Killin’ folks ain’t in my line Sure ain’t no way to let my little light shine

God revealed in Christ Jesus condoning segregation, hatred, and abuse. By extension, those who sing them today can’t imagine an armed Jesus dragging Iraqis from their homes. Home is important.

When Mavis goes off-mic, moaning a portion of “Waiting for My Child,” the almost unbearable intimacy of it makes you feel as if you’re outside a stranger’s window, watching a mother grieve.

The Staple Singers may be best loved for their pop-soul hits of the ’70s, mesTheologians will argue that she can’t sage songs like “Respect Yourself ” and know what God’s gonna use her for. “Heavy Makes You Happy.”Their biggest, But these are songs of peace.Those who “I’ll Take You There,” ends her night at died for them could not conceive of the the Hideout after the audience claps her

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back for three encores. Before that release, she takes them through a tense version of “On My Way,” slower and lower than that on We’ll Never Turn Back. If a brother or sister declines her invitation to the Freedom Land, she’ll go alone, she says.

It’s beyond me how any believer can resist joining her in singing, “I’m on my way, great God a’mighty, I’m on my way.”

J.D. Buhl appears in the music issue of Geez Magazine (Fall 2008). He teaches junior high English and literature at Queen of All Saints School in Concord, Calif., where he lives with his kitten, Billie.

MUSIC NOTES Mark Fisher

Songs of Hope, Honesty, and Healing

in the month prior to their demise; over half of all suicides are committed by men aged 25-65.

The wonderful folks at Visionary Concepts have set out to aid the cause of suicide awareness by compiling an album’s worth of poignant, often uplifting songs that reach out to the listener through the instruments and voices of well-known musicians, independent Hope, Volume One Of the many compilation albums that icons, and emerging new artists, includcome out each year, few are important for ing Ken Andrews (Failure), Charlotte any reason other than marketing a record Martin, Joanne and Johnny Cash, Lisa label or a management company’s artists. Loeb, Katy Rose, and Kevin Max (DC Hope, Volume One counts itself among Talk), among others.

Unlike many compilations, for the the important. Much like the Take Action! compilation series, Hope,Volume One was most part this one flows like a proper assembled to help raise awareness and album. Both the selection and placement funds for the cause of suicide prevention, of the songs are excellent. Charlotte in this case through Suicide Awareness Martin and Lisa Loeb kick off the album with their always intriguing and intimate, Voices of Education (SAVE.org).

According to the press release from slightly-left-of-center sounds. It had been managing label Visionary Concepts years since I’d heard Lisa Loeb’s voice (visionary-concepts.net), “The mission of (fans of the late ’90s girls-with-guitars SAVE is to prevent suicide through public invasion may remember her), and she awareness and education, to reduce stigma, sounds better than ever. “Come Back and to serve as a resource to those touched Home” is a touching song that contrasts by suicide.” Suicide claims the lives of well with Martin’s atmospheric opener, 30,000 Americans each year, affecting all “Crimson Sky.” 5th PROJEKT’s age groups, yet most of us are under- “Resistance” is another highlight with informed about both its victims and its its droning, Starflyer 59 sound and softprevalence. For example, among people spoken female vocals. Other highlights aged 15-24 suicide is the third leading include the Kevin Max anthem “Your cause of death; 75 percent of elderly Beautiful Mind” (a gentle reminder that persons who commit suicide visit a doctor unique is beautiful and that normal simply does not exist), Ken Andrew’s modern rock classic “Up or Down,” and Katy Rose’s simple but fun “Cool Whip.” The most striking moment is when Joanne Cash joins her brother posthumously for a rendition of “Softly & Tenderly” that is so raw it will certainly make your eyes well up.

Overall this is a great album with an even greater cause behind it. A must-have album for so many reasons, Hope, Volume One should be near the top of your “to purchase” list.

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Ken Block’s Drift Since the late-’90s, Sister Hazel has been one of the most instantly recognizable (and most consistently overlooked by the media) bands on the music scene. Bursting into the mainstream with their massive hit, “All for You,” in 1997, the band has evolved into far more than simple pop radio fodder, delivering a string of albums that are both musically pristine and lyrically powerful. The short pitch here is that if you haven’t paid attention to this band since their “big hit,” you really should catch up. You won’t regret it, especially since following their groundbreaking path will ultimately lead you to Blockville.

You think we’re broken/what if we’re just a little cracked?/I know we’re choking on the little things that seem to come with time… So begins the intimate sound of Drift (Rock Ridge Music, 2008), the debut solo album from Sister Hazel vocalist Ken Block and the key to Blockville.With these simple words, Block lays the foundation for a community of songs that find few peers in today’s music scene.The music ranges from country-tinged alt-rock to folk to simple acoustic pieces that fall away in the wake of the artist’s striking, intimate voice.

Drift possesses a gritty, realist attitude throughout that will surely interest many fans of poetic forms of music. Tackling issues of artistry, his own personal demons, and the need to find peace and balance

in his life, Block speaks honestly here at every turn. As good as the music is, the lyrics are what will keep you revisiting this album again and again. Amongst the hard issues, Block exhibits a quiet optimism that is instantly appealing.

A case in point is the track “Completely Wasted,” written about a time in Block’s life when his first son was born while he was still dealing with the loss of his younger brother to cancer. At the time, Sister Hazel was in the throes of wild success and Block was living the stereotypical rock star life. As his son entered the world, feelings over his inevi-

table failure to protect his younger brother from the disease showed themselves in force.Wondering how he could possibly protect his son shook his stability and Block soon found himself in rehab, thanks to friends and family.

But it’s not all despair on Drift.“So Far” speaks to the need for balance in our lives, recounting what he doesn’t need to be and thus defining what kind of man he is.

The more electric “You and Me” takes listeners through the thought process of a painful breakup, declaring boldly, “The best part of us was me,” without even a hint of vocal bitterness.The album’s intro-

duction,“Blue to a Blind Man,” is another wonderful moment, examining the mutuality that all good relationships require.

Ken Block lays it all out in Drift, and the results are remarkable. From the musical variety to the personalized universalism of the lyrics, you simply cannot go wrong with this album if you enjoy introspective and artistic approaches to music. Learn more at Blockville.com and LyricsforLife.org.

Mark Fisher is a freelance reviewer and music enthusiast. He resides in West Virginia with his two sons and an extremely patient wife.

Where Your Treasure Is continued from page 21.

However, I want to raise what I view as two important caveats about the simple lifestyle.The simple lifestyle is a good benchmark, but too simple a lifestyle can actually make life more complicated and stressful. For example, our family has made a decision to live with just one (10-year-old) car. But that is because my wife is able to walk three blocks to where she works at our church as the worship music director. We could easily be in a situation in which trying to live with just one car would either make life very complicated or not allow either my wife or me to pursue our vocation.The second caveat: If you don’t have anything, it’s harder to share. Personally, I’m a fan of big houses if they are consistently used for hospitality and as a blessing to people without big houses of their own.

That’s why we have one.

Material goods do not buy happiness, and if you have mistakenly come to believe so, unfortunately you are in for a disappointing life. If you have trouble trusting what the Bible says about this issue, I refer you to a voluminous literature of empirical research which solidly backs up this idea.

Instead, it is through a loving and committed relationship with God and other people that higher-order needs for love, significance, and meaning will be filled. n

Bruce Wydick is a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Games in Economic Development (Cambridge University Press., 2008).

order needs will be met. We can choose to meet them either by following the ads in our consumer culture or by following the way of Christ. Numerous and powerful messages are promoting the former: The New York Times reported recently that a market research firm has estimated that people in urban areas today view on average 5,000 advertisements a day, up from 2,000 just 30 years ago. That’s a lot of competition for the countercultural voice of the gospel, and it’s almost impossible to avoid having some commercial culture sink in.

One of the best ways is to continually refill our minds, literally re-mind ourselves that our real treasure is in Christ, in family, in community, and in being his outstretched hands and feet to an aching world.

As Christians we should strive to develop a simple lifestyle, purposefully restraining our material consumption.There are two approaches to this. First, we can spend less so that we have more money to give away. Second, we can work less, meaning that we will have less money to spend on consumer goods in the first place, but more time to give away.

We should also develop a skeptical attitude toward materialism and use anti-materialism as a platform for witness.

Nothing grabs people’s attention more than someone who is naturally content with who they are and what they have (especially in our culture). We need to deprogram ourselves away from the 5,000 ads we see every day, follow Jesus’ example, and try to travel light.

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MUSIC NOTES j.d. buhl

Sister Sam Goes Before Us

yelped in “Expectations,” and she left the strictures of evangelical Christian music behind.

She and Burnett married in 1989 and together made seven albums presenting Sam as a quirky singer/songwriter with a fondness for wry observation and dry, While she can sing prettily, Sam Phillips’ crackling production. Her songs were is not a pretty voice. The way grace is often little more than strings of words, conveyed through her instrument is more avoiding the big verse/chorus message along the lines of what ColleenTownsend with aphoristic wisdom. Some could be heard as precursors to Alanis Morissette; Evans wrote about forgiveness: others were as tender as a Wesley hymn.

Don’t Do Anything is the first CD she Forgiveness does not allow a fool has produced herself, the marriage sadly to persist in folly…or lies to go being over. It works as a whole, rather unchallenged…or prejudice to than a collection of interesting pieces, flourish unopposed. Forgiveness thanks to its short songs and textural is reality dealing sensibly with consistency. reality — love with a rugged face.

Phillips’ musical work is that of “reality dealing sensibly with reality.” Hers can be the voice of the most encouraging girlfriend (ask Gilmore Girls devotees) or a romantic prophet. Both voices are present on her newest album, Don’t Do Anything (Nonesuch, 2008), which reflects on the vagaries of love and the perseverance of faith.

While some fans play the same tiresome “Is she still a Christian?” game played with Bob Dylan, it is of some interest to consider Phillips’ CCM roots. If Amy Grant was the girl any guy would want to take home to his parents, Leslie Phillips was the weird chick with whom he’d only be friends. But she had it going on, considering the synthesizer-and-drum machine confines of Christian music in the ’80s. She wrote her own songs and betrayed an interest in rock melody beyond new wave radio fare. After three releases on Word/Myrrh, things took a turn with The Turning in 1987. Producer T Bone Burnett understood the kind of records she wanted to make; he shared her interest in sounds as well as songs.

Welcomed by secular listeners, Phillips turned to them, officially adopting her old nickname, Sam.“I can’t breathe!” she

Love with a rugged face walks streets in “Under the Night,” where in the dark it can see “what the light can’t find.”

The revealing of things, often those whose existence was not even suspected prior to their outing, is a theme relating these 12 songs: simple slivers of reflection, tiny meditations flying by on the dark breeze.

All along, her probings into folly and lies find forgiveness at hand. The album begins with the warning, “This is bigger than you and the part of the truth you trust,” and concludes with an assurance that “The splendor / the holiness of life / that reveals itself / convert[s] blind fate / into destiny.”

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After the release of the album (her second on Nonesuch), Phillips set out on a seven-gig Borders tour last summer.

On a chilly night in San Francisco, the artist and I chatted before she took the stage. Signing my LP of The Indescribable Wow (1988), she exclaimed, “Oh! I love vinyl. It’s so big!” She remains as lovely and funny as ever, a charming combination of Lucille Ball and Bette Davis, but in holey thrift-store fashions, knee-high boots, and unbrushed hair. What’s not to love? Appearing beside her was Eric Gorfain, the young multi-instrumentalist who recorded and arranged much of the album. He played his Stroh violin (neck and strings amplified through a silver horn) and three-quarters guitar through tiny miked amps (“All of the distortion with half the volume,” Sam quipped) while she strummed a six-song set. She then sat down to sign copies of the CD, a line of fans winding round the record racks.

Nice work, if you can get it. (Learn more at SamPhillips.com.)

Fans of Raising Sand, the Robert PlantAlison Krauss collaboration produced by Burnett, already know Phillips’ “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us.” Having “lost the love I never found,” a lonely soul sets out, acknowledging the guidance of Sister Rosetta Tharpe (see “I’m Shouting!” by Al Tizon in the November/December 2007 issue of PRISM) and her “music up above.” Tharpe’s “Up Above My Head” pivots on the belief that “there is a heaven somewhere.”

But music is not the only thing up above her head; there is also trouble in the air.“I know I’ve loved you too much,” sings Phillips’ protagonist, having stood in her “broken heart all night long.” “I’ll go on alone, to get through.”The song is delivered plaintively by Krauss, her fiddle lending a floating quality to such abandonments as “the sight of my heart” and the “sound of hope” having left her again.

Phillips’ own version is more shattered and dreamlike. However, the accordianfold liner notes in Don’t Do Anything leave

out the lyric’s crux, a line Sam nonetheless sings with the lightest touch.

“Looking for the lamb that’s hidden in the cross, the finder’s lost.” Let the “Is she

still a Christian?” crowd chew on that one while those who have loved too much, and now must go on alone, do so with Sam Phillips’ music up above their heads.

J.D. Buhl appears in the music issue of Geez Magazine (Fall 2008). He teaches junior high English and literature at Queen of All Saints School in Concord, Calif.

Lost and Found continued from page 11.

A Sacred Opportunity continued from page 22.

ness and transformative change. Befriending them and witnessing their change can foster change in you and in your community.”

Sean Pica, Mark Wallace, Sean Johnson, Ricardo Sheppard, and thousands of other men and women have been powerfully transformed through their prison experience. Like Isaiah, they have been touched by the seraph’s live coal and experienced its life-giving power by hearing the healing words: “Your guilt has departed, and your sin is blotted out.” Not only have they changed for their own sake but they have also answered the divine call, with the power of conversion gleaming in their eyes: “Here we are, Lord. Send us.” n

ment. There’s an opportunity to build a relationship and influence. I take it slowly, step by step, and once there’s trust anything becomes possible. Someone asked one of the men why he trusted me, and his response was, ‘Well, she trusted me first.’”

Her approach for building trust is remarkably simple. “I ask them how they are doing and inquire about their families.

I just try to normalize the situation as much as possible. I ask them when their birthday is. I record their birthdays and then bring them a card—that usually blows their mind! If I hear there has been a death or illness in their family, I will bring a sympathy card. Just doing the normal things, things you and I on the outside take for granted, makes huge inroads in the prison. Keeping promises is also crucial.”

What is it that draws Thomas back to the prison week after week, year after year? “The Bible makes it clear that prisoners are important to God,” she explains. “And there is a special reward for visiting with prisoners, as mentioned in Matthew 25. The way I interpret it is that God sees prison as a sacred place. I’m still learning to understand that, but I’ve come to see prison as a sacred place, too.When you get locked up you’re at the bottom of the barrel; there’s nowhere to run.

So most inmates then turn their attention to God.That is how many of them cope with prison and actually find spiritual freedom they might not otherwise find on the streets.

“God called me to this work,” she continues. “He placed the ministry in my heart. I see my own life being transformed daily, so the ministry just keeps drawing me deeper and deeper in. Having seen the evidence of God moving, doing miracles in the prison, I don’t want to do anything else. I worked for a big bank for many years and then for a secular nonprofit, but I left that to follow this calling, and it’s changed my life completely.” n

Learn more about Rehabilitation Through the Arts at RTA-arts.org.

Dr. Hans B. Hallundbaek (hanshall@optonline.net) has spent many years as a prison volunteer and educator. Besides writing on social and criminal justice issues, he serves as a Presbyterian minister and teaches legal aspects of corrections management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

The Correct Way continued from page 19. not followers, so when they get out they can stay out.

As in every community we live in, security should be paramount to deter lawlessness. On the outside, we expect our caretakers—police, firefighters, educators, etc.—to be qualified.

Inside prison it should be no different. If the guards aren’t qualified, it defeats the purpose.

Men and women should leave prison equipped to do something valuable — tailoring, computer literacy, electrical work, plumbing. Prisons should be in partnership with the community — if you have an A student coming out of a plumbing program, a local company should be waiting in the wings to hire him right away. He’s not used to life on the outside anymore, or how the world has changed. It’s intimidating without a lot of help from the community. n

Sharon Gramby-Sobukwe is department chair of Eastern University’s School of Leadership and Development (NGOLeader.org), which offers organizational leadership and economic/community development programs in South Africa in a hybrid (online/annual residency) format. Kristyn Komarnicki is editor of PRISM.

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MUSIC NOTES J.D. Buhl

From “Wanderer” to “Thunderer” Thought my image needed a pat on the back I thought my ego needed a Cadillac There I was sittin’ in the driver’s seat I was feelin’ low, still incomplete Now I really know, like I never knew before The Lord come knockin’ and I finally opened up the door Thank you, Lord; thank you, Lord “Sweet Surrender” did not make it into The 100 Greatest Songs of Christian Music, the colorful CCM celebration of 2006.

The King of the New York Streets’ greatest hit—in what was still called “gospel” at the time—came too soon to rank highly amongst the hair bands and evangelical ingénues that followed. Still, there are those who remember its scintillating groove and assured, knowing vocal. Dion always sang with utter joy, immeasurable depth, and complete authority. By 1980 he had placed that voice in the service of the Lord.

“Irrepressible” is the word. Dion—the toughest, tenderist crooner to ever rule the charts, is nothing if not irrepressible.

Now 68, the former paragon of independence is a living testament to the necessity of restraint and control as gifts of grace.“I don’t do what I want to,” sings the bluesman on his new album, Son of Skip James, “but what I oughta and what I should.”

It all starts with the snappy drumroll and boogie piano that open “The Wanderer.”This 1961 hit, and its predecessor at No. 1, “Runaround Sue,” are symbolic of a sound, a style, and an attitude that virtually define rock and roll for a whole generation of men. The for-

mer is an anthem for the love-’em-andleave-’em type; the latter warns other guys about a girl who does the same.

Such records as these and “Lovers Who Wonder” or “Donna the Prima Donna” are not triumphal, but give expression to a street understanding of fairness. What is lacking is compassion.

When Lou Reed inducted his hero into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, he summed up his speech with, “After all, who could be hipper than Dion?” Like Reed and other aging artists, Dion has heroically shown us the variegated levels of hipness. His cool followed him from impeccable rock as sharp as his clothes to an unaffected Christian witness that needed only that gray-flecked slouch cap.

Dion has made it through the years with one identity, one Lord and Savior, one wife, and the belief that “rock ’n’ roll, at its best, proclaimed your own personal freedom and individuality.”

“Sadly,” he continues, “so many artists and friends of mine have never achieved the very reality which they were expressing in their music.” It takes Jesus.

One day while jogging in 1979, Dion observed, “God, it would be nice to be closer to you,” and everything changed.

The only problem with his subsequent six-album run in gospel music is that it happened in the ’80s—glossy guitars, synthesizers,“programming,” and pillowfight drums. The majority of the 18 selections on The Best of the Gospel Years come from Inside Job (1980), a wonderful record best appreciated as a whole.

While Paul Harris’s electric keyboard dominates, guitars are present and still sounding natural; Dion’s writing and singing are sweet and simple, with every song memorable and edifying. The trilogy of “Old Souvenirs,” “New Jersey Wife,” and “Man in the Glass” is especially gripping. These compassionate songs, laced with humility and humor, are followed by “Sweet Surrender.”

Dion was nominated for a gospel PRISM 2008

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Grammy in 1985. Other highlights from this period include the intensely personal “Come to the Cross,” as well as “Golden Sun Silver Moon,” and “You Need a Love,” both of which use real horns. His duet with Pamela Sessody, “Day of the Lord,” could be a worshipband standard.

His interest in the blues began early, nurtured by A&R giant John Hammond at Columbia Records. After two incharacter singles, the label didn’t know what to do with the increasingly primitive, introspective and drug-addled pop singer. His earnest stabs at blues and folk rock (many of which can now be enjoyed on the retrospective The Road I’m On) were ignored at the time, and he slipped away.

Reemerging in singer-songwriter mode, he gave us “Abraham, Martin and John” in 1968. Stripping things further back, it was just the man and his guitar who laid down Bronx in Blue, the 2006 album that marks an astonishing career high.With just a hint of percussion, Dion steams his way through country blues (and country and western) classics by Blind Willie McTell, Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Hank Williams, among others. Two rocking originals tear it up. And his playing and singing are rich in detail, making you pay attention to every nuance. A five-star album 50 years into his career? Like I said: irrepressible.

Now we have Heroes: Giants of Early Rock Guitar (just out from Saguaro Road Records), a tribute to the rockers Dion once toured and shared stages with, which joins last fall’s Son of Skip James (Verve Forecast), the former presenting 15 electrified oldies, the latter another acoustic set of blues thumpers, slightly enhanced by piano and organ. The killers on Son are the tough-talkin’ title cut (which begins “I want to be more like Jesus” and ends “I’m a lover not a fighter, but I could kick your ass”), Sleepy John Estes’“Drop Down Mama,” and the early

Dylan song he was the first to cover, “Baby I’m in the Mood for You.” His spiritual journey has led him out of evangelical circles and back to the Catholic Church, even returning him to the parish of his youth, Mount Carmel in the Bronx. “The Thunderer” has got to be the first rock song about Saint Jerome; Phyllis McGinley’s poem gives him vibrant images of this “crotchety scholar … the great name-caller.”

This is my one desire: that Dion and his beautiful Martin 000C BD cutaway Signature Model would get down to some serious gospelizing. “I Know I’ve Got Religion,” “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning,” “When I Lay My Burden Down”? The songs of Blind Willie Johnson, Rev. Gary Davis, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the Staple Singers?

Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light”? Even a bluesy remake of “Come to the Cross” would do.This is what the people need,

Brother Di. And who could be hipper than you?.

J.D. Buhl writes about music for Valparaiso University’s journal of the arts and current affairs, The Cresset. He teaches junior high English and literature at Queen of All Saints School in Concord, Calif.

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MUSIC NOTES

Songs for the Faint of Heart

talk to help us do what we do really well but rather a lament for a calling immersed in utter failure, a sliver of hope that “all unity may one day be restored.” Save for a couple of black graduate students and our Latino guests on this special occasion, Emmaus Way at 5 p.m. on Sunday is every bit as segregated as every other church B y J esse J ames D e C onto is at 11 a.m.

Our marriages fail just like everyone We sit in a renovated storefront in down- else’s.The people we love suffer and die; town Durham, N.C., encircling Wade we lose our jobs and have trouble findBaynham as he strums the chords of ing new ones, just like everyone else.

Christian communitarianism’s favorite But here at Emmaus Way, thanks in no anthem: “They Will Know We Are small part to Baynham, his guitar, and Christians.” The Duke lacrosse scandal his warm baritone voice, we don’t preof 2006 has shed light on the deep tend any different. We not only admit racial tension in this segregated city but that life is a whole lot tougher than the obscured a more recent trend: Durham’s Sunday school songs and praise choHispanic population has grown from ruses ever taught us to believe, we also almost none to some 25,000 in less than sing about it.

Baynham finds the material for cortwo decades, and these new brownskinned neighbors are seen alternatively porate worship not in hymnals or youth as victims (of black crime or white exploi- group songbooks, but in his vast music tation) and criminals (for crossing the collection, from singer-songwriters to border from Mexico and “stealing our full-on rock bands. Singing along to jobs”).Yet here they are, a dozen mem- Rich Mullins or U2 will not surprise bers of Reino Hoy—“Kingdom Today” anyone familiar with attempts to (post) —a fledgling Latino congregation, sitting modernize Christian worship. But in our midst.We, the overeducated, mostly Baynham digs deeper, finding words of white members of the creative class— wisdom in the songs of Emmylou Harris, doctors, teachers, writers, musicians, tech- Julie Miller, Jewish songwriter Peter nophiles, graduate students, theologians Himmelman, Over the Rhine, even —make up this emerging church called secular hit-makers like Bruce Hornsby.

Baynham says he’s not looking for Emmaus Way. As we sing Carol Arends’ words,“We “doctrinal propaganda,” or even a hipwill work with each other, we will work per worship experience, but simply side by side, and we’ll guard each one’s excellent art.

“It will not allow you to walk away dignity and save each one’s pride,” we might be tempted to pat ourselves on the from it.You have to interact with it,” he back. Here we are, embodying these says. “[The songs] tell real stories about words, worshipping together across eth- brokenness and loss and heartache.”

We all have these stories, but church nic lines, as if to say, “Screw the most segregated hour of the week! We meet is all too rarely a place to share them. at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, thank you Baynham and his rotating team of guest very much.” But those of us who attend musicians are shifting the paradigm, Emmaus Way know that the irony is because they have their own stories and not lost on Baynham. He has told us what the music they share has helped them he thinks of Arends’ song: It’s not a pep to heal. Baynham made seven studio

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records and toured for 20 years with his wife before their marriage ended in divorce, destroying both his personal and professional life. Fellow musician Mark Williams’ sophomore album, Journals of a Recovering Skeptic, earned accolades from CCM magazine, and 7ball magazine named him one of the top 25 independent artists in the nation in 1997. But his solo career stalled and his marriage fell apart after tens of thousands of miles on the road together.

Drummer Dale Baker lived his rockstar dream with Sixpence None the Richer, touring Europe and playing on Letterman, Leno, and Saturday Night Live before leaving the band over money and hurt feelings. All of them have felt the sting of betrayal.

So when Baker’s drums and Baynham’s guitar carry lyrics like Emmylou’s, we believe them, and we can sing with them: “Our path is worn, our feet are poorly shod, we lift up our prayer against the odds, and fear silence is the voice of God, and we cry Alleluia.” I personally suffered through a failing marriage for years and didn’t know who could hear my pain or possibly understand it; the musicians at Emmaus Way made it easy to unload and probably saved my life.

There is hope in the pain, and there are Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants in our white-bread church. The secondlanguage Spanish-speakers among us are translating our testimonies and Scripture dialogue so our guests can understand, and the rest of us are waiting patiently, just to get a taste of the unity we seek.

Maybe the world doesn’t know we are Christians by our love just yet, but we cry “Alleluia” anyhow.

Jesse James DeConto is a staff writer at the News & Observer in Chapel Hill, N.C. He writes and performs with the folk-rock band Oscar Begat and lives in Carrboro, N.C., with his two daughters. He has been writing for PRISM since 2000.

MUSIC NOTES Josh Tremill

by and large meditates on post-Katrina New Orleans, a reality that has sent many citizens of the city, Leverett included, back to their roots in order to rebuild their lives. On Orphans, Leverett is at his best on grittier old-school bluesy numbers such as “Like Hell Inside” and the title track. These two songs really drive the album; they capture the pain and In the fall of 2005, Hurricane Katrina energy that Leverett senses in the postshook up people across the United States. Katrina New Orleans community and For Mo Leverett, the impact of this translate it into dirty guitars, bouncing natural disaster hit especially close to rhythms, wailing harmonicas, and Leverett at his most guttural. Unfortunhome.

Since 1990 Leverett had been living ately, these tracks are both so close to the in and serving the community of New beginning of the CD that it starts to Orleans, where he and his family had drag towards the end, as one slow acoustaken root in the Desire Housing Project tic track blends into another.

Nevertheless, the lyrics on all of his —the public housing site which had been ranked the worst in the United tracks are striking, both for their poetic States by the US Department of Urban quality and their social and spiritual Housing and Development. There he relevance. Perhaps the most shocking had founded Desire Street Ministries, a aspect of Orphans is its emphasis on multifaceted organization that combines prayer. After a disaster like Katrina, one Christian discipleship and evangelism with social and humanitarian services in an effort to both benefit the community and train its residents to play an active role in transforming the city.

While running this ministry, Leverett somehow found time to record and release multiple albums. The second of these, Sacred Desires (1995), began establishing his sound: acoustic-heavy, bluesladen folk, reminiscent of Bob Seger, with a peppering of New Orleans-style blues. With vocals that range from gruff to warbling, Leverett’s vocal style on this album is that of a growling, more mature-sounding Ryan Adams, hitting his listeners hard on his more raucous numbers and soothing them with his lighter ballads.

After experimenting with jazz sounds and rhythms on a 2005 album, Blades of Love, Leverett comes back to his musical roots with his latest release, Of Orphans and Kings (2007). It’s an appropriate transition, given that this album

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might expect any social reformer— Christian or otherwise—to spend most of her/his time encouraging people to hurry up and reestablish themselves, rebuild, get things back to the way they were. Not so with Leverett. While he certainly supports the rejuvenation of New Orleans on tracks like “NOLA Is Rising,” other songs, such as “Watch and Pray,” make it clear that Leverett’s concern is for not just the social reconstruction of New Orleans but its spiritual reconstruction as well. Using a prophetic tone, he emphasizes the Scriptures’ hope of redemption through suffering, reminding his listeners that “Sometimes there is only hope for change that comes through storms.” To find this hope, he encourages his listeners to seek God in prayer, where they can find true solace and a better future.

Coming from anyone else, this heavy emphasis on prayer and communal spirituality in New Orleans could

Te d J a c k s o n

The Music and Ministry of Mo Leverett

possibly be criticized as a one-sided expression of Christianity, of faith without works. But in Leverett’s case, such criticism would be absurd. While his music talks the talk of the Christian faith, encouraging the poor and outcast to find God in the midst of their struggles, his work in social ministries and reconstruction walks the walk of redemptive servanthood that is central to the gospel’s message. During his tenure at Desire Street Ministries, Leverett planted a church in the Desire Housing Project, but his team also built a 36,000-squarefoot facility in which they house their church, school, after-school youth program, and many other ministry programs.

They launched a medical clinic, housing renovation program, and entrepreneur development company. All these ventures illustrate Leverett’s commitment to serving the whole person—body, mind, and

spirit. At the same time, his ministry also addressed the region’s larger social concerns, striving to bring both racial rec-

got Leverett thinking and praying about its applicability on a larger scale. In 2006, he decided it was time for him to take the work of Desire Street to other urban areas, so he left work there to found a new organization, Rebirth International (myrebirth.org). From its headquarters in New Orleans, Rebirth plans to train members of other urban communities in Desire Street’s gospel-centered model of social and spiritual ministry, equipping them to apply the model to the needs of their respective communities.

In this way, Leverett hopes to take the sacred desires of both his ministry and his music and make them into a living reality, into a slice of the kingdom of God, here and now.

onciliation and economic development to the Desire Housing Project.

The success of this holistic ministry

Josh Tremill is a freelance writer and a member of Emmanuel Mennonite Church in Gainesville, Fla.

6 HVk^dg ^c GZY! L]^iZ 7ajZ Jesus Made in America A Cultural History from the Puritans to The Passion of Christ Stephen J. Nichols “Stephen Nichols’s account of how Jesus has been perceived throughout American history is long on wisdom and short on tedium. . . . Not the least of the book’s many merits is Nichols’s ability to sort through the extraordinary mix of cultural nonsense and profound theological insight that make up this story.� —Mark Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, University of Notre Dame

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MUSIC NOTES

Larry Norman Visited This Planet

record on the turntable, guided the arm onto the most provocative song title (“Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?”), and waited. After a few crackly needle-to-vinyl revolutions, a nasally voice came commandingly through the speakers: I want the people to know that he saved my soul / But I still like to listen to the radio.

Adrenaline percolated up from the

BY AL TIZON depth of my soul. They say rock and roll is wrong / I’ll give you one more chance / I say Larry Norman—singer-songwriter, I feel so good I gotta get up and dance.

I got up and danced. I know what’s pioneer of “Jesus rock,” and 2001 inductee into the Gospel Music Association right, I know what’s wrong / I don’t conHall of Fame—died on February 24, fuse it /All I’m really trying to say is / why 2008. He was 60 years old. The earth should the devil have all the good music?

Yeah, why should the devil have all didn’t shake, flags didn’t fly at half-mast, and news of Britney Spears didn’t get the good music? I reasoned as I moved eclipsed. But upon finding out that Larry to the beat. Followers of the Most High Norman had breathed his last, this boy took a mental health day off. I admit, long distance grief for someone I didn’t even know might seem a bit odd. But Norman’s music saved my life (I’ll explain in a minute); so allow me a few nostalgic tears as I ponder life after Larry.

Just when I thought that my decision to follow Jesus at age 17 meant listening to Lawrence Welk—and liking it—I had a date with destiny. While going through the “N” section at a Christian music store, I saw a strangelooking record—“strange” in that it looked like a rock album … but in a Christian establishment? (Yes, that was should be playing not just good music, an issue in the early ’80s!) The title at the but the best music. And Norman delivtop of the cover, Only Visiting This Planet, ered, with one faith-affirming rock song glowed bright orange, and there was a following the other. I was hooked.

I played that album until it warped, man dressed in street clothes right below it. Angst lined his face, and long, blonde and I eventually found Norman’s other hair straddled the top of his head like a important releases, including So Long bad wig. The hippie’s name was spelled Ago the Garden (MGM/Verve, 1973) and out: “LARRY NORMAN,” with a Something New Under the Son (Solid Rock, 1981). Furthermore, his music opened lightning bolt through the “O.” Hungry for music to replace my the door to other pre-CCM artists like recently incinerated rock-and-roll col- Daniel Amos, Randy Stonehill, and the lection, I judged the album by its cover late great Mark Heard. And even though and bought it. Hurrying home, I anx- I eventually grew weary of the comiously tore off the cellophane, placed the mercialization and artistic limitations of PRISM 2008

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what CCM became, I continued to regard Larry Norman and his early disciples with great appreciation.

As I said, his music saved my life, or at least my faith, which are arguably one and the same. That is, it showed me that the Christian life did not have to mean settling for mediocre. It did not have to mean staying safe and maintaining the status quo. It did not have to mean swallowing emotional lithium, repressing passion and joy. And it did not have to mean burning social bridges, limiting oneself to fellow Christians and church potlucks. I began to fear these things, thanks to well-meaning Christians who were telling me that good music (read: thoughtful lyrics and kick-your-butt rock and roll), good movies (read: quality acting and plots that don’t necessarily end in conversion), and good drink (read: “hide the beer, the pastor’s here”) are now anathema. That’s what Larry’s music did—it saved me from an uncreative, unreflective, unexciting life.

More positively, his music pointed to an approach to faith that not only pulsated with vitality and poetry, but one that also cultivated a social conscience. In the classic “Great American Novel,” he didn’t hold back: You are far across the ocean in a war that’s not your own [Vietnam] / And while you’re winning theirs, you’re gonna lose the one at home.

And again: Do you really think the only way to bring about the peace / Is to sacrifice your children and kill all your enemies?

He ended the song with the only solution that Larry ever proposed: Don’t ask me for the answers; I only got one / That a man leaves his darkness when he follows the Son. Righteous rocker. Jesus freak. Friend of the White House. Suspected communist. Left-wing. Right-wing. Too spiritual. Too secular. Devil-worshipper.

Evangelist. Norman was called all of these things at different points in his life. And his response? I been shot down, talked about, some people scandalize my name / But here

I am talking ‘bout Jesus just the same.

The insistence to sing about his faith cost him much, including his own commercial success. He was undoubtedly on his way to the top. His band, People!, released two successful albums with Capitol Records, and they hit the charts with the single “I Love You” in 1968.

By the early 1970s, Billboard Magazine described Norman as “the most important writer since Paul Simon.” And Time called him “the most significant artist in his field.” But at the height of his popularity, Norman left the band and eventually the label and chose to go his own way in order to sing about what he wanted to sing about—Jesus.With songs such as “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” and “Sweet Song of Salvation,” he basically declined the invitation to join the rock elite. But for what it’s worth, in my household, he was called such things

as “Father Larry” and “LaNo the Wise.”

These reflect where he sits on my list of musical greats—right up there with Dylan, Heard, and U2.

Nevertheless Larry Norman was far from perfect, as two failed marriages, a history of relational fallouts, and a bipolar condition can attest. There was a day when someone’s brokenness hindered me from receiving anything from that person, but nowadays I’m suspicious of anyone who comes across as unbroken.

This is not to justify or dismiss the demons with which Norman obviously wrestled, but rather to give thanks to the God whose track record shows that he indeed uses weak and wounded people to accomplish extraordinary things.

Larry Norman was broken, imperfect.

He was a misfit who was at home neither in the church nor in the world: What a mess this world is in / I wonder who

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began it / Don’t ask me / I’m only visiting this planet.

On the grand notoriety scale, not a whole lot of people knew who Larry Norman was, so his passing didn’t mean much to the wider world. But for a small circle of friends and a larger circle of enduring fans, his death signified the end of a magnificent run. More importantly, it beckoned the faithful to remember that life in the Son should reflect authenticity, creativity, and responsibility.

Thanks for everything, Larry. Your visit to this planet has made the world a little less messy.

Al Tizon is assistant professor of holistic ministry at Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa., director of ESA’s Word & Deed Network, and PRISM magazine’s Word, Deed & Spirit columnist.

MUSIC NOTES TODD KOMARNICKI

Peace in a Pod I wish I could sing you this column. To let you in behind my ribcage, to where sound and yearning and the beating of my heart all rhythm out my love for the songs below. Music is definitively personal, but when it becomes communal, the silent “ah” of a shared joy can bond people together for a lifetime.Years ago, during a live performance by Radiohead, the audience became so ecstatic at what we were experiencing together that strangers hugged after many songs. “Did you hear that!?” we said with our gaping, happy mouths, not needing any words at all.

And then in our own silences, in sorrow or wonder, or sheer kitchen-dance euphoria, we will find music that becomes ours so distinctly, that we are taller and deeper and wiser just for the hearing.

Music that we will spend years sharing with new and old friends, awaiting the moment when the song becomes a bridge that not even time can tear down.

So it is in this spirit that I offer you my iPod and earphones, and hope that once heard, these choices will become a part of your story, too.

“Chet Baker’s Unsung Swan Song”

by David Wilcox (Home Again: A&M Records, 1991) is not only a haunted and riveting portrait of the artist’s lifelong battle with heroin addiction. It is also a

tremulous reminder that we are all fragile, leaning on the windowsill of life, wanting to fly with the songbirds outside on the branch, not knowing if we’ll find a safe place to land.This song has taught me compassion as if I’d witnessed a stranger save a life. It is that tender. It is that true.

Another song that makes me cry, but this one just out of pure, dumb happiness, is “Killing the Blues” as performed by Allison Krause and Robert Plant on their delicious new recording of duets, Raising Sand (Rounder, 2007). The combination of Plant’s unexpected restraint and Kraus’ purity of tone allows this song about loss and new beginnings to tiptoe back and forth between those two realities.

And then, as it glimmers to a finish, you

realize that the song has done for the listener exactly what the title promised.

Johnny Cash spent a lifetime preparing his voice for his final recordings. In his last several CDs, all exquisitely produced by Rick Rubin, Cash’s ravaged lungs and weary soul gave a gasping beauty to his work that only survival could have inspired. On When the Man Comes Around (American Recordings, 2002), his cover of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” takes all the levity out of romance and replaces it with a depth of desire for his wife that is the definition of “to cherish.” This had long been a favorite song of my father’s, as it was the song he associated with first falling in love with my mother 50 years ago.

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sing-along with Johnny during a recent drive in the car, the lyrics finally made sense. Love, like great music, changes you the moment it is first encountered.

The earth stops for a second—just to let you catch your breath.

Six years ago, I was living in Amsterdam—far away from my life and where I’d hoped it would go. Josh Rouse’s “The Whole Night Through” (Under Cold Blue Stars: Slow River Records, 2002), with its simple lyric definition of grace—“What we need right now, is somewhere to just lay down and dream the whole night through”— was both salve and solace while I waited for the next chapter of my life to begin.

Now when I listen to it, it’s not tears that arrive, but gratitude. Sometimes we need to stop and learn to dream again, before we have the strength and vision to dance into our days.

Leonard Cohen talk-sings. Never quite a lamentation, never just a melody with words. He would have been the Bob Dylan of the Old Testament if he’d

he treasured. All the narrator has in the end is his story. His song. And only in the sharing of it will he be able to live on.

The final song that I need you to hear is The Blue Nile’s “Easter Parade” (AWalk Across the Rooftops:A&M Records, 1993, originally released 1984). Everyone who listens will have a different guess as to what is happening. When I hear it, I see Jesus walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I’m watching from a skyscraper and the air is filled with hope been born at the right time. Never do I find his wounds and desire for forgiveness more potent than in “Famous Blue Raincoat” (Songs of Love and Hate: Sony, 1995, originally released 1971). A story of barren friendship and the cost of loyalty, “Raincoat” invites us into a deeply private pain, and then tells us only the details, and little of the truth.

What remains is a man without the things

and confetti, possibility and redemption.

And then there is no air at all.The streets are empty. My throat is dry from daring to reach for Paul Buchanan’s vocal high wire. I can’t move.The song can’t move.

Yet it does. It leans forward just enough to catch the wind again. The parade will continue. The sun chooses the sky.

And I press play again. I need to go find myself, this time amidst the crowd.

Checking every face for the familiar.

Feeling the pavement so solid beneath my feet that I am certain it’s directing my path. Music calls us all forward. “The wild is calling,” Buchanan sings. “This time I follow.”

I hope you follow, too.

Todd Komarnicki is a director, screenwriter, film producer, novelist, and euphoric kitchendancer. His third novel, War, will be released by Arcade Publishing (arcadepub.com) in July.

TOWARD A BIBLICAL AGENDA March 28-30, 2008 at Palmer Seminary of Eastern University (Philadelphia)

How should I vote in 2008? What issues are most important to God? What does the Bible say about abortion, gay marriage, and immigration? What about foreign policy, including the conflict in Iraq? And overcoming poverty in the U.S. and around the world? Keynote addresses and workshops at this timely and important conference will explore these and other questions to help Christians apply biblical values in the sociopolitical realm, including the voting booth. It’s a conference that all who strive to be faithful to the gospel in the public square should not miss. For more information or to register, call

484-384-2990 or visit www.esa-online.org.

sider

the

Speakers include those pictured and more . . .

PRISM Sponsored by Palmer Seminary’s Sider Center on Ministry 2008 and Public Policy and Evangelicals for Social Action.

47

center on mi n i s try an d

pu blic polic y

MUSIC NOTES

Ecclesiastes Rocks

BY J.D. BUHL

“The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt.”

Bono There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, an error that lies heavy upon humankind—the attribution of popular music to Satan, as in the old saw, “Rock and roll is the Devil’s music.”

Satan no more invented rock and roll than he invented beer and football (a far more dangerous combination where I come from). Instead, as with so many of the pursuits with which we pass the days of our lives, the sinfulness found in rock music is our own. Rock and roll is just one more vanity and “a chasing after wind.”

Ecclesiastes makes many Christians uncomfortable; its pessimistic, philosophical tone doesn’t seem to jive with the rest of the biblical canon. The author, known only as “the Teacher,” presents God’s people at rock bottom. He does not hedge about our fate in those preSavior days: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.”

Nothing really matters, anyone can see Nothing really matters to me.

Anyway the wind blows...

Queen, “Bohemian Rhapsody” A keen if disillusioned observer of human futility, the Teacher attributes nothing to Satan; there is no scapegoat

here, only our tendency to give ourselves over to foolishness. He expects nothing more of us than this and commends us all to self-indulgence, “for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves.” When called demonic, rock musicians often claim to be nothing more than facilitators of such enjoyment, the reward for “all the toil with which one toils ... the few days of the life God gives us.”

Try to set the night on fire, yeah.

The time to hesitate is through.

No time to wallow in the mire, Try now we can only lose and our love become a funeral pyre.

The Doors, “Light My Fire” The Teacher’s starting point is that “God made human beings straightforward, but they have devised many schemes.” Whatever his eyes desired, he acquired; he got “singers, both men and women, and delights of the flesh”—just as we give ourselves over to sex, drugs, and the romantic escapism of rock and roll to “make a test of pleasure.”

Twenty, twenty, twenty-four hours to go, I wanna be sedated.

Nothing to do, nowhere to go, I wanna be sedated.

The Ramones, “I Wanna Be Sedated” He turned then to wisdom. “The wise have eyes in their head, but fools walk in darkness,” he says—but the same fate befalls each. Ecclesiastes asks what we accept as wisdom and what we consider knowledge. Much later Paul would write that both are perfected only in Christ, but here we’re on our own.

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell? Blue skies from pain?

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?

A smile from a veil?

Do you think you can tell?

Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here” Rock and roll, like all pop culture, is in the dream business, and “dreams come with many cares, and a fool’s voice with many words.” The Teacher warns, however, “If the snake bites before it is charmed, there is no advantage in a charmer.” He saw that all skill derives from one person’s envy of another and that “fools fold their hands and consume their own flesh.” From Frankie Lymon to Brad Delp, we’ve watched rock’s snake charmers consume their own flesh and “die before [their] time.”

The end of laughter and soft lies, The end of nights we tried to die.

This is the end.

The Doors, “The End” The Teacher anticipated the Kinks’ “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” by saying it is not from wisdom to ask “Why were the former days better than these?” Against the complaint that rock contains too few happy songs, the Teacher replies, “Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad.”

He has seen righteous people die in their righteousness and the wicked flourish in their evildoing; time and chance affect everyone. “Do not be too righteous,” then, “and do not act too wise”; neither “be too wicked, and do not be a fool...It is good that you should take hold of the one, without letting go of the other; for the one who fears God shall succeed with both.”The best of rock lives this balance. It knows well that “the hearts of all are full of evil.”

I know I’ve dreamed you a sin and a lie.

I have my freedom but I don’t have much time.

Faith has been broken, tears must be cried.

Let’s do some living after we die.

The Rolling Stones, “Wild Horses”

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Two of Ecclesiastes’ central messages are precisely those of rock and roll. The first: “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.

For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help.”

The Teacher extends this essential rockand-roll concern: “Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone?” Oh, those lonely nights.

Two hearts are better than one.

Two hearts, girl, get the job done.

Bruce Springsteen, “Two Hearts” Second, the proverbial evil-woman problem: “I found more bitter than death,” the Teacher reports, “the woman who is a trap, whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are fetters.”

I been tricked, trapped, by a tricky trapper She’s got me tied down, I can’t get free She’s got her hooks, got her hooks in me.

The Chairmen of the Board, “Tricked and Trapped”

The Teacher concludes, “One who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her.” Without this cautionary truth we might have no popular music at all. The boundless knowledge of rock, blues, and soul in this area is often the very aid one needs to escape such snares, thereby pleasing God. Who’d’ve thought?

J.D. Buhl, who teaches English and literature at Queen of All Saints School in Concord, Calif., has been a rock-and-roll and Ecclesiastes fan for as long as he can remember.

TOWARD A BIBLICAL AGENDA March 28-30, 2008 at Palmer Seminary of Eastern University (Philadelphia)

How should I vote in 2008? What issues are most important to God? What does the Bible say about abortion, gay marriage, and immigration? What about foreign policy, including the conflict in Iraq? And overcoming poverty in the U.S. and around the world?

Keynote addresses and workshops at this timely and important conference will explore these and other questions to help Christians apply biblical values in the socio-political realm, including the voting booth. It’s a conference that all who strive to be faithful to the gospel in the public square should not miss.

For more information or to register, call

or visit www.esa-online.org.

800-220-3287

sider

the

Speakers include those pictured and more . . .

Sponsored by Palmer Seminary’s Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy and Evangelicals for Social Action.

center on m i n i s try an d

pu blic polic y

PRISM 2008

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MUSIC NOTES

I’m Shouting!

BY AL TIZON

Let’s take a pop quiz: • Who invented rock and roll?

• Who first let gloriously loose on an electric guitar?

• Who laid down the tracks for the coming of the soul train?

• Who catalyzed the cross-over phenomenon, ignoring the lines that separated men from women, black from white, church from nightclub, gospel from pop?

Feats of this sort are usually attributed to male pop icons like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, James Brown, Larry Norman, and André Crouch. But all of these must pay a tithe to a black, female, Pentecostal virtuoso named Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the high priestess of pop according to the order of Melchizedek.

I may be overstating the case, but someone’s got to try to tip the scales of justice. Tharpe’s unmarked grave in a cemetery in Philadelphia tragically symbolizes the way history has relegated her to the ash heap of musical obscurity. So no amount of credit toward the Sister is too much, no affirming statement an overstatement.

So claims Gayle F.Wald, professor of English at George Washington University and author of Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Beacon, 2007).

“Directly or indirectly,” she writes, “[Tharpe’s] spirit had infused everything from the rock and roll of Chuck Berry to the rockabilly sounds of Elvis to the groovy, tripped out summer of Woodstock . . . .” This, while maintaining lyrical fidelity to her faith.“Believing her talents to be divinely inspired,”

Wald asserts,“she saw herself doing God’s work as a popular musician.”

I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable of popular music, but I never heard of Rosetta Tharpe until someone shoved a CD into my hand a few years ago titled—what else?—Shout, Sister, Shout! A Tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe (M.C. Records, 2003). “Here, you gotta listen to this.”

Now given the long list of “mustlisten CDs” that friends have passionately recommended through the years (as I have done unto them), I wouldn’t have given this one the time of day if it hadn’t been for the fact that those paying tribute were perennial favorites. The roster included the Holmes Brothers, Joan Osborne, Bonnie Raitt, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Odetta, Michelle Shocked, and Victoria Williams. I figured this eclectic cast of creative, thoughtful musicians knew something I didn’t know.

So I gave the CD a listen. And I kept listening … and listening … and listening.

Three years later, it still gets extended play on my five-rotation CD player.

“That’s All,” “Music in the Air,” “Up Above My Head,” “Didn’t It Rain,” and other catchy simple tunes are now and forever a part of my permanent mental iPod. Her songs make you laugh, cry, tap your feet, and play air guitar. Some of them make you worship. Some of them make you do all of the above at the same time.

But did I get hooked because my favorite bands were singing the songs?

This nagged at me until about a year ago when I set out to find some of Tharpe’s own work. A friend lent me his copy of Tharpe’s Gospel Train (Mercury Records, 1956) album, and then I found a few CD reissues of her earlier recordings on Document Records. To tell the truth, I was disappointed. Although I enjoyed listening to the original versions of the covers I had grown accustomed to on Tribute, they felt hollow, as if the 1940s equipment they were recorded on could PRISM 2007

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not capture Tharpe’s greatness, thus rendering anemic the power of both her voice and instrument.

This was confirmed when I discovered a video trailer on the CD (after having it for several months, I embarrassingly admit). It is Rosetta Tharpe live, singing “Down by the Riverside” in what seems like a church setting; the well-dressed choir behind her is a dead giveaway.You know, however, that this is no ordinary church service when she starts things off with an electric blues riff. The control of her deep but decidedly feminine voice and her command of the audience are the first things to strike you. (Actually, the fact that she has a Gibson SG strapped around her neck strikes you even before the music begins.) But then in the middle of the song, she goes instrumental on everybody. The guitar suddenly looks like a part of her being, as if she had been born with it. It moves and sings at her command, as her fingers dance up and down the neck. I swear I saw smoke rising from the strings when I first beheld the clip. I also saw all of the lead guitar greats as youngsters sitting at her feet.

Indeed, says Wald, “Whenever a rock musician lets loose a glorious guitar solo, we’re in the living presence of [the] strong and mean vibrations of Rosetta Tharpe ....” The video clip is worth the price of the CD. Do yourself a favor: Skip amateur hour on YouTube, find Sister Rosetta on it, sit back, and let the Spirit wreak holy havoc on your soul.

Then, buy the CD so you can own at least one of the video clips for anytime encores.

The Sister’s electric guitar-based spiritual music is legendary—or should be.

It gave birth to something.“Even though I was just a child,” recalls singer Etta James, “I knew immediately that this woman was playing a different kind of music. It was gospel, but the way she put it across, in her bluesy-jazzy style, was a real ‘revelation.’” Yes, a revelation—for, hallelujah, through this woman, the elec-

tric church was born! So was rock and roll. So was contemporary R&B. So was every conceivable musical cross-over.

But Tharpe’s life and work influenced some much deeper issues than music.

To those who pitted faith against popular culture and vice versa, she sang of God’s presence whether she was performing for church folks or for social elites at New York’s Apollo Theatre. To those who wanted to keep women “in their place,” she entered into a man’s world wielding a man’s instrument and basically showed them up. To those who wanted to keep the line solidly drawn between blacks and whites, she freely went back and forth from one side of the line to the other, as she performed with black and white performers for black and white crowds. She made a holy mess of society’s gender and racial boundaries.

I know, I know; she was just a musician. But given who she was and what she dared to do, she was also a kind of accidental prophet, in the best sense of the word, challenging both religious misperceptions and social injustice. Sister Rosetta Tharpe deserves our attention for all of these reasons, and the CD/ book tandem certainly helps to make her fascinating life accessible to the public.

And now if someone would just make the movie …

Al Tizon is assistant professor of holistic ministry at Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa., and director of ESA’s Word & Deed Network (formerly Network 9:35).When he is not teaching or directing, you might find him pining for used records at the local music store or alphabetizing his CD collection.

Insure Justice continued from page 21. at the time of the trial and knows nothing about them or their case? Why do poor people sit in jail for weeks or months rather than go home with a radio ankle bracelet to await trial (as the wealthier accused do)? What about those who spend a week or two in jail because they cannot pay a $100 fine?

People say, “What can we do? This is not our responsibility as Christians.

We cannot fix everything.” Fortunately, B.T. Roberts did not stand silently by as he looked at injustice. Because of him and others like him, things did change.

The Bible calls us not only to have personal righteousness but also to help develop a righteous, just community.

Although God will ultimately judge

injustice and establish total justice, he calls on his followers to work for righteousness and justice today. In Isaiah 58, he says that the kind of fasting he chooses is that which will loose the chains of injustice and set the oppressed free.

“Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear” (v.8).

Although we cannot rid the world of injustice, we can attempt to establish justice within our sphere of influence.

We live in a nation where we vote and give input to the legislators. We should speak out, not just on issues of personal morality but also on issues of economic morality and justice. Jesus identified with the poor and calls on the church to do PRISM 2007

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the same.

In the biblical story, David had only five small stones, yet he defeated the giant, Goliath. Jesus asks each of us to use the small power and opportunities God has placed before us. Our political strength may not be great, but when we do what we can, God will help our efforts hit the mark. ■ Norm Wetterau is a family physician in New York who actively promotes justice through the church and organized medicine. A version of this article first appeared in Light & Life magazine, a publication of the Free Methodist Church.

MUSIC NOTES

Redeeming Dylan

BY J.D. BUHL

When a haggard and horny Bob Dylan slipped into Victoria’s Secret commercials a few years ago, a vituperative cry went up until some clearheaded journalist reminded us that when asked in 1965, “If you were going to sell out to a commercial interest, which one would you choose?” Dylan answered, “Ladies garments.”

A cry of greater intensity greeted Dylan’s conversion to Christianity in the late ’70s. There was a deep sense of betrayal, since Dylan has always been cast as emblematic of ’60s counterculture values and revolutionary politics, and the emerging evangelical subculture he identified with had not been invited to the party. Biographers have urged us to see this musical and spiritual direction in the context of his whole career, citing Dylan’s moral fortitude and earlier use of biblical imagery. In Dylan Redeemed (Continuum, 2006), the latest book on Dylan’s “Christian period” (1979-1983), Wabash College professor Stephen H. Webb looks to the past to say Dylan “became the conscience of his generation by contradicting it.”

Webb is writing in the post-Chronicles era (Dylan’s 2004 autobiography changed everything) and wrings from 40-plus years of scholarship on the artist a new approach, proposing that Dylan’s Christian period “looks unnatural only to those who let a leftist political perspective dominate their interpretations of his work.” Webb sees Dylan as more of a religious artist than a political one throughout his career and wishes to extricate him from the context of ’60s cultural radicalism that he believes has led to self-

serving misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Dylan’s work by those who feel they have Bob on their side.

A few such Dylanologists he addresses directly, finding in their work a refusal to let the artist be himself. “Try as [they] might,” he concludes, “[they] never manage to separate Dylan’s music from [their] own political passion.” Webb also presents an alternative to the theory that the artist’s turn to Jesus was the result of disillusionment with the idealized woman and his commercial/critical low at the time.

Such positions bring him up against some of the best writers in rock journalism, and Stephen Webb is no rock ‘n’ roller. This is a man who credits “Bill Harley”—instead of Haley (one of many annoying mistakes in the book)—as an inventor of rock ‘n’ roll, blows a sly reference to Steely Dan by spelling Rikki incorrectly, and admits to singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at church camp with no knowledge of its origin. But the fact that he accepted the song as an old Christian hymn fuels his contention that Dylan’s conversion should not have come as any surprise. Dylan and gospel

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music—and the gospel itself—were fellow travelers on a long artistic journey that ranged from dabbling to full identification.

With Dylan Redeemed, the artist’s work is finally studied from a specifically Christian, even premillennialist perspective. This allows Webb to make a better case for Dylan’s singularity than readers are used to. Webb and other excited young evangelicals, with “one foot in popular culture [and] one remaining in our religious ghetto,” heard Dylan’s trilogy of explicitly Christian albums (Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love) before investigating his earlier recordings. So while the rest of the world reeled, Webb was—and is—in a unique position to chronicle the growth of a “musical theologian”—an essentially conservative one at that.

It is not Webb’s intention to install Dylan alongside right-wing icons like Barry Goldwater (Dylan’s favorite politician); he wishes to show that Dylan “embodied the conservative spirit of honoring the past over the present” and can be seen as a conservative “because he was a radical in his critique of the modern world.” By taking on accepted understandings of Dylan and his place in history, Webb reveals how limiting labels like “Voice of a Generation” can be: Dylan was certainly a voice (and Webb’s writing on the physical reality of that voice is fascinating), but he can be heard as speaking to a particular generation, not for it.

He argues well that Dylan’s alliance with progressive politics was a delusion of the left. His view that the predominantly Christian albums are “the key that unlocks both the musical and the thematic unity of [Dylan’s] work as a whole” is refreshing. Not all attempts at mining early material for Christian content are as convincing as his theological analysis of “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” from 1963. Dylan has said that he’d always

known about God and was familiar with the Bible “as literature.” “I was never really instructed in it in a way that was meaningful to me,” he explained. “... I wasn’t conscious of Jesus.”

Once he became conscious of Jesus, the change that threw his audience was existential. Paul Williams, who published the first book on Dylan’s conversion in 1980, wrote, “‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is the ‘I am’ that the wounded lover (of a person, of life) shouts to the other and to the world, the ultimate declaration of existence, passionate rediscovery, and proclamation of selfness.”

Dylan was now shouting a different “I am,” the primordial “I AM” that necessitates a duality. Declarations of existence, rediscovery, and selfness are not made alone, but in unison with Christ. The

offense taken by Dylan’s audience came with his proclamation that it is no longer all about me, but about Thee.

Leaving them fuming like spurned lovers, Dylan has eluded every club that would have him as member: folk music purists, electric rock ‘n’ rollers, country fans, rock ‘n’ rollers again, the pluralist spiritual-not-religious, and finally Webb’s evangelical culture and “Christian rock.”

Leaving at the altar one of his most magnificent songs, the hymn-like “Every Grain of Sand,” Dylan returned to his previous lyrical concern—women.

In a 1987 interview with Sam Shepard, Dylan exclaims, “Women are the only hope.” He once preached from stages that Jesus was the only hope, and likely both statements remain true for him. Regardless of such paradoxes, Dylan

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has always pointed beyond himself.

“The basic thing,” Dylan feels, “is to get in touch with Christ yourself. He will lead you. Any preacher who is a real preacher will tell you that: ‘Don’t follow me, follow Christ.’”

That is one element of Dylan’s career that is consistent. He must find all the fuss about his “born-again period” amusing, and would remind us of his words from 1969: “I don’t want anybody to be hung up ... especially over me, or anything I do. That’s not the point at all.”

Spoken like a real preacher.

J.D. Buhl teaches English and literature at Queen of All Saints School in Concord, Calif. His first published work on Bob Dylan’s career was a review of the album Dylan in 1974.

MUSIC NOTES

Derek Webb’s Prophetic Voice

BY JOSH MILLER

The musical path of American singersongwriter Derek Webb has been a long and winding one. It began in 1993 with the popular Christian folk-rock group, Caedmon’s Call, whose lyrics often meditated on the Reformed theology of their Presbyterian background. In the midst of these heavily theological songs,Webb operated as what he has jokingly referred to as a “professional biographer,” penning songs about his struggles to understand two things: women and God. After 10 years with Caedmon’s,Webb left the band to pursue his solo career and immediately stirred up controversy.

His first album, She Must and Shall Go Free (2003), attempted to present the message of the gospel through graphic —yet biblical—language, repeatedly referring to the church as a “whore” who sells herself to various material things of this world and can only be delivered from this whoredom by the grace of God found in Jesus Christ. His use of this provocative metaphor prompted some Christian stores to refuse to carry his album.

His next record, I See Things Upside Down (2004), began to show signs of the prophetic tone that would highlight his third album, Mockingbird (2005). Amidst overtly theological songs, Webb’s second album included harsh critiques of American class divides and racial segregation (“I Repent”), as well as the shallow, judgmental nature of certain branches of Christian subculture (“T-Shirts [What We Should Be Known For]”).

Mockingbird carried on in this critical vein, questioning the ethics of warfare (“My

Enemies Are Men Like Me”), blind patriotism (“A King & a Kingdom”), and legalism within the church (“A New Law”).

His latest album, The Ringing Bell (released in May), grapples with many of the same issues Mockingbird touches on, from what it means to be peacemakers to corruption in American politics.

I recently caught up with Webb and got a chance to sit down and discuss his latest work.

J. Miller: As your solo career has progressed, your music has become more socially and politically charged. What led to this change in direction?

D. Webb: Whatever I’m reading or thinking about has always gone into whatever kind of art I’m making. Back when I was in Caedmon’s, I thought a lot, apparently, about women, and so I wrote a lot of songs about women. But as I’m getting a little older and as the events of the day are unraveling in front of me, I’ve started to look more closely at what’s happening in and to the world where we live. I’ve started to look at environmental issues and realize that this is God’s creation, and even though it’s broken, we still have the responsibility to take care of it. Christians should be the people at the front of the environmental movement, because God made all things for us to enjoy, for us to participate in; and instead we’re just abusing a lot of it.

Also, for some years, we’ve been in a pretty serious time of war, which stirs you to think about certain things you might not have thought about in times of peace. But at the same time, Jesus’ primary commands were to love God and to love our neighbors—our neighbors also including our enemies. The fruit of being a person who follows after Jesus is that we be people who put clothes on the naked, who feed the hungry, who visit those in prison. When there aren’t such huge moral and ethical

dilemmas going on right in front of us on television every day, it’s easy to start making Christianity about peripheral moral issues. But when the world unravels the way it is currently, it can be a wake-up call, because we have to go back and look at what Jesus said about who we are and what we’re supposed to be doing; and suddenly we realize that the issues are much bigger than we typically make them out to be.

JM: But some of the ways you interpret “what Jesus says” in your music might not go down well with a lot of your Christian audience, especially the Christian right. How do you see yourself connecting to a politically conservative audience?

DW: I don’t really know what people think of the music I make. I don’t want to sound cold about this, but I don’t really feel it’s my job to connect with Christian music fans. When I prioritize my intention about what it is that I’m doing, I’m trying to make really good and really honest art...if I can.

And if people don’t like it, that could be as much evidence that I’m doing the right thing as that I’m doing the wrong thing.

I also think that artists, especially artists who are followers of Jesus, have a real responsibility to take up a certain prophetic voice. It’s the responsibility of the follower of Jesus who’s an artist to be a radical truth-teller, regardless of what kind of art they’re making. I would love to see more so-called “Christian artists” take more seriously their role in building the kingdom. And it would have a lot more to do with telling the truth to people than with selling a lot of records.

JM: How has this radical truth telling in your music affected your own lifestyle?

You sing a lot about fighting against racial segregation and class divisions, about living simply and sacrificially— how have you been able to do these things in your personal life?

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DW: It’s definitely a challenge. But in all cases, the lifestyle change has come before or during the song. A few years ago, my wife and I moved from the suburbs to the city, which has brought us a whole separate set of complications than what we had living outside the city; and I was writing about that as it was happening.

JM: Your new album, The Ringing Bell, marks a change in your sound, going from the acoustic-folk sound of Mockingbird to harder, dirtier rock. What led to the change?

DW: It was pretty organic.When the new songs started to come, they were built more around guitar riffs than gui-

tar progressions, so that lends itself easier to an electric guitar arrangement. Also, knowing that I was going to be getting further into the nuances of some of the issues that were on Mockingbird—the idea of peace and living peaceably with people—I tried to strike a better balance of marrying really heavy content with catchier melodies and more winsome music. If there were any lessons that I took from the Mockingbird experience, it was to try to balance that a little better.

And I feel like we did that on the new record. I think that makes the new record capable of a lot more. The new record has moments that are potentially much heavier than what Mockingbird had, but you won’t notice it.

JM: In one of your new songs, “I Wanna Marry You All over Again,” there’s a line that goes, “I wanna read the Bible and I wanna make out.” Does that progression really work? ’Cause I’ve been looking to score a good Christian girl, and I’m thinking some Song of Songs, some sparkling grape juice, some votive candles...Your thoughts?

DW: Yeah. Maybe so. I mean, you got to be careful with Song of Songs.

There’s some pretty graphic stuff in there...

Josh Miller is a creative/freelance writer and a member of Emmanuel Mennonite Church in Gainesville, Fla.

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MUSIC NOTES

Our “Other Elvis” James Brown 1933-2006 J.D. BUHL

The spread on page seven of the December 26, 2006, San Francisco Chronicle was no doubt similar to many other newspapers’ the day after James Brown died: a lengthy appreciation of the “Godfather of Soul” by a staff writer, a couple of dramatic file photos of “the hardest working man in show business” hard at work, and a sidebar description of 15 of his greatest hits between 1956 and 1988. But the Chronicle made space in the right-hand corner for an Associated Press piece with the headline “Widow says she was locked out.”

Brown’s fourth wife,Tomi Rae Hynie, returned from a retreat to find her husband dead and her access denied to the Beech Island, S.C., home they shared with their 5-year-old son, James Jr. Security guards informed her at the padlocked gate that “Brown’s lawyer, Buddy Dallas, and accountant, David Cannon, said she was not allowed inside,” the piece reports. Cannon, it said, “would not comment,” and phone messages left for Dallas “were not immediately returned.”

Such a shameful juxtaposition of grief and controversy upon Brown’s death is a mirror reflection of the man’s life. An aura of sadness has always surrounded Brown and his music—the celebratory and the sorrowful alike— that gave it a depth and humanity beyond the seriousness of his guttural howls and the sweaty physicality of his particular take on American music. Something tragic dogged James Brown all his career,

so that the fun, freedom, and commitment of his music have always been matched by a parallel reality that was not so fun, not so free, and lacking in selfcontrol. From the scandalous to the merely shady, from the ill-advised to the illegal, there was forever a flip side to James’ latest dance, and it wasn’t nearly so pretty.

This is not to dwell on his early days.

Soul Brother #1 was consistently outspoken on his rise above adversity: abandoned by his mother, raised in a brothel, dancing for pennies on Georgia street corners, imprisoned at 16 (a misstep that led to his meeting Bobby Byrd, a gospel-singing kid who got him into his group and remained Brown’s foil for 50 years). He strenuously urged young people to stay in school, steer clear of the law, and make something of themselves. The man founded scholarship funds, programs, businesses (does anyone remember “Shine Me!”?), and other forms of philanthropy throughout his life. Yet instead of this legacy, it is the bankruptcy, bribery, drug arrests, firearms, violence, spousal abuse, and attempted murder rap that are most remembered, casting a dark shadow over the most joyous, exhilarating music popular culture has ever known.

I’ve had James Brown records for nearly as long as I’ve had records, and that’s a long time. But I remember feeling myself apart from the crowd when our Main Man was sentenced to prison for six years for attempted murder in 1988.“Free James Brown!” cried his fans, but all I could say was “Why?” Brown was no political prisoner, no questionably accused innocent like Mumia or Leonard Peltier, no victim—certainly no victim. If JB was a victim of anything, it was his own image and the expectations of his audience, expectations Brown invited and knocked himself out to meet, if not exceed.

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do. Brown was a great entertainer, our other Elvis. But he was also a wife-beater and a PCP freak. He needed the time off. And the implication that America’s pop icons should be treated any differently than the rest of its poor souls was repugnant to me. Such a self-aggrandizing double standard, I thought, would offend even a supreme self-aggrandizer like Mr. Dynamite; and it was anti-gospel enough that Bible-reading JB himself even turned away from it.

Brown asked for no special treatment, acknowledging his star status only to make radio and television spots—after being transferred to a reintegration center 15 months into his sentence— warning against alcohol and drug abuse.

When he was released early, in February 1991, reports said “he made a goodfaith effort to rebuild his life.” He made a few more good records, too.

While I now tell my junior high students that “pleasure is not the measure”—not the highest good—the pure pleasure of James Brown records, themselves odes to pleasure, is a force to be reckoned with. The man was a dynamo, and the pleading love songs and crying dance tracks he laid down for over 50 years tear a huge hole in our collective skin, affording anyone with the guts to look with a deep, gory gaze into the human condition. His music also took rhythm and blues into the realms of jazz, laying out its pleasure in the workings of the band, command of the beat, and the creation of an involved (sometimes album side-long) environment wherein wonder and wonderwork meet.

Four weeks before he died, JB made his usual appearance at the annual James Brown Turkey Giveaway in Augusta, Ga. Smiling and shaking hands, he told the Toronto Sun,“I like to be paid because I put my money back in young people and poor people. I’m like a Robin Hood, and I thank God, ’cause that’s a good feeling when you’re doing things for the poor.”

Pleasure is not the measure, even for James Brown, and the pall is lifted by acts of kindness. While he could dance better than 99 percent of the human race, he suffered from the same brokenness as the rest of us. He also did more than many in his position to alleviate that suffering for others. Like Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, and other performers we feel we know by the time they die, James Brown was human— seriously, physically, quite existentially a particular human being, with his own particularly human traits and trappings —not the superhero we wished him to

be. When I was my students’ age, I thought it was all about the footwork, the sharp suits, and precision bandleading. But because this was the man who gave us “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “Don’t Be a Dropout,” and “Money Won’t Change You,” I wanted more. And my scorn came down as hard as one of his grooves when he disappointed me.

Superheroes these men were not, but Robin Hood—now there’s a comparison Brown can make convincingly —with the Good Book in hand, giving Thanksgiving dinners to those who

Reel Life continued from page 14.

otherwise would go without. As words of thanks and praise follow the man offstage, my quelled arrogance can sit quietly alongside his own, as I offer my thanks that Brown leaves us not only with the timeless “I Feel Good (I Got You)” but also with the ever-timely “that’s a good feeling when you’re doing things for the poor.”

J.D. Buhl writes about music for Valparaiso University’s Cresset magazine. He teaches English and literature at Queen of All Saints School in Concord, Calif.

Mastermedia International, Media Fellowship International, Hollywood Connect, Christian Filmmaker Network, Christian Actors Network Forum, HollywoodTransformation, Christian Screenwriters Forum, Women in Christian Media, and Inter-Mission.

How the presence of committed Christians in the industry will impact film in the long run remains to be seen, but as long as movies—regardless of who makes them—ask meaningful and significant questions about the nature of life, God, and our relationships with one another, they will provide Christians on both sides of the movie experience with unique opportunities to grow their faith and to share it with others.

The challenge is for Christians to focus on their calling as ambassadors for Christ, a journey that inevitably seasons the culture—in all we do, say, watch, create—simply because God has placed eternity in our hearts.

In the end, says Komarnicki,“love and light are much more infectious than darkness. No one has ever enjoyed their first cigarette. It’s like that with darkness—one has to delve into it again and again and become inured to its dissatisfactions to start believing the lie.We were made for love and for light and to praise God. If that’s how we were designed, and the purpose for which we were designed, then all truth will ultimately draw us toward that end.” ■

stunning to me.”

The most prominent of the programs available to help aspiring movie moguls who are also Christians is probably the Los Angeles Film Studies Program. Located in Burbank, Calif., the LAFSC is run by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. According to LAFSC’s website, its purpose is to “integrate a Christian worldview with an introductory exploration of the work and workings of mainstream Hollywood entertainment.”

Many Christian colleges now offer majors in film studies, including BIOLA (Bible Institute of Los Angeles), which has been shaking salt into Hollywood for many years now. Summer workshops are available as well. One of these, the Christian Filmmakers Academy, partners with the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and takes its students through a technical boot camp for moviemaking. Film festivals provide another important venue for Christians in film to network and improve their craft; annual festivals are held all over the country, from the Greater Syracuse Film Festival in New York to the Damah Film Festival in Southern California to the Christian WYSIWYG Film Festival in San Francisco. For those who long for a touch of the exotic, the Sabaoth International Film Festival is held each year in Milan, Italy.

For those already involved in filmmaking, supportive organizations and ministries abound. Those communitybuilding institutions include Christian Filmmaker Ministries,

Laura Coulter’s dual passion for justice and research makes her an invaluable regular contributor to PRISM magazine, for which she has written on the issues of Guantanamo Bay detainees, gender equality in the church, the juvenile justice system, water rights, the hazards of the Christian workplace, and the death penalty.

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MUSIC NOTES

Not Crazy Two Ton Boa’s Sherry Fraser M AT T W E E D

Divas don’t belong in rock and roll.

Sherry Fraser of Two Ton Boa seems to have a pretty good handle on this fact.

Though the band is in reality her own personal creative vehicle—she writes/ arranges all the songs top to bottom and plays bass and sings live and in the studio —she manages to balance a solo songwriter’s personal intensity with the charisma of a hard-rock frontwoman.

The first Two Ton Boa EP, released in 1999, generated a remarkably favorable response and expectations of a follow-up.

Yet Two Ton Boa all but disappeared for nearly seven years. Last fall’s Parasiticide was the band’s first proper full-length mashing together of garage-rock roar with singer/songwriter aesthetic and singularity of vision.

A marriage of defiance with raw, cynical individualism, Parasiticide is nonetheless packaged with subtlety and grace. It makes sense—considering that Fraser is classically trained in both voice and multiple instruments—that the aggression intrinsic to a lot of “garage-y” independent rock would be tempered and refined in Two Ton Boa.That aggression takes on an exceedingly more pointed and surgical character than could ever be found in its roots. This music doesn’t bludgeon; it cuts.

The sounds themselves aren’t what you would expect from a garage-rock album either. They’re not way off the map, but a subtle subversion of the traditional roles of all instruments—including the female voice—occurs in Two Ton

Boa’s music. Electric guitar is arguably the element that defines rock, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a prominent one anywhere on Parasiticide. Fraser opts instead for a dual bass guitar approach, with touches of keyboards here and there. The effect is unexpectedly satisfying, because the music ends up being really heavy—think heavy metal without the metal.Vocals float high over the rumble, entirely without competition, more dynamic and piercing by contrast with the guttural roar underneath.

Parasiticide comes across as a not-soscholarly meditation on greed, corruption, and oppression and enslavement by the almighty dollar (most notably in “Cash Machine,” probably the strongest song on the album). An Ecclesiastes-style angst rightly perceives things as grievous, but does not approach them with an analytical or objectively critical mindset.

Rather it displays an emotional attachment that comes from personal experience, intuition, and instinct—the voice of a spirit who longs for something more substantial than material success and the adulation of others. In the same way, songs like “HERarchy” display not a political, principled feminism, but a narrative one.

In no way do Two Ton Boa’s songs trade in conventions.They tell stories.Parasiticide’s poignancy lies it its narratives, and this is what sets it apart from its peers. Let’s hope it’s not another seven years before the next Two Ton Boa (twotonboa.com) opus arrives.

I had the opportunity to interview Sherry Fraser about her perspectives on the intersection of her music with personal and social issues.

Matt Weed: How are women perceived/ treated in the indie music world as opposed to the major-label world? Do you consider yourself as having an “agenda” of any kind?

Sherry Fraser: I can’t say there’s one official “way women are treated in the indie music world.” There’s a lot of PRISM 2007

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diversity in the indie music world, but I do believe subcultures tend to repeat patterns we see in the dominant culture.

Of course there is sexism in both music worlds, mainstream and underground, coming from both genders. At this point I’m in a press blackout mode, which means I don’t read reviews of my own material, and I tend less and less to read reviews on other people’s music, because there is so much awful journalism and irresponsibly written music criticism out there right now that it’s not worth the energy or getting angry about it.

But here’s an interesting tidbit: One of the guys at my label did a random study of a popular indie music website that uses numbered ratings to review artists, and he accidentally discovered, in the process, that the bands with female lead singers got lower ratings across the board.

I wasn’t surprised in the least. I think there’s a lot more room for interesting female artists in the indie scene, perhaps in part because there’s less money invested, and because people are starved for alternatives to dominant brands of music and images of artists themselves. How far a strange female artist can go with her shtick is what’s debatable. Especially if she’s not good looking, or she’s older, overweight, or, if she’s not white, is in a minority group that’s not perceived in an edgy, “fashionably erotic” way by hipster types. But there are women that don’t fit the mold that get pretty big in the indie scene.

If I were to say I had an “agenda,” it would be to generally ignore, as much as possible, any preferential treatment I perceive towards men in the press, or any of the other preferential treatment shoveled out for good-looking people, younger people, whatever... and get on with making music. I spent years being vaguely angry about sexism, and at this point for me, being angry robs energy from what I really want to be doing: writing and becoming a better performer and musician.

absolutely anything in music.The question is whether or not someone makes a “place” for it to be heard by any number of people. Artists decide what they want to put in music, oftentimes based on outside advice and pressures. Then labels decide if they want to record that music and distribute and promote it; other people decide whether or not they want to program it into radio stations they have influence over; and then the people that are listening to those radio stations have a decision to make based on what selections have been presented to them. So there’s a lot of filtering going on.

I’ve always wondered at the categorization that goes on. Christian rock: What makes one song more Christian than another? Does it need to have a lot of references to God and to praising God? I feel like a lot of my songs are just talking about life; they contain values that resonate with and reflect Christian values, but my music would never be categorized as Christian rock, because I make no direct references to God or Jesus. My lyrics are often illustrating very dark circumstanc-

es, situations, or feelings. I am holding up a mirror and saying, “Look at this” with metaphors. I am taking an emotional snapshot of something elusive, in a way that I couldn’t do with just words.

I am looking at things—coldly sometimes—not glossing them over. I feel like I am speaking truths about dangerous things that will fog your vision if you don’t take them out of yourself and shine a light on them.

To me the songs are reminders to myself and others.There are real demons in our culture, and they suck on us constantly, in the dark crevices of our minds; they’re everywhere, so many terrible messages and influences that want to kill life. I feel like my songs help remind me I’m not crazy. I’m being fed craziness every day by the values our culture seems to hold most dear: money, power, and physical beauty.

‘first-timer’ say that they want to come back again and do even more in Africa.

It’s really rewarding to hear that.” over the country and from all avenues of The Rev. Tracy Clark, an associate life. They are housewives, administrative pastor in Richmond, Va., traveled with assistants, college students, healthcare the Joseph Alliance mission team in 2005 providers, educators, retailers, corporate and returned again in 2006. “I thought executives, ministers, and others.Yet most I was coming over here to help my importantly, they are all ‘Josephs.’” brothers and sisters in Africa,” she says, LaRhonda Dean, who serves as proj- “but now I know that I have come over ect coordinator for the Joseph Alliance, here to work with my brothers and sisis a high school English teacher in the ters, and what I thought I had to give Atlanta, Ga., area. She enjoys spending was nothing in comparison to what I part of her summer vacation in Africa, have received.” She adds, “I can now but when asked what aspect of her identify with the African in my African involvement with the Joseph Alliance American.This experience has completed brings her the greatest joy, she responds, something in me that I didn’t even know “The greatest joy comes when I hear a was missing. I found a part of myself here,

and I will never be the same.”

Stevens and the entire Joseph Alliance team extend the invitation to all modern-day Josephs in America. The grand vision is to expand into all of Africa, says Stevens, “facilitating a system of connections and serving as a liaison between needs and volunteers.” She hopes individuals, churches, and organizations will feel the passion and get on board—hear the call and answer—then watch the results as the Joseph Alliance launches mission teams to advance the kingdom of God from shore to shore. ■

MW: How do you conceive of a live show? Is it a place of vulnerability and honesty, or of getting “into character” and performing? What’s your relationship to the audience?

SF: A live show is a one-off chance to connect with a unique group of people in the space of one hour. What am I desperate to get across to them, and to myself? Do I want to inspire us all to live and be more awake and feel? Am I just showcasing an album or am I trying to create more reasons to live? I don’t want to numb people out; I want to express something we aren’t always good at putting into words. Ideally I want to inspire people to live and create their own art, I want to feel connected to life, to people, to give us all hope, wake ourselves up and shake our minds and hearts up a little bit.

MW: How has your upbringing in the church impacted your artistry? Do you think there’s a place for one’s faith in popular music?

SF: Well, I think there’s a place for

Calling All Josephs continued from page 29.

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Matt Weed lives in Philadelphia when not touring with his band, Rosetta. He also runs a recording studio and does photography and filmmaking on the side.

Through her company Perfect Proof (perfectproof.net), Vanessa Burke provides freelance editing and writing services.

MUSIC NOTES

Lived a Little Today

BY J.D. BUHL

A true believer in the rock ‘n’ roll dream for 30 years, singer, songwriter, and guitarist Alejandro Escovedo found himself in the decidedly unglamorous position of vomiting blood just minutes before taking the stage in April 2003, a victim of Hepatitis-C and too many good times.

What might have been solved with a preventative, if uncomfortable, lifestyle change a few years earlier had become a full-blown crisis for this star of the Austin,Tex., music scene. Critically ill, he was rushed to an emergency room. He had no health insurance and little money (with music and popularity, these seemed the least important things one could imagine), but doctors were about to save his life. Recent articles in Paste and No Depression magazines describe how an international community of friends, fans, and musicians raised money for a treatment and convalescence that stretched over three years. And in May 2006 Escovedo returned to the music scene at age 55 with the release of The Boxing Mirror (Back Porch), his most personal and accomplished album.

Built on the foundation of his signature sound—Stones-ish rockers and border ballads floated over two cellos and violin—the album shimmies like a

snake in the desert, leaving mysterious traces of dangerous curves. “Have another drink on me,” Escovedo invites, only to let on that he’s envious of your ability to accept. “Dear Head on the Wall” asks us to “forget what we already know,” and this leads to the album’s most startling lyrical refrain: You see a buck from the sky/trample a wandering doe.

The song is “Notes on Air.” Despite its being the one composition the artist did not have a hand in writing, this stark, mythical image of innocence lost captures his journey from edgy rock ‘n’ roller to committed conceptualist, and then from repentant second-chancer to a newly edgy rock ‘n’ roller. John Cale’s production work throughout the album creates spaces for Escovedo to deliver songs that are more like paintings: the background is huge, bright but sludgy, full of discernable instruments cemented with electric keyboards. These spaces create breathing room wherein singer and listener can pause, reflect, and, taking nothing for granted, face the day. In front of this background, Escovedo gives clear vocal performances of great warmth and frankness, with nothing to distort or pretty up the truth.

Escovedo revisits the beginning of his journey with “Sacramento & Polk,” a reference to the Palo Alto Hotel in San Francisco where “a third-story jump ain’t high enough” to end one’s life.

Those seedy days in the late-’70s punk scene provided the jumping-off place for a real career in music: from the cartoonish Nuns to cow-punk pioneers Rank & File to rock bands the True Believers and Buick MacKane, finally through a series of solo albums that grew in scope, complexity, and sincerity. From his 1992 debut, Gravity, to the theatrical project By the Hand of the Father, Escovedo’s renown only increased.

Then he collapsed. “The veins in my esophagus had burst,” he told No Depression. “I had advanced cirrhosis of

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the liver and a tumor in the abdomen.

They were all bleeding.” The Boxing Mirror picks up the story in Arizona, where he was hospitalized and began his recovery. “I turned my back on me,” he sings, “and I faced the face of who I thought I was.” He’d always been a musician, the “coolest guy in the room,” but what—or who—was he now? His return to music after thinking he’d never touch a guitar again only intensified the search.

Escovedo attributes the emergence of his renewed and re-envisioned self to the faith of his wife, Kim Christoff (whose poetry contributed to several of the album’s lyrics). And The Boxing Mirror presents a portrait of a man who’s almost made it to faith himself. But something is missing. These undeniably powerful words and images do not yet suggest a new destination: This latest leg of his journey, from Arizona to the present, remains a mystery.

The going, however, is easier.

Alejandro’s longtime friend and bandmate, guitarist Jon Dee Graham, said in No Depression,“There’s a peaceful air about him now .... I could see fear, I could see determination, I could see all that stuff, but what I’m seeing instead is calm.”

That calm casts a new light on the age-old couples’ conundrums that rock songwriters have treated since the invention of the 45. In “Died a Little Today” Escovedo states sadly and simply what so many have so complicated: Gonna learn how to give/not to simply get by/or to barely hang on/for the sake of goodbye.

A point of weariness and resolve is reached early in The Boxing Mirror, and is sustained through loudness and lullaby alike until redemption asks to enter in. Facing down death is, after all, not only a human experience.

J.D. Buhl writes about music for Valparaiso University’s Cresset magazine. He teaches English and literature at Queen of All Saints School in Concord, Calif.

MUSIC NOTES

A New Day for Andrew Osenga: The Morning REVIEWED BY JOSH MILLER

After listening to The Morning, one thing about Andrew Osenga is certain: He’s changed.

The Christian singer/songwriter frontman for the late-’90s alt-rock band The Normals, Osenga is currently lead guitarist for Caedmon’s Call. Between these two gigs, Osenga put out a solo album, Photographs, and also managed to release a second solo CD, Postcards and Souvenirs, while on the road with Caedmon’s.

His latest release, The Morning, sounds unlike any of his earlier work. While The Normals’ music relied on bouncy, light, U2-esque guitar riffs, and his solo work consisted primarily of pared-down folk music, The Morning listens like a rock standard.Track after track hinges on facescrunching, lip-biting guitar licks and loud, crashing drums. Osenga’s content has also changed. No longer the soulsearching bachelor crooning, “Someday some girl will find my words beautiful / Someday some son will call me ‘Dad’” (from The Normals’ Coming to Life, “The Best I Can”), Osenga has a wife and child, and is ... happy now. While his earlier works listened like melancholy struggles toward a potentially brighter future, his latest album resounds with hope, proclaiming that “Every sad thing will become untrue” (“White Dove”) and reminding us of “...the promise / That we will not stay the same” (“New Beginning”).

This is not to say that Osenga has become the new spokesperson for the

power of positive thinking; he’s far too honest for that. The Morning maintains the brutally open, confessional lyric style of Osenga’s solo and Normals days, examining the difficulty of having a loving marriage (“Trying to Get This Right”) and of making the right decisions at critical moments (“Following the Blind”), and sums up the process of these struggles with the frank admission,“We know the truth/We know that we never do/ The things that we should do” (“After the Garden”). And, as we’ve come to expect from Osenga, his lyrics are extremely tight rhythmically, especially in his four short, poem-like tracks, “All the Wrong Reasons,”“In Gym Class in High School,” “Farmer’s Wife,” and “Just a Kid.” The end product of all these elements is a different kind of Andrew Osenga album—one that examines the depths of the Christian life with a slightly less angsty, more hopeful lens and serves as a fine addition to the career of one of Christian music’s lesser-known but extremely talented veterans.

(Note: The Morning is currently available only at www.andrewosenga.com.).

Josh Miller is a graduate student in the English department at the University of Florida, and an active member of Emmanuel Mennonite Church in Gainesville.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

(Luke 4:1819) Introducing an interactive, in-depth resource from ESA’s Network 9:35 for churches joining in Jesus’ transformational mission:

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By Heidi Unruh, Phil Olson & Ron Sider Designed to serve either as a standalone resource or as a companion to the book Churches That Make a Difference, this CDROM can help your church assess its readiness for holistic ministry, study your community context, engage the congregation in outreach, and plan the next steps in your church’s ongoing ministry journey.

Becoming a Church That Makes a Difference CD-ROM includes: • Over 100 short readings on basic and advanced facets of holistic ministry • Adaptable guides to steps in the ministry development process • Toolkit with 45 practical, downloadable worksheets to help you inventory, evaluate, equip and mobilize your church’s outreach • Stories about church-based ministry models • Resource list and links to ministry partners Available from ESA for $25, or order together with the book Churches That Make a Difference for $40.

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Call toll-free 800.650.6600 or esa@esaonline.org.

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MUSIC NOTES

iPod Nation B Y M AT T W E E D

We can’t talk about music without some attention to how we listen to it. Increasingly, that’s through headphones attached to music players like the iPod.Unfortunately, a lot of the rhetoric surrounding the rise of the “iPod nation” has to do with fears that kids will damage their hearing by listening to music that’s too loud.

In fact, iPods are no more damaging than any other device that uses headphones. The real problem is the fact that iPods seem to be permanently and symbiotically attached to their owners, which points to a deeper issue:The iPod has become a primary mediator of our daily lives.

What do I mean by “mediator”? A lot of people call this phenomenon the “iPod bubble.” It’s not that the physical device itself somehow alters our consciousness or perceptive abilities; rather, it becomes a lens through which we see our surroundings.To take it further, many contemporary critical theorists (most notably, Jean Baudrillard in his essay “Precession of the Simulacra”) would say that all images and media we consume mediate our reality, so it’s actually possible that we might never have any unmediated, authentic experience of anything. While this is a very postmodern concept, it’s important not to confuse it with outright relativism. The idea here is that while there might be some real, true thing out there in the world, we can’t experience it directly or authentically because the things we consume have too much influence on our perceptions.

This is a little frightening, but I believe the apostle Paul agrees in 1 Corinthians 13:12, when he says, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in

part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” If Paul were to comment on postmodern critical theory, he might say that perhaps the only direct, truly authentic experience we have available to us is the experience of a relationship with God, made complete in heaven.

But we have to live in the tension of a physical world with all its daily necessities. So what does all this theory have to do with Christians, music, and iPods?

The question for us is not whether our daily reality is mediated, but what mediates it. For most of us in the West, popular culture is the main, if not only, mediator of our experience.We experience a constant bombardment of images and sounds on a daily basis, which can be overwhelming if we don’t limit it.What makes the iPod phenomenon unique is the combination of continuous isolated stimulation and the power of choice: With an iPod we invite and facilitate the bombardment.

In a London Times article last year, Andrew Sullivan wrote that the iPod can be seen as a symbol of growing atomization: People can be so selective about the information they receive that they never have to see or hear anything they disagree with.Thus the isolation of always being “plugged in” is not only physical but also ideological. Music is no exception to this; it is power of self-determination that we crave, and we use media to construct our identity. Music is a consumer choice, and in making that choice we are supposedly defining who we are.

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choices. If we exalt self-determination to the level where it determines our identity, we engage in idolatry.We are defined by our status as children of God, not by the music we listen to, the movies we watch, nor any media we consume. Our daily experience may be subjective and always mediated, but if we set the Word as the primary mediator of that experience, we can begin to see with the eyes of Jesus, rather than through the eyes of our culture. This is what the Psalmist spoke of in Psalm 1 when he said that the righteous man “delights in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”When the Word permeates us and mediates experience for us, then we perceive everything around us as Jesus would perceive it.

I’ll come clean here: I own an iPod, and I listen to it frequently. It mediates my walks to and from classes, my rides on the subway and the train. Practically speaking, to stay isolated in its bubble all the time would be to ignore the biblical call to community and the pleasure of the company of other human beings.

But to demonize a tiny metal box as the source of our ills is to oversimplify the realities of an increasingly informationsaturated world. The iPod is just a tool for bringing our musical delights with us, and for a heart which sees everything through the lens of the Word, that tool can be used responsibly.

Matt Weed lives in Philadelphia when not touring with his band, Rosetta. He also runs a recording studio and does photography and filmmaking on the side.

MUSIC NOTES

The Psalters

BY MICHAEL SNARR

It’s dinnertime. I could call the kids and get little or no response, or I could put the Psalters’ Live at Joe’s Java into the CD player and watch the kids rush to the kitchen. I choose the latter. The first to emerge from upstairs is our 8-year-old, Ty. He rushes in and begins a high-speed jig in the middle of the kitchen floor, a comical flurry of motion that suggests a Scottish dancer on a hot frying pan.

Isaiah, 6, isn’t far behind. He circles the kitchen floor, displaying the accentuated head motions of a free-range chicken.

My oldest, Madison, has quietly taken a seat at the table—at 11 a bit too cool to gyrate with her siblings. Three-year-old Elise, the loudest member of the family, runs in demanding, “Most High!” She is referring to track 13, in which “Most High” is shouted amidst high-energy drumming and rhythmic chanting. But we’ll save that song for last.

Instead, we start with the fifth track.

Music expands into every corner of the kitchen, accompanied by stirring quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.The layered sounds climax as King says,“I ain’t gonna study war ....” The music stops abruptly, King pauses, and the kids join him as he passionately concludes, “...no more!”

Welcome to a typical evening at our house—typical up to a point, that is, for tonight, unlike other nights, the Psalters are playing in town.

Musically, I know of no other band with which to compare the Psalters. Many of the songs are tribal at their core, with multiple hand drums punctuating impassioned chants and loud, yearning vocals.

Influenced by the songs of the oppressed, such as gypsy music and black spirituals, the musicians play banjos, violins, flutes,

bells, tambourines, trumpets, cellos, mandolins, and accordions.They weave these sounds into an irresistible tapestry that draws you in as it slowly crescendos to a frenzied pace, stirring the God-desire in the deepest corners of your heart and compelling you to move and praise.

Earlier in the day I invited the band to visit a couple of classes at the college where I teach. They explained their theology and played a couple of songs for an Exploring Christianity class and an Introduction to Bible class. Although Wilmington College was founded by Quakers and maintains its identity as a Quaker college, only a handful of students are Quakers. Most are relatively conservative students from Middle America.

The students’ reaction to this motley outsider band was hard to read.The Psalters sport dreadlocks, tattoos, various piercings, and clothes unlike any you’d see in a store. They talk about what it is like to be a nomadic band that lives in a blackpainted school bus. They talk about how American Christians have become separated from God as our lives have become so comfortable.We don’t need God with all our comforts—or so we think.

“We are the cry of the exodus,” they proclaim. “There is no home for us here.

We are a nomadic tribe of Psalters, walking in the footsteps of ancients past to the far corners of the present, united as one voice against the oppression within and without. One more echo in the eternal song of our First Love, our Hope, our Pillar of Fire.”

Yes, they really do talk like that.

Live at Joe’s Java, the band’s most recent album, features 22 tracks. From the cardboard case (handmade from recycled beer cartons, with a defaced penny for a clasp) to the

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proviso “all songs public domain—no rights reserved,” the CD can best be described as subversive. The tracks alternate songs with readings from Scripture or dead saints such as Mother Theresa, Simone Weil, Abbot Pastor, Jacques Ellul, Dorothy Day, and King.

Contemporary voices also make an appearance. On one track John Piper urges believers to be Christian before they are American:“Shall we be American with a pinch of religious flavoring? Or shall we be Christ’s people with a pinch of American flavoring?”

At the concert tonight the band tells the largely conservative Christian audience that they don’t believe one can pledge allegiance both to God and country.The audience takes it relatively well, partly because the Psalters sincerely invite those who disagree to hang around and talk after the concert, but also because you can’t worship God and be offended at the same time. And you can’t go to a Psalters concert, hear their testimony, experience the infectious passion of their vocals, and not worship. It’s as simple as that.

To learn more and to order the CD, visit www.psalters.com.

Michael Snarr is associate professor of social and political studies at Wilmington College in Wilmington, Ohio.

MUSIC NOTES

Telling the Truth: Pedro the Lion B Y M AT T W E E D

Subversion sells these days, even among Christians. Operating outside of traditional CCM conventions has become pretty trendy among Christian artists, especially in light of the explosion of independent artists and record labels in the secular mainstream (see Tooth & Nail Records for the biggest success story in Christian music right now). Much of the time, however, “independent ideals” are simply a marketing tool, a repackaging of the same product we’ve seen before.

Very few artists are truly willing to “walk the line,” as Johnny Cash put it, to risk their commercial viability, as well as their public holiness quotient, to push the boundaries of what we define as Christian music.

One of these line-walkers is David Bazan, mastermind and singer/songwriter of the “band” Pedro the Lion (Bazan plays all the instruments on the recordings, but assembles a band for touring). Though Bazan would probably shudder at the mere mention of his project in conjunction with CCM, he is in many ways the most important voice in Christian music right now. I say this not because he sells lots of records, or because Pedro the Lion is setting the tone for a new generation of Christian artists; on the contrary, Bazan’s music exists on the fringes where definitions and labels based on lyrical clichés are murky, even irrelevant. Rather, this no-man’s-land is precisely Pedro the Lion’s niche, a place from which deeply personal songs can address both Christian and non-Christian alike.Yet the personal and confessional nature of the music is not a shrine to self, as is the tendency of megalomaniac singer/songwriters. Instead, it

becomes an interactional space. Indeed, at live performances, Bazan will fill the time between songs with a simple “Are there any questions?” and anyone who raises a hand can engage him in dialogue.

Perhaps the most difficult album in the Pedro catalog is 2002’s Control, more or less a concept album about infidelity.

Bazan’s songs are narratives about the tyranny of the mundane and the anguish and alienation of comfortable contemporary life—essentially, sins born of complacent routine. For him, these run the gamut from corporate greed to adultery, and he testifies about them with an urgency and authentic humility that can only come from experience. The forthrightness present throughout Control can be difficult to swallow, but ultimately the dynamic and troubling juxtapositions (“Gideon is in the drawer/Clothes scattered on the floor/...Oh my sweet rapture/ I hear Jesus calling me home”) echo with a hurt that is disturbingly familiar to Christians fighting the daily battle with sin and brokenness.This hurt is just one component in a world of alienation that Bazan explores in excruciating detail, even drawing comparisons between sexual conquest and corporate exploitation: “If it isn’t making dollars, then it isn’t making sense/If you aren’t moving units then you’re not worth the expense/...If

In Bazan’s world, lust and greed have very real, very painful consequences, which cry out for a Savior’s redemption.

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you want to make it, you had best remember this/If it isn’t penetration, then it isn’t worth a kiss.” Eventually, the cycle of sin descends to a place where the narrator cries in despairing irony,“Second best, second best/I can learn to live with this... After all what’s wrong with second best?”

This is not a cavalier portrayal of sin.

In Bazan’s world, lust and greed have very real, very painful consequences, which cry out for a Savior’s redemption.Yet for many listeners, Bazan’s sexually explicit descriptions and pointed use of profanity invalidate his voice and credibility as a Christian artist.That Bazan is not interested in this audience seems clear enough from the outset, but they—not he—are missing out. Bazan has embraced a postmodern vocabulary of personal narrative and confession that most Christian artists wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.

Control is about the absurdity of the mundane and the insidious routine-ness of sin. These are issues that matter.

Full disclosure is uncomfortable, but it is a welcome change in a Christian media culture that revels in hiding sin while projecting images of breezy holiness.

When Sandi Patti had an affair and it became public, there was an almost universal shame that a Christian pop-culture icon had proven faulty: Suddenly her songs of pious praise seemed hollow and empty.

Still, the Christian public is forgiving Continued on page 40.

RON SIDER

tinuing to believe in God is extremely irrational; others consider the question of God’s existence much more open. It would certainly be bad philosophy to argue that contemporary science demands a naturalistic worldview.

Second, and quite apart from current discussion of “intelligent design,” many of our best minds have thought the amazing complexity and order of the world around us points to some intelligent cause. Even the great skeptic, David Hume, wrote that “a purpose, an intention, or design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it” (quoted in C. Stephen Evans, Why Believe?: Reason and Mystery as Pointers to God [Eerdmans, 1996] p. 35).

Third, in a random, materialistic world, it is hard to understand ethics as anything more than arbitrary and subjective. As the atheist Jean Paul Sartre said, “Everything is permissible if God does not exist.” So why not rape, rob, or kill your neighbors if you are stronger and can get away with it? As Russell said, those who have the best poison gas will determine the “ethics” of the future.

In practice, to be sure, many ethicists do develop ethical systems and argue that right and wrong are more than subjective feelings. But it is hard to see how a solid foundation for a universal ethic can be derived from a blind

materialistic process. On the other hand, it is easy to see how a loving personal Creator could make a world with universal moral norms and create human beings with some innate sense of that moral order.

Fourth, there is the problem of freedom. If everything is determined by prior materialistic causes, how do we explain the inner experience of freedom that we all experience? Surely, materialistic determinists have to conclude that freedom is just an illusion, because it would seem impossible for genuine freedom to evolve from a materialistic process. And yet the materialists often acknowledge that moral responsibility makes no sense at all without freedom.

Finally, there is the historical evidence. Virtually all serious historians today agree that Jesus was an historical person who was kind and loving but also made some pretty outrageous claims.

There is even pretty strong historical evidence that the crucified Jesus was alive again on the third day.

How clear is that evidence? The person willing to look honestly at the historical evidence with an open mind finds it surprisingly strong. But it is not a mathematical proof. The preponderance of data points toward a real historical resurrection, but the evidence is not so strong that it totally overwhelms the rational mind.

There is a certain parallel to the other

things we have noted. Design in nature, the sense of right and wrong, human freedom, all seem to find a better foundation in a theistic rather than a naturalistic view of the world. But none of the arguments—one by one or together —represent a totally airtight case. They leave room for human choice.

Why? Biblical revelation says the Creator shaped persons as free beings because he wanted us to love and obey him in freedom, not compulsion. If God had made the evidence for his existence so total, so clear, so omnipresent that every rational mind felt compelled to accept it in the same way we feel compelled to accept mathematical formulae, we would not be free in our relationship to God. It looks as if the Creator left pretty clear calling cards scattered in nature, persons, and human history. But God chose not to make their message so abundantly clear that they would wipe out human freedom.

We are left with two radically contradictory views of the world. The theistic view, I think, makes better sense of all we know than the naturalistic view.

But, finite beings that we are, we must all, on both sides of this divide, keep looking honestly at all the solid data that human experience (science, history, selfreflection) provide. Unless we do that, we fall into dogmatism, rather than continue an honest search for truth. ■

MusicNotes continued from page 38.

strength as a songwriter: His open, honest lamentation pulls no punches yet is never self-indulgent. It humbly acknowledges the overwhelming need for the redemptive work of Jesus. In this respect, Bazan can be listened to as a contemporary psalmist, reflecting the sometimes harsh honesty of King David before God. These songs are worth our time and

thought, because here is displayed for us a microcosm of the Real Story—God’s work of grace in transforming people who are helplessly broken.

enough, as long as they are not forced to confront the ugly reality of sin. You certainly don’t hear anything about falling from grace on Patti’s comeback album.

This is how David Bazan makes us uncomfortable, but it is also his greatest

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Matt Weed is a visual arts major at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he also runs a small recording studio with people from his band, Rosetta.

MUSIC NOTES

Speechless Sounds B Y M AT T W E E D

An interesting trend has arisen in popular music: Instrumental music is no longer confined to the classical domain.

Over the last 15 years it has slowly crept into popular genres, first in electronic music (a producer’s genre by nature) and then into experimental rock. Recently, instrumental popular music has exploded, invading nearly every possible genre and subgenre. Artists are abandoning the personal in favor of the sensate, working with sound alone. While it may never rule the airwaves, this movement will be making waves for some time to come, as it heralds a new attitude for popular music, a more delicate touch and a wider consciousness.The question for Christians is this: What is the value (if any) of such music, and how can it be evaluated?

For much of its history,Western music was defined by scales derived from Pythagoras’ experiments with mathematical ratios in pitch intervals. The “Christian-ness” of music was simply a question of whether it used tonality in this traditionally occidental manner, where consonance represented the divine and dissonance the devil. Other, foreign types of tonality were relegated to the “pagan” (despite the fact that many different modal scales had been used in medieval Christian music), and, indeed, the very foundation of this system of composition lay in Renaissance obsession with humanist Greek thought.

Departures from traditional tonality have, of course, aroused the ire of Christians throughout the centuries. At the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, Christians condemned its syncopated rhythms as

demonic, exposing fears of social degeneracy and “the Other” that had begun with similar criticisms of jazz, ragtime, and blues music. This stemmed from a long history of Christians buying into colonialist and Enlightenment ideas about a universal order and universal beauty, ideas which were tied more to imperialism and the white man’s burden than they ever were to Jesus. “Chaotic” music threatened those ideas; it threatened to undermine the very foundations of social order and turn all youth into degenerates (ironically, Elvis had a lot in common with Socrates, as they were both condemned for “corrupting the youth”).

But the threat was and has always been the cultural heterogeneity of these forms and the way they undermined cultural supremacy.

Fast-forward 50 years: dc talk is in the stereos of good Christian youth everywhere; discussions of styles and forms are largely past; CCM is at least a huge market force, if not a wholly accepted mission vehicle. Strangely enough, this is perhaps the essence of postmodernism: Implicit in the production of contemporary Christian music is the idea that there is no universal, divine standard of beauty; it’s all a matter of taste. Secular trends dictate the modes of production in CCM; in fact, they dictate everything except the lyrics. Form follows function in the sense that the musical construction and style are conduits by which a target audience may be reached—any form is as good as any other, as long as it carries the appropriate lyrics.

In this climate, is a Christian discussion of instrumental music and pure sound forms even relevant? Right now, the “Christian-ness” of music amounts to whether or not the lyrics are about God. And not just anything about God either—they must (unlike Joan Osborne’s “What If God Was One of Us?”) specifically extol the virtues of the evangelical God, using a specific set of

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canonized buzzwords. Lyrical content has become the issue for Christians in popular music and is really the whole reason for the existence of the CCM industry. Yet with “music for music’s sake” on the rise again, what place does instrumental music have in a biblical worldview?

Early church writers often described music as a way to elevate the sentiments of humans, to break words out of the communicative boundaries of language, in order to praise God more fully. This implied that organized sound constituted a vocabulary, which, even if not fully self-contained, could at least extend the communicative power of human language.

If words spoke more directly to the mind, music could speak to the heart. Indeed, we have always spoken of major and minor scales having respectively happy and sad qualities, implying an intuitive understanding of the emotional nature of this aural vocabulary.

Music is intrinsically abstract. Even the thought of standardizing a language of tonal symbols would not only demonstrate inexcusable cultural arrogance but would also be inevitably doomed to failure. Still, nearly everyone agrees that music can communicate. It moves us, though we cannot understand how.

Movies wouldn’t make emotional sense without their soundtracks; sometimes the utter absence of music is even more jarring. It is a vocabulary of the soul, a language that we learn just like any other but are often powerless to explain or resist.

A comparison: Instrumental music is in many ways like nature. God’s creation awes us with its majesty, often moving us in unexpected ways. We believe that nature communicates to us something about its Maker—this is general revelation. The Word of God (Lyric of God?) communicates with specificity, but creation communicates with impressions, emotions, and sensations. In much the

same way, instrumental music can speak directly to our hearts in dramatic ways.

Rather than music for music’s sake, perhaps this is music for its Maker’s sake.

If music, in whatever form it takes, causes us to praise God, then it has revealed something about God to us. This is a sort of microcosmic general revelation: When we recognize what a gift it is to receive beauty through the language of music, we can experience in a sensory way the goodness of the Giver. Even when those who create the sounds we hear are not Christians, we can still be blessed by what they make, because any beauty that they have access to is ultimately part of the general revelation of God’s character. They may be glorifying God without even knowing it. In hear-

ing it, our forever enjoyment of God can be enhanced. After all, every good and perfect gift is from above. Surely that includes every good and perfect sound, too.

Godspeed You Black Emperor!

Yanqui U.X.O. (Symphonic Rock)

Matt Weed is a visual arts major at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he also runs a small recording studio with people from his band, Rosetta.

Pain, Prayer, and Progress in Sri Lanka continued from page 27.

As Ajith Fernando has remarked, “The church is the one place that has both races,Tamils and Sinhalese. It should serve as a source of reconciliation. Pray that God will purify the church. The tsunami revealed the weaknesses as well as the strengths. Pray that we will be ready for whatever God has for us!” ■

Deborah Meroff’s most recent book, True Grit: Women Taking on the World, for God’s Sake (Authentic Media, 2004) recounts the true adventures of nine ordinary women who are making an extraordinary difference in such places as Tajikistan, India, Egypt, and Lebanon. Meroff lives in London, England.

help his children, and so is a pastor. God gives me strength.”

Added to financial and emotional challenges from the tsunami are escalating religious and political tensions.

Extremists among the country’s Buddhist majority have been pressing hard for an anti-conversion bill that calls for prison sentences of up to five years and/or a stiff fine for anyone found guilty of converting others “by force or by allurement or by any fraudulent means.”

Members of the public would be encouraged to report cases of suspected “forced conversion.” The wording leaves the door open for abuses in interpretation and would inevitably have a major quenching effect on proclaiming the gospel. Also, on the political scene, the Tamil-Sinhalese peace agreement continues to unravel. Many fear this alreadywounded country will be ripped apart by another civil war.

Suggested listening: Mono Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and Sun Shone (Japanese Post-Rock) Explosions in the Sky The Earth Is not a Cold Dead Place (Rock)

Stars of the Lid The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (Soft Ambient) Boards of Canada The Campfire Headphase (Electronic) Pelican The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw (Hard Rock) Arovane Atol Scrap (Experimental Electronic)

For Prayer & Action: • Recently elected President Mahinda Rajapakse is under intense pressure from the Buddhist Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU or National Heritage Party) to pass an anti-conversion bill. Pray that the concerns expressed by other governments about growing religious intolerance in Sri Lanka, including the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, will prevent this bill from passing.

• Pray that fair action by President Rajapakse will defuse present tensions between the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) and government (Sinhalese) forces and prevent another war.

• Pray that God will continue to protect his church in Sri Lanka and use it to bring hope to tsunami survivors.

• Empower Christian relief and development by the NCEASL. Go to www.nceaslanka.com/donate.htm to donate online or dial their donation hotline at 94-11-551-1359.

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MUSIC NOTES

Hip-hop-crisy B Y M AT T W E E D

I have no right to write this article. I’m a white guy from the suburbs; for me to write about hip-hop is to ignore its most important value: authenticity.Where you come from is important, and I don’t come from the right place or have the right background to have any authority on the issue. In hip-hop, you can know everything there is to know but never be a part of it. It’s not just music; it’s a life.

That being said, this is not intended to be a primer on the “elements of style” of hip-hop but simply some thoughts on its current consumerist bent and how Christians can respond.

A casual survey of the mainstream hip-hop landscape will show that many of the really big names are often dumbed down to the lowest common denominator: party songs. These songs contain almost no shred of the lyrical virtuosity that is the foundation of good hip-hop and instead settle for repetitive lines about booty, hoes, and drugs. (To be fair, some of these artists are probably capable of much more than their releases would suggest, but who needs lyrical prowess when you have nothing to say?) Outside the party songs the complexity might increase, but the subject matter usually remains the same. Many ask: Why so much misogyny, drugs, and violence? Is this what hip-hop is fundamentally about?

No—but it sells. Everyone from critics to concerned parents has some lengthy explanation of why “kids in the ghetto” want to hear this kind of thing, attributing it to the “cry from the streets,” oppositional culture, or any number of other social factors. But this assumes two things: first, that urban African-American youth are indeed the primary audience

for hip-hop; and, second, that hip-hop artists choose to specifically address this audience.

These are not well-founded assumptions. In fact, in the mainstream, it is safe to say that what gets heard is what a given record label wants people to hear, which is usually whatever will move the most copies off the store shelves. This is determined mainly by the preferences of those who have the money to spend. In this country the demographic with the most extra money to spend is composed of white, suburban youth. Not exactly the stereotypical hip-hop fans, they are still by far its most profitable audience.

With profit margins as priority number one at the major-label level, it’s well known that a lot of artistic control ends up in the hands of white guys in suits. At its worst, what this amounts to is rich white adults creating products for the consumption of rich white kids, using (usually) African-American celebrities as a conduit and a commodity.

If authenticity is a cornerstone of hip-hop culture, this presents a serious problem. It wasn’t always this way—hiphop has been bought out. This has very little to do with the actual talent of the artists themselves; rather it is an issue of control. Just like any other marginal subgenre that grows out of obscurity and into an influential force, it was bound to attract the attention of those who would commodify it. Now, what began as a cultural voice belonging specifically to urban African Americans has been largely corrupted by the media industry in order to make money off of white cultural envy.

If hip-hop were fundamentally about “bling and hoes,” its history would reflect that. Fortunately, that’s not the case. Its roots are in social commentary (both serious and humorous), political protest, and plain old good poetry. Many independent artists are still carrying this torch, refusing to climb the ladder and put

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money-making before music-making.

The result is often intelligent, provocative verse that stimulates thought, surprise, and joy.

Christians have a unique opportunity here. Many of us have spent a lot of time condemning and dismissing hip-hop for its attitude and lyrical content—which is essentially wasted breath since we don’t have the authenticity to speak into that culture.Yet hip-hop is a wide-open field, thirsting for something new and different to break the pattern of sameness that corporate values have imposed on it.

That something could very well be the gospel of Jesus, if we can be open-minded enough to recognize the talent of young poets and support them in taking it to the streets. Hip-hop has for too long been suspect in the Christian community, and it’s time to recognize that the Jesus-obsessed MCs may in fact be the most culturally savvy missionaries anywhere in the world. And honestly, there’s nothing more authentic than the Good News.

Some suggested listening for the curious: Christian BloodRelated: Platinum (Over a Million Souls) (2003) The Cross Movement: Higher Definition (Cross Movement Records, 2004) Sup the Chemist: Dust (EMI, 2005) Secular Cannibal Ox: The Cold Vein (Definitive Jux, 2001) Dalek: Absence (Ipecac Recordings, 2005) El-P: Fantastic Damage (Definitive Jux, 2002, explicit lyrics) Matt Weed is a visual arts major at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he also runs a small recording studio with people from his band, Rosetta.

MUSIC NOTES

Givin’ ’em Hellfire DAVID EUGENE EDWARDS HAS NON-CHRISTIAN MUSIC LOVERS EATING OUT OF HIS WOVENHAND

By Matthew Weed Why isn’t contemporary Christian music taken seriously by the mainstream? Simple answer: It’s boring. For the most part it’s always three years behind the secular competition. Certainly many Christian artists are competent songwriters and musicians within their styles, but rarely are they true innovators in the wider arena of contemporary music. At worst, many are content to mimic secular trends, amounting to little more than a sanitized alternative to MTV culture for Christian youth.A bleak state of affairs? Perhaps— but also ripe for something wholly fresh and unexpected to shake things up.

Enter David Eugene Edwards. Formerly of the country-alt-rock band 16 Horsepower, Edwards went solo in 2003 under the name Wovenhand and has since wandered into a sort of progressive “psychedelic country” that has few parallels anywhere in popular music. Bearing Nick Cave’s gothic sensibilities and the folk influence of Bob Dylan (though with far better musicianship), this is country music not in the Garth Brooks sense but in the Johnny Cash sense—dark and brooding much of the time, yet ultimately held together by earnest hope. For Edwards, that hope comes from Jesus, a fact that is constantly apparent in his music. This isn’t Christian music; it’s music made by a follower of Christ.

Wovenhand’s most recent offering, Consider the Birds, is epic in every sense of the word. Full of dynamic extremes, it is both disquieting and uplifting. Over

10 tracks it plumbs the microcosm of self while recognizing the place of that self in the macrocosm of God’s story.

Many times it seems particularly concerned with the end of that story: Judgment and destruction of sinners are recurring themes throughout. “Eschatological” might seem a strange word to describe a country music record, but it fits here, and Edwards is not content to be gentle. His lyrics have a blunt force that is impossible to ignore: “The world will bow/the knees will be broken/for those who don’t know how.”

Edwards’ Wovenhand certainly prays and praises furiously and challenges both the world and the followers of Jesus, but one would be hard-pressed to call Consider the Birds a CCM record. It was

From “To Make A Ring,” on Consider the Birds

released on a secular label, as was all of Edwards’ previous work in 16 Horsepower (he has never been a player in the CCM market), and bears none of the hallmarks of the usual contemporary Christian youth culture. Edwards isn’t a smiling, modest, Focus-on-the-Family-approved role model. He’s enigmatic, judgmental, tormented, difficult—everything a Christian artist is not supposed to be (in other words, a real person).Yet what shines through most powerfully in his music is that he is in love with Jesus.

Consider the Birds is about bringing things out of darkness into the light, and as such it is messy—just as much of Jesus’ ministry was—but ultimately it recognizes the sovereignty of God over all else and demands forcefully that the

Nothin’ in this world Gives me a reason to doubt I want into him of my flesh I want out I have been given to follow the sun Forever round the throne Listen Judgment is not avoided by your unbelief By your lack of fear Nor by your prayers to any little idol here He owns all those cattle He owns all these hills Forever round the throne Crow eye come see The lord will not be mocked Not by you or me Power glory honour Be unto my king We will weave our hands together to make a ring Forever round the throne Power glory dominion Be unto the king We will weave our voices together and sing Forever round the throne © David Eugene Edwards

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listener recognize that as well. In the end, Edwards’ central message is a resounding “Let Your Kingdom come!”

It might seem strange then that it was a non-Christian friend—the coowner of an independent record label that puts out metal, hardcore, and experimental music—who introduced me to Wovenhand. Surely, openly Christian music that is this rough-edged and lacking in lyrical subtlety would not last more than a minute on a non-Christian’s CD player? Wrong. Not only did my friend genuinely enjoy Consider the Birds, he started passing copies around to all of his friends, most of whom are nonChristians, and they were uniformly excited and impressed. I asked what they found so attractive about it, and, by and large, the answer was that Wovenhand’s musical style was stunningly different —and its lyrics “truly honest.” It would appear that the conventional wisdom of CCM does not apply here. Indeed,

presenting a sweetened gospel in a slick, contemporary package no longer seems either important or necessary.

In fact, it’s probably counterproductive. Wovenhand’s surprising success in the secular underground (my friends aren’t the only ones taking notice of this record) points to some important truths about the creative climate for Christian artists today. In the new generation of listeners, where every consumer gets to be a critic, most aren’t concerned with stylistic trappings and cultural identifiers.

They want two things: excellence and authenticity. In that light, the practice of carefully hiding a Christian message inside pop music that is indistinguishable from the mainstream trends appears ridiculous. As Wovenhand dramatically shows, it doesn’t matter if a songwriter rains politically incorrect hellfire and brimstone from the soapbox. The responsibility of the Christian artist is not to fit in but to stand out—to push bound-

Sharing the Burden of Christmas continued from page 20.

He’ll probably be disappearing soon— putting on his jeans and secondhand golf shirt and heading back down south to pick oranges. But maybe he’ll be back next year. The clothes closet at the First Baptist Church will be ready. ■

ethnic food is a novelty in places like Sparta, population 1,800, where the nearest Wal-Mart is 45 minutes away and you still do your shopping downtown.

Filipe is lucky to find an apartment on Sparta’s quaint Main Street. He can walk to the church, the supermarket, or one of the Mexican stores. He likes it so well that he is rethinking his plan to follow the migrant trail back to Florida after the Christmas tree harvest. He wants to stay here in the mountains, where it’s cool and quiet and la migra doesn’t bother to inspect. Christmas tree work can last 10 months a year if you find the right boss. There are also sawmills and a few factories, but competition is fierce for those jobs and Filipe doesn’t have a brother or cousin to smooth the way.

Jesse James DeConto is a freelance writer living in Chapel Hill, N.C. His research was made possible by a grant from the Phillips Foundation.

Contact him at deconto@email.unc.edu.

Washington Watch continued from page 32.

aries with adventurous excellence, while making it absolutely clear that out of the authentic abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Hopefully, more artists can follow Edwards’ lead in rising to that challenge.

Matt Weed is a visual arts major at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he also runs a small recording studio with people from his band, Rosetta.

important achievements.”

Yes, it’s true: we could always do more to help spur development, and yes, Republicans and Democrats will disagree on how best these things can be done. But acknowledging accomplishments like those above and coming together in sincere bipartisan dialogue will bring us much closer to solving these problems than will demonizing and vilifying each other.

It’s high time we recognized that, despite our differences (however real they may be), we are committed as a society to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that these things will never be achieved unless both sides of the aisle work together to achieve them. ★

jeopardy. When he leaves office, if he sustains his commitment to peace, health, and development in Africa—which was Rebecca Yael Miller is on staff at the New completely off Candidate Bush’s radar in Atlantic Initiative of the American Enterprise 2000—it could stand as one of his most Institute (www.aei.org/nai).

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MUSIC NOTES

Separation Anxiety DRUNKARD’S PRAYER OVER THE RHINE (Back Porch Records) Reviewed by J. James DeConto

It’s 10 a.m. I pop Over the Rhine’s latest album, Drunkard’s Prayer, into my six-disc changer and take off for what is supposed to be a two-day business trip.

“I want you to be my love,” Karin Berquist begins, the title of the first song and the sentiment that defines not only the album but also, by all accounts, her and husband Linford Detweiler’s salvaging of a marriage on the brink, pushed there by life on the road. The spare instrumentation—no more than what would fit within the intimate confines of their suburban Cincinnati living room—will also come to define the album. The upright bass notes quiver long and low, with acoustic strumming salted only by an occasional hammer and slide. Detweiler’s piano touch is gentle, Berquist’s voice relieved. Forsaking the road and cutting short a tour, they pulled together. “I know you want me

now, like I want you,” Berquist declares.

I leave my little hippie town in central North Carolina and hit the countryside, passing the dairy farms and produce stands of northwestern Orange County.

Detweiler takes the guitar, and things get more complicated, but just a little.

He’s walking those minor chords into every change. Electric guitar notes tremble high and ghostly, thanks to a steel slide. Berquist’s melody is the stuff of modern rock genius.“I was born to love, I’m gonna learn to love without fear.”

“Born” is beautiful; it rivals my favorites, the title track from Ohio and “Bothered,” the chameleon song that pulls up my chin like mother’s touch, whether it’s just bass and vocals on Eve, grooving ivory on Besides or the vibey version from Ohio. I find myself hoping “Born” will someday be reborn with some electric fuzz, thumping bass, and, oh my gosh, we’re through two songs and this pop/ rock album hasn’t had a single drum beat!

On the title track, Detweiler’s electric piano has a tremulous effect—echoey, uncertain, intoxicated.“You’re my water, you’re my wine, you’re my whiskey from time to time,” Berquist cries in the husky whisper she’s perfected. The bass gives depth, but not much rhythm, the humble sort of bass line that anyone could play but few are smart enough to.

Drums? Forget it.They’d just interrupt the moment.

“Bluer” is more Blue Ridge Mountains, where I’m headed, than Mississipi Delta. Detweiler sings a sweet harmony, a rare treat from our shy pianist. The song has an old-timecountry-stage-show sound that will reemerge later on the disc. Recording this bluegrass seems to foreshadow the couple’s fresh start in rural Kentucky.

“Bluer than this blue angel…are we gonna leave here strangers?”

It’s track No. 5 before we have our first drum sighting.“Spark” is a dark, altcountry tune that matches my mood:

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refreshed by the bucolic landscape but sad at the separation from my wife and daughters that work demands. “Is God the last romantic?” Berquist wonders.

I turn left onto I-40 westbound toward the mountains—a two-hour drive, interviews to conduct, facts to gather, people to observe. I’ve been doing this every week for several months, and I’m tired of it. So is my wife. But the band kicks up a song fit for a road trip.

“We often end up writing the music that we need to hear at the time. In the case of Drunkard’s Prayer, this collection of songs in many ways celebrates the healing and even survival of our marriage. The songs were mostly written during a chapter in our lives where Karin and I were struggling with the stuff of staying together, when it would have been so much easier to drift apart and be yet another statistic.”

Linford Detweiler, in an interview by Jeffrey Overstreet

No more pastoral piano or timid bass.

“I’m looking forward to looking back on this day,” sings Berquist, backed by a dominant drummer in tight with the bass, an Eleanor Rigby-style cello, and Old West acoustic guitar. Like a bunch of cowboys on a cattle drive, the band and I have a job to do, but we can’t wait to get home.

Drunkard’s Prayer’s denouement brings it back to the unadorned sound of the

intro, but “Firefly” is a wonderful exception, the highlight of the album.The song starts with Berquist playing straight piano chords and repeating the signature line from the chorus,“My memory will not fail me now.” She arpeggiates the chords on the verses, low to high, but when the chorus returns, it’s with distorted electric guitar, bean-shaker percussion, bass tremors, and Berquist’s voice at its sensual, soulful best. This is the sort of intensity more frequent on albums past, especially Eve and Films for Radio.

Drunkard’s Prayer ends with a cover of the classic jazz ballad, “My Funny Valentine.” It’s romance without sentimentality, best shared with the woman I love. But I am driving away. I listen to the CD twice more before I get to work.

Around 11 p.m, I’m ready to sleep on my hosts’ couch. I have some work planned for tomorrow, but it could wait a few weeks. My wife calls to say our 9month-old daughter won’t go to sleep unless I’m there to rub her back. I know what I have to do.Yeah, it’s a long trip. But Over the Rhine will take me home.

J. James DeConto surprised his then-fiancée by flying from New Hampshire to Ohio to take her to an Over the Rhine concert in the fall of 1999.They sat close to the stage, from where Berquist and Detweiler laughed at their, uh, public displays of affection

Washington Watch continued from page 32.

In Like Manner…the Women continued from page 7.

resort to low-income housing in the first place?What are the long-term consequences of gentrification and urban renewal?

Tomorrow I am attending a lecture by a well-known financial analyst, and I plan to ask him some really tough questions about the role of the government in economic reform.After that, I plan to come back to the office and talk to my coworkers about what we can do, in the long run, to change the systems of injustice in this country.

And perhaps, on my way home afterwards, I’ll go against all the advice I’ve received and try simply looking each man in the eye, greeting him with the respect due any neighbor, so he sees that I recognize his God-given human dignity.

That just might be the most charitable—and just—act of all. ★

hosted by Dr. Suzan Johnson Cooke ( w w w. w i m i n c o n f e r e n c e . c o m ) , October 9-11 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Trust me, you’ll be encouraged and blessed to go forward in the work God has for you.

Although it may hurt to lack the blessing of man, we must desire so much more the blessing of God. God’s blessing comes through our obedience to what God has called us to do, and sometimes fulfilling that call comes without the blessing of those from whom we desire it. Nevertheless, step out into your calling, searching first God’s blessing, and looking forward to the fulfillment you’ll receive by ministering to those whom God shall have you bless. ■

Rebecca Yael Miller is on staff at the New Atlantic Initiative of the American Enterprise Institute (www.aei.org/nai), an international nonpartisan network of think tanks, business leaders, journalists, and prominent political and cultural figures dedicated to revitalizing and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies and to combating the dangerous drift and self-absorption that infect American and European politics.

Elizabeth D. Rios is co-pastor of Wounded Healer Fellowship in Pembroke Pines, Fla., academic advisor and adjunct professor at Trinity International University, founder of the Center for Emerging Female Leadership (www.cefl.org), and a doctoral student in organizational leadership. Visit her weblog at http://latinaliz.typepad.com

W

Ron Sider, continued from page 40. the budget they will approve in early fall) the full request by President Bush for foreign economic aid. (The House cut the president’s request by a couple billion dollars!). In fact, tell them that the evangelical community wants Congress to authorize even more than the president requested.

• If you don’t get ESA’s weekly ePistle,

sign up now (send an email to e-pistle @esa-online.org) so you can receive regular updates on this expanding campaign.

We stand at a historic moment of unusual opportunity to dramatically reduce global poverty. Evangelicals are strategically placed to play an especially

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crucial role.As I look back on the almost 30 years since I first wrote Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, I am amazed at what God has already done—and very excited about what God wants to do through us in the next decade. Let’s seize this opportunity! ■

MUSIC NOTES

Heading West Rapper Kanye West takes on a whole herd of sacred cows “I think there’s a much more interesting conversation about spirituality happening in pop culture than there is in the typical church.”

—DICK

STAUB

The Truth Hurts

BY JESSE JAMES DECONTO

Warning:The subject of this review contains explicit content. I’m not talking about four-letter words, misogyny, or celebrations of guns, drugs, or doing time, although there is some of that here, too.

But wielding a wit reminiscent of The Simpsons in its prime, Kanye West will make you squirm as you try not to laugh at his explicit lyrics on America’s racial caste system, educational inequality, coercive secularists, and the sexual objectification of women.

The College Dropout (Roc-a-fella Records) has sold 2.5 million copies, grabbed 10 Grammy nominations, and won for best rap album and best rap song.

The latter award went to “Jesus Walks,” a rap that succeeded in the critics’ columns and record stores not so much for its theme of spiritual warfare as for as its layers of choir-loft background vocals, its concert-hall instrumentation, its military-march rhythm, and its lyricism, which manages to be simultaneously poetic and transparent. A few lines describe the gap West is trying to fill in the hip-hop world: They said you can rap about anything except for Jesus/That means guns, sex, lies, videotape/But if I talk about

God my record won’t get played. Inside the front cover, the first thanks go to God, and West wonders,“Why there no good rappers on God’s side?”

West set the bar pretty high for his debut album as a solo artist. By the middle of the disk, however, he admits he fell short: Always said if I rapped I’d say something significant/But now I’m rappin’ ‘bout money, hoes and rims again.Truth be told, he’s being too hard on himself: Yeah, at times he sounds as sex-crazed as any guy in his early 20s, but West’s thoughts on money are what make this album a classic.

The College Dropout begins with a spare monologue from a middle-aged African-American man, a teacher, asking West to write a song “the kids” can sing on their graduation day. West’s response,“We Don’t Care,” is a sarcastic parody of Motown R&B, complete with a choir of 8-year-olds singing, Drug-dealing just to get by, stack your money till it gets sky high/We weren’t supposed to make it past 25, joke’s on you, we still alive.The characters of West’s childhood were considered either lazy or stupid if they didn’t sell drugs; the other options were so paltry—working for $6.55 an hour, scratching lotto tickets, or selling bootlegs. Poverty meant having the power shut off at home and being diagnosed with learning disabilities: Now tell my momma I belong in that slow class/It’s

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bad enough we on welfare/You trying to put me on the school bus with the space for the wheelchair.

The next couple of songs,“Graduation Day” and “All Falls Down,” begin to explain the album’s title.West actually is a college dropout, and his message is that each individual has to find his own path to a better life.The consequence of doing what society expects—going to college, getting a well-paying job, buying lots of stuff—can mean the loss of your identity, whether West’s individual identity as an artist or the black communal identity. We buy a lot of clothes when we don’t really need ‘em/Things we buy to cover up what’s inside/’Cause they made us hate ourself and love they wealth.

“Spaceship” picks up the despair of low-wage work introduced in “We Don’t Care.” West tells of a job at a popular clothing store, where he suffered low pay and abuse from managers, then the exploitation of being the “token blackey” hired to attract African-American customers. The song’s chorus sticks in your head both for its soulful sound and its desperate lyric: I’ve been working this graveshift, and I ain’t made sh**/I wish I could buy me a spaceship and fly, past the sky.

The stirring first half of the album ends with a trio of inspirational raps from West, Jay-Z, and J-Ivy built into a single track,“Never Let Me Down.” From there, the content becomes murkier.You have to wade through a lot of sex, cursing, and self-congratulation, but you’ll find some hilarious rants against formal education for its own sake.“Workout Plan” epitomizes the murkiness. The song promises to deliver rich rappers, pro athletes, or “at least a guy with a car” to the women who follow West’s fitness advice. Read as another parody, it’s a sharp indictment of a culture that values women only for their bodies. But heard in the context of West’s other sexual content, which may or may not include more sarcasm, it almost sounds

as if he does just that. I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

All in all, The College Dropout is the work of an admitted sinner touched by the grace to speak truth, summed up in a line from “Jesus Walks”: God show me the way because the devil’s trying to break me down.

Guest columnist Jesse James DeConto listens to Kanye West in his car or on headphones, out of the range of little ears. His 4-year-old daughter prefers “girl” singers.

Prophet Unaware

BY BOB HEPBURN

One of the weirder sidebars to Kanye West’s Grammy quest was the unrelated Stellar Award nomination of The College Dropout for “Christian Hip Hop Album of the Year”—a bid that was retracted a few weeks later after howls of protest swamped Stellar Awards’ headquarters.

As embarrassing as this misstep was, it speaks volumes about how the church is faring in the contest for the hearts and

minds of those outside its walls.

Mad props* to Kanye West for understanding the times and knowing what the church should do. He taps into the Jesus Zeitgeist with “Jesus Walks,” deploying street-sharp, church-referenced lyrics crafted for him largely by Che Smith (aka Indianapolis rapper Rhymefest), voicing them over an infectious, militant, and danceable track (co-written by hip-hop violinist Miri Ben-Ari), and then directing it at the street—a context already searchin’ “hard” (in a heartbreakin’ way) for a Christ that’s f ’real.

West lobs a “Go ye” grenade into the Church: Follow your Lord, come out of the sanctuary, and engage this hurting world you’re busy waiting on Jesus to escape from.

Sad drops** for the church for not understanding the times and not knowing what it should be doing.Trading our prophetic voice for the “profitic,” we’ve succumbed to the idolatries of Christian prosperity and celebrity. The adversary’s saw? “Nothing succeeds like success.”

Indeed.

As a secular hip-hop prophet,West’s “ministry”to the church is strange indeed.

Beyond wittily tackling the idiosyn-

crasies of a socio-cultural context, his challenge of status quo Christianity in “Jesus Walks”is a call for a radical return to an “axe is already at the roots” spiritual authenticity. Like the secular poets and prophets who posthumously provided resonant grist for Paul’s Areopagitic flow, so does West (among others)—for those in the Philippians 3:10 loop. Both street and church contexts eagerly await a reso/ revo-lution and everyone will be shocked and awed at how God works it out. In the meantime, God is able to use even someone who says he believes in himself to remind and rebuke God’s own children to get with God and get at what God’s after:“He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

Guest columnist Bob Hepburn is director of YUBM (Young Urban Black Male) Ministries.

Check them out at www.yubm.org. *many thanks to **shame on (Brush up on your street slang at www.urbandictionary.com)

Ron Sider, continued from page 40.

Especially striking are two tax cuts that would get phased in from 2006 to 2010: Once fully in force, the 10-year (2010-2019) cost of these two tax cuts is $146 billion. And 97 percent of all the benefits from these cuts go to the richest 4 percent of households with incomes over $200,000 a year; 54 percent go to households with annual incomes of more than $1 million.

Do evangelical Christians really want to support tax cuts for millionaires paid

for by cuts in food stamps, healthcare, housing vouchers, and nutritional programs for poor Americans? Is that the meaning of compassionate conservatism?

If evangelicals want to implement the new NAE declaration’s call to empower the poor to improve their circumstances, they will have to demand that the president and Congress reprioritize the 2006 budget. Eliminating proposed tax cuts for the richest 5 percent of Americans would make available tens of billions of

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dollars to empower the poor.

How can that happen? Actual adoption of the 2006 budget is a lengthy process that will not be complete until October of this year. If enough of us write letters to the president, our senators, and our representatives in the House, they will change the proposed budget. ■ “Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

Psalms 82:4

MUSIC NOTES

American Jukebox

BY TODD KOMARNICKI

Bad news is always an easily broken shell, barely obscuring good news behind its opaque roundness, awaiting a tiny crack, a nudge to spill out all the life that hides on the other side. I had long labored under the delusion that it was the other way around, that good news—joy, excitement, that numinous state when the sun falls gently, when the crops and children grow—was so fragile as to be almost undesirable; that the fissure in the shell could be caused by simply breathing; that when the team dog-piled at center court after a last-second victory, somebody inevitably broke an ankle.

And then came January 23. January 23 was a day I had invested with such import, a day in which I had expected a long-desired and, dare I say, deserved piece of good news, that it seemed a hinge upon which my gambler’s life would swing. The hinge broke. So did the shell. Bad news anointed my head like an egg thrown from a height.

So I did what any exhausted, frustrated, misunderstood writer would do.

I rented a car, packed up boxers,T-shirts, not enough socks, and too many CDs, and decided to drive from New York City to Los Angeles.That afternoon. Of course, I didn’t expect to make it by nightfall. In fact, I didn’t have much of a desire to arrive at all. The journey is what matters, not the destination—isn’t that the cliché? Well, this was a cliché in need of embracing.

I’d never driven more than six hours alone in a car and, considering my injured state of mind, didn’t know how much silence I was going to be able to

handle—thus the sprawl of jewel boxes filling both the passenger seat and the passenger feet.

It would be convenient to report that each stretch of America had its own matching soundtrack—that Ohio had The Byrds, Nashville had Cash, and Phoenix had the Gin Blossoms—but music is never convenient. And considering the amount of tears I shed listening to the songs I’m about to mention, it seemed the entire trip that God was the DJ, and all the landscape traveled was inside my skin.

There were far too many hours of rumble-worn highways and scarecrow billboards to list everything that found purchase in my slowly mending psyche.

What follows is my American jukebox—the songs you should iTune into your life immediately. But not because I said so. Remember who the DJ was.

Rickie Lee Jones—“Cycles”: This cover of a Frank Sinatra song defines the good news/bad news revolvingdoor policy I mentioned earlier. And despite her faded vocal, Rickie leaves you with a kiss that you know will linger tomorrow.

The Bees—“Chicken Payback”: This may be the most ridiculous set of lyrics ever recorded.“Payback the chicken, Back/Payback the monkey, Back/ Payback the camel, Back”…etc. But the music is so happy you find yourself going to the ATM willing to pay a zoo full of animals back for the goofy joy of it all.

Mark Lanegan Band—“One Hundred Days”:There are certain songs that are decisively memorized the first time you hear them.As if you’ve been singing it in your sleep since age 10, waiting for someone to press it to vinyl. Lanegan’s voice is molasses and gun powder— relaxes you and puts you on edge with the very same note.

BellX1—“Tongue”: I have no idea what this operatic rock song is about.

But you can’t deny the power of singer PRISM 2005

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Paul Noonan’s lament—“Who’m I fooling? I like airline food.” It’s loud, fast, slow, beaten, triumphant—just like life, only shorter.

Bruce Cockburn—“Pacing the Cage”:Why this man isn’t as famous as Bob Dylan will be question number 12 when I get to heaven.This song embodies what it is to be a stranger in this life.

We wait, watch, and yearn—all the time knowing and preparing for the “coming of the outbound stage.”

Elvis Costello—“Little Palaces”: This acerbic rant off King of America is the ideal sing-along for spleen venting and random rage. After 3 minutes and 48 seconds you’ll feel spent. And you’ll feel richer.

Rufus Wainwright—“The Tower of Learning”:This moody warbler finds the perfect syncopation and soaring synths (what’s life without alliteration?) with this track off his second album, Poses. A love song and a travelogue, it’s about how we teach each other, even if it’s only to dream.

Catatonia—“Stone by Stone”: This Welsh band made its mark by letting singer Cerys Matthews attack with mortal strength, even when she’s only whispering. Haunting, melodic, like a sad story you keep repeating to friends.

U2—“City of Blinding Lights”: My favorite love song from Bono to his wife since “All I Want Is You.”Any husband that can humbly ask,“Can you see the beauty inside of me?” understands that we learn to love ourselves only by being loved.

Kings of Leon—“Slow Night, So Long”:This Southern band, oft described as “the Allman Brothers, back and cuter than ever,” understands how to put blues and country into a cauldron and have it pour out as rock and roll. And the way this song ends twice is as rewarding as meeting your best friend’s fraternal twin.

Ariel Ramirez—Misa Criolla/Navidad Nuestra: This Argentinean Christmas Mass is not something that can be

described. Buy it. Fall to your knees.

And hear the angels’ voices.

I Don’t Wanna—“The Call”: This song was released in 1986. That makes 19 consecutive years that I sob every time I listen to it. Some art sneaks inside so deep you don’t have to understand why.

So, now it’s official. By the time I

arrived in Los Angeles, I had definitive proof that it is bad news that is fragile, that grace and passion and vision are all a breath away, that bad news couldn’t hold up under a butterfly’s sneeze.

Because we were built for good news.

And I had 3,267.8 miles of it—thanks to four speakers, 74 CDs, and the greatest DJ in the universe.

Guest columnist Todd Komarnicki is a novelist—Free (Doubleday, 1993) and Famine (Plume Books, 1998)—screenwriter, director (Resistance,2003),and producer (Elf,2003).

At 6' 2",Komarnicki both looks down on and, in the deepest spiritual sense, looks up to, his sister Kristyn.

The New Friars, continued from page 26.

Scott Bessenecker is director of InterVarsity’s Global Projects. He is currently writing a book on the history of Christian youth living among and serving the poor and the emergence of this 21st-century movement of “new friars.”

from MIT with a degree in urban planning in 2003,Von Stroh joined Servant Partners and now lives in a slum community in Bangkok, Thailand, serving the poor there.

Several of his Global Urban Trek colleagues are lining up to join him.

A strong sense of call to a sacrificial life among the poor has made it possible for missionaries like Von Stroh to take up residence in a slum community—though he would hardly call it sacrificial. As he began to embrace God’s call to a life of radical devotion to the poor during his last year or two at MIT,Von Stroh felt the rising pressures to “hedge his bets” and double major in something on which he could fall back. Instead he kept on track with his urban planning major with the goal of living among the poor after graduation.“Even if I never used my major, I could always go live in some low-rent, inner-city ‘hood, work at McDonald’s, and share Jesus with my neighbors and coworkers. But now I have my dream job!”

As our age becomes marred by social decay, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, failing economies, and stagnant churches, it’s time for another missionizing monastic-like movement.

And if the emerging evangelical youth of the early 21st century are any indication, we may be on the cusp of a fresh expression of this longstanding Christian tradition. Make room for these new friars as they seek the highest spirituality among the lowest on earth. ■

Tameka Harris of Global Urban Trek is flanked by children from the Mokattam garbage-collectors’ community of Cairo, Egypt.

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MUSIC NOTES

An Appeal to Open Ears, Open Heart

BY J. JAMES DECONTO

The guitarist shuffles his feet as he strums a vibrant Latin tune. People move around the room in rhythm, hugging and kissing or shaking hands as they greet friends and strangers. “Dios te bendiga,” they say: God bless you.That’s the title of the song and its recurring lyric. I’ve heard it played by a Baptist pastor in a Sunday afternoon church service and a sevenpiece teenaged band at a holiday party, and the effect on those gathered was nearly the same: dancing feet, smiling faces, and momentary communion.

Thanks to a journalism fellowship, for which I am writing about immigrant Christmas tree workers in the Blue Ridge Mountains, over the last several months I’ve been blessed to drink in Latino immigrant culture, to feast on its food, join in its games, and listen to its music. I’ve seen a young man with earrings, a shaved head, a crooked ball cap, dark moustache and soul patch, baggy shorts down to his calves, a replica baseball jersey, and gleaming white sneakers line-dancing alongside little girls with traditional Mexican dresses adorned with colorful embroidery while a DJ played a Spanish-language version of Billy Ray Cyrus’“Achey, Breaky Heart.” I’ve seen four acoustic guitar players leading music at a Saturday evening Spanish Catholic Mass, all strumming the same chords and singing praises to God in unison, without the need to dress up the music with vocal harmonies or lead guitar lines, their voices swelling with emotion as the words they sing seem to issue from

somewhere deep inside them. And I’ve heard men singing love songs as they shoulder heavy Christmas trees, hauling them as far as 300 yards uphill from where they were cut to the trucks waiting to carry them away.

It’s easy to see why our Third World neighbors have a reputation as a musical and mystical people. But we slight them and ourselves if we indulge in their music in the name of “celebrating diversity” or “exposing our children to different cultures.”There’s more at stake than some trite nod to multiculturalism.

I am challenged by these people who sing and dance with a passion I can’t seem to conjure, only to return home to trailers we might consider too small for a family of three, let alone for the eight grown men who often live there as they harvest our Christmas trees or tomatoes.

It’s not simply a passion, but a different way of thinking.The four Catholic guitarists all play the same notes, because being together is more important than producing the best possible music. The most skillful musician among them might sound better by himself, but, still, they play together. At one Hispanic Baptist mission in the North Carolina mountains, an elderly man sits in a pew with his wife and plays simple lead guitar parts while the pastor strums his own guitar —decorated with a bumper sticker from his hometown, Monterrey—to lead the congregation in worship. One Sunday I might get up the nerve to bring along my own instrument to one of these services. I’m quite sure the congregants and musicians would welcome the addition—pre-arranged, or not—but I’m not sure if I can overcome my American reserve.

I hope that, little by little, exposure to the communal ethic embodied in the dance of Dios Te Bendiga will calm my craving for individual perfection. What do I gain by struggling to learn the tenor line as my Episcopal church sings a hymn PRISM 2005

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together? Yes, the beauty of harmony may raise us toward God, but so does the simple act of singing together.Why am I uncomfortable when the old man from the Baptist church sings sad songs for the congregation, his feeble voice so worn it falters short of the high notes?

If it were up to me, would I put this man on the stage of my own church? Yet even in a Spanish I could barely understand, the man’s voice bled a somber wisdom that made my heart want to hear more of what my ears despised.

The truth is, I choose music based on the way it sounds, and the result is a CD collection that sounds more like itself than like the broad spectrum of music that God’s gifts make possible. I’ve never liked rap music. So what? It may be my only chance to hear a first-person perspective on inner-city life. If Jesus really does call us to social action, maybe Christians ought to listen to Eminem, instead of just chastising him for using four-letter words. Latin music, likewise, has much to teach us, not just in church, but in popular Latin bands such as Los Tigres del Norte, whose hit song “Somos Mas Americanos” (We Are More American) laments Latino exclusion from mainstream American culture.We may think

We slight our Third World neighbors—and ourselves —when we indulge in their music in the name of “celebrating diversity” or “exposing our children to different cultures.”

There’s more at stake here than some trite nod to multiculturalism.

line and Mediterranean acoustic guitar sound,“A Man and a Woman” is a sensual celebration of a marriage that withstands romantic temptresses. “All Because of You” and “Crumbs from Your Table” use the same split-octave vocals to explore a grace that lies right at our feet yet remains an atmosphere away. And just as they did with 2001’s “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” U2 closes this album with a gentle hymn, begging “Yahweh” to “take this soul/and make it sing.” U2 no doubt will continue to do just that for their fans.

we sympathize with those who suffer, but until we listen to them, in their own words, we can’t help but patronize. My own taste can no longer serve as an excuse to buy another Coldplay or REM album instead of a record from immigrant Latinos or urban rappers. As long as it does, neither my musical depth nor my social conscience will grow the way it should.

How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb U2 (Interscope Records) Time won’t take the boy out of this man,” sings Bono on U2’s latest album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. It’s a line packed with meaning for a band that’s been performing together longer than Elvis Presley’s career, and not just because “Boy” was U2’s 1980 debut.

Twenty-five years and 10 records later, God and women are still mysterious, the Edge’s guitars still echo like no other, and Bono is still a son trying to please his father.

Bob Hewson died in 2001, and U2 sang “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own” at his funeral. The song swings from a desperate falsetto chorus to the gentlest of whispers, musically mirroring a passionate relationship that a listener might mistake for a marriage.

“I don’t need to hear you say/that if we weren’t so alike/you’d like me a whole lot more,” Bono sings to his departed father.The song “One Step Closer” came to him when, after his father’s passing, Oasis’ Noel Gallagher asked whether his dad believed in God.“I said,‘I don’t think he knows,’” Bono told blender. com.“So Noel went,‘Well, he’s one step closer to knowing now.’”

“The heart that hurts is the heart that beats,” sings Bono, backed by the Edge’s soothing steel guitar, in a subdued, almost spoken ballad, as though his father’s death gave him the simple,

sad words he’s sought amidst the angry metaphors of a career spent fighting injustice through song.

As a New England Patriots fan, I remember many moments from the 2002 Super Bowl well, but none more clearly than U2’s halftime performance when Bono lifted his leather jacket to reveal an American flag stitched inside, a show of solidarity with a nation only months removed from the most frightening act of violence in our history. As with many potential allies, the Bush administration apparently lost U2 over the past three years, at least if you listen to track No. 4,“Love and Peace or Else.”

The song’s muddy, biker-bar sound makes it the most unique and memorable on the album, but its Protestant politics fit it squarely into U2’s classic repertoire.

Its closing question,“Where is the love?” seems aimed directly at the governments in Tel Aviv and D.C. for their acts of violence in the Middle East.

Despite its title, which may be disarming to some and alarming to others, this is not a political album.Actual atomic bombs are simply the most dangerous weapons of the metaphorical warhead U2 has in mind: sin nature.The cacophonic radio single “Vertigo” is a prayer for divine balance, describing the human mind like a jungle. The pop beauty “City of Blinding Lights” gives thanks that love blesses even the dazed and confused. Driven by a dance-club bass PRISM 2005

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Guest columnist J. James DeConto is a 2004-2005 Phillips Journalism Fellow writing about immigrant Christmas tree workers in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Job Opening for Scholar Activist Eastern Seminary and ESA announce a joint position for a tenure track faculty person who would teach half-time (D.Min. and M.Div. courses in holistic ministry) and serve half-time working with Ron Sider as Assistant Director of the Sider Center on Ministry and Public Policy at Eastern and directing ESA’s Network 9:35 program.

Network 9:35 offers tools, coaching, and programs to local churches seeking to combine evangelism and social ministry.

Requirements: Ph.D.; evangelical theology; passion for holistic ministry; desire to combine academic activities (teaching, research, and writing) with activist and popularizing work mobilizing the church for holistic ministry and the society toward justice.

Interested applicants should contact Naomi Miller at: nmiller2@eastern.edu tel: 610-645-9389; 6 E. Lancaster Avenue, Wynnewood, PA 19096.

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Looking Back, Looking Forward

BY DWIGHT OZARD

It was a messy, glorious delivery. Overwhelmed by the rest of the festivities, PRISM was born during ESA’s 20th Anniversary at the “Chicago Declaration II” conference.“Key Leaders” declared yet another declaration, and a rock-and-roll show took place. But as the first registrants trickled in, we pulled the first copies of PRISM (Volume 1.1) to our faces and sucked in the “fresh print stink,” sure that even the ink was heady with potential.

It was—and still is—which is why leaving is so damned difficult. PRISM is a good thing, and I have loved it with near parental intensity for over a decade.

Unearthing engaging, relevant, pastoral, and at our best (I believe) subversive moments from the culture around us has been among my deepest joys.And while we have taken great joy in pulling the

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carpet out from underneath evangelical piety, we have worked just as hard to point to a good and godly place to land and a life of faith that is whole and rich and true—and worldly.

But two days from now I’ll begin a second autologous stem-cell transplant —a simple procedure we pray will stop or slow the Multiple Myeloma (a rare, incurable bone-marrow cancer) that I’ve been fighting since 2001. By the time I’m ready to work again (the transplant has a 6- to 12-month recovery rate), I’ll be well into the fifth year of a mortality rate of “about five years” for MM. All things considered, passing the torch seemed the most responsible choice.

Besides, pop culture is a young man’s game.

Not that old means useless.Take Mavis Staples, who, after last year’s duet with the legendary troubadour on the gospel music tribute to Bob Dylan, You Gotta Serve Somebody (Columbia), this year showcased her guttural, ascending, sensual, wail of a voice on the vital if uneven Have a Little Faith (Alligator). If the songs and arrangements were at times cumbersome and prosaic, they were made transcendent solely by her voice.

Shout it aloud: I believe!

Not that believing is easy these days.

For me, cancer meant quitting a “dream job,” and therefore abandoning not just work but a calling, and with that came a deep, frightening self-doubt. In that state of mind, all the platitudes in the world only made my blood boil. Putting your arm around me and talking about how God has arranged all of this for his purposes is not only comfortless, it’s also a quick way to get punched in the nose.

No, comfort comes from commiseration, from the Holy Spirit, the advocate who comes to our side to champion

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our needs.

Thus MusicNotes insists that the best (and most “Christian”) music isn’t the stuff that answers questions for the listener, but raises them.

This explains our fondness for U2, including the “ironic”and admittedly difficult 1990s version.We loved their restless, dogeared faith, whether earnest or angry.

Now, of course, everyone’s back on U2’s bandwagon, Bono having apologized to Michael Powell and made nice with evangelicals (sending videos about AIDS and Trade to Christian festivals and doing a cover story for Christianity Today). As I write, it’s only days from the release of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Interscope), and the bits I’ve heard continue to find eternity in unlikely places, from Pennsylvania Avenue to AIDS clinics in the slums of Soweto.These are songs that raise all the best questions—mortality, love, sex, grace, and mercy—and then once in a while just look across a crowded room and wink, consumed by play.

Yep, what makes U2 the world’s best rock band is their insistence that, however deep Bono digs to get the best ideas and questions just right, the music has to rock, make you dance or sing or, in my case at most U2 shows, just throw your arms around a total stranger, grab a hanky, and ask/tell the person,“Isn’t this grand!?”

We’ve championed artists like The Vigilantes of Love and frontman Bill Mallonee, whose second solo d i s c, D e a r L i f e (Fundamental/Meat Market Records), finds him digging with Woody Guthrie in the gutters, and counting a rosary during his coffee breaks. I love Bill Mallonee.

Likewise, The 77s, who still show

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glimpses of being the best pure rock band in the world. You can pick up their best work at www.77s.com .

We’ve crusaded for two other n ow - d e c e a s e d artists. Gene Eugene and his stunning Adam Again, whose Prince-esque funk and amazingly engineered records explored betrayal, grace, and forgiveness with near unspeakable honesty. Gene died almost five years ago, and the records get better and better.

So, too, Mark Heard’s final three records and the 2-CD tribute disc that followed. Pure, dense, absolutely unfettered spiritual yearning, full of noble domestic longings and a Kierkegaardiancum-Georgia ennui, brimming with anger and a passive-aggressive fearfulness that simmers just below the surface, Heard’s songs are just as likely to make you crumble into unexpected weeping as they are to make you want to slam your fist into a desk. No one man made better music in the 90s (www.pastemusic.com is a good place to start).

Further into the marg ins is Canadian Leonard Cohen, the 74year-old Jewish/ Buddhist/Jesusas-Messiahobsessed/Order of Canada recipient who last October released the intoxicatingly dusky Dear Heather (Columbia). Cohen’s baritone rasp is charred by years of cigarettes and mellowed by whiskey, and the lounge-y 1970s “ooh ahh” vocals are an acquired taste, but if you can find your way to Cohen’s barroom sensuality and near monastic tonality, you’ll be overcome by a lyricism that suggests the poet’s deep reverence for the small of a woman’s back and a personal, intimate, knowable God.

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Enthusiastically recommended, in spite of itself, is k.d. Lang’s Hymns of the 49th Parallel (Nonesuch), Lang’s would-be tribute record to Canadian songwriters.

Lang, Canada’s most famous lesbian, also owns the Great White North’s best voice, a gift that rescues a disc half-full of predictable, lazy song choices.Why two each from Cohen, Neil Young, Jane Sibbery, and Joni Mitchell when so many other fine Canadian songwriters—like Ron Sexsmith—remain unheard? Still, Lang’s voice alone is intoxicating, and, whether singing well-worn classics or rarely sung gems, she leaves us wanting more.

Obviously I love the margins —nay, the gutters —more than the middle of the road.

But once in a while the charts are fodder for something of interest. Back in 1994 it was Amy Grant’s Heart in Motion. No alt-rock snob, I loved Grant’s delightful tightrope walking—delectable sugary pop confections like “Baby Baby” juxtaposed with grace-laden songs smart enough for grown-ups—and it’s all captured on her latest Best of 1986-2004 (Word/Curb).

These days CCM is focused on either moralistic anthems for the culture wars or “worship” music—and oddly, worship music stars. There’s a Monty Python flavor here, with the only difference between church singing and a “Christian concert” being the $50 ticket (Simony, anyone?) and the “machines that go bing” making lights and sound. Meanwhile, CCM continues to craft stars out of kids who don’t understand the difference between virtue and virginity. I won’t name names; rather, rest assured that there’s more than one Eliza Doolittle in CCM. But not all CCM “worship music” is spiritual

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self-pleasuring. In Faithfully Yours (Cross Driven), Margaret Becker and David E. Edwards have crafted a song-cycle based on the Psalms, allowing Becker to set her startlingly rich voice against the ancient yearnings in the Psalmist’s texts, bringing them unadorned save the gentleness of her disciplined, sensitive songwriting before her Lord.

Fernando Ortega’s eponymous fifth release (Curb/WORD) is another exception. I’ll take this to the hospital with me because Ortega insists (despite his record company’s desire to make him a “worship leader”) that the realm of the believing artist is, well, all realms.

The winsome Sixpence None the Richer incarnated the “all realms” theory of believer’s pop; their “Kiss Me” was Billboard’s 1999 Record of the Year.

Unfortunately, record company politics pushed them to break up, leaving us the desperately good The Best of Sixpence None the Richer (Squint/Reprise) to fulfill their obligations.

Kendall Payne’s wise-assed, selfeffacing hit,“Super Model,” became the theme for the WB TV ser ies, Popular. Four years later she’s back with Grown (www. kendallpayne.com), a smart, mature, sophomore record featuring “Scratch,” one of the best opening tracks on a record, ever.

Farewell for now.If you want to know what I’m up to in the coming months, go to www.dwightozard.com. I will miss you.Thank you for your care.

A freelance writer and organizational consultant, Dwight Ozard (www. dwightozard.com) was PRISM’s senior editor from 1994-1998.

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Prophets in Their Own Country

BY DWIGHT OZARD

Buddy Miller, Universal United House of Prayer New West Records Fifteen years ago Buddy Miller was a little-known singer/songwriter/guitarist, co-producing his wife Julie’s records for the Christian Myrrh label and playing the Nashville honky-tonk scene when not on the road with Julie. Eventually, both Millers quickly discerned that their callings were not to the CCM marketplace, and in 1995 both Millers signed individual deals with High Tone Records.With each release, Buddy and Julie’s star continued to rise. Julie’s songs were recorded by Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and others, while Buddy’s “Hole in My Head” was recorded by the multi-platinum Dixie Chicks (ca-ching!), and his considerable guitar talents led him to become Emmylou Harris’ bandleader.

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But it was the breadth of his tenure at High Tone that best captured Buddy’s vast and imaginative grasp of the mongrel that is American Music. On four records, Miller crafted and covered grinding, foot-stomping honky-tonk romps; “high, sad, and lonesome” brokenhearted country classics; fiery, classic drinkin’, cheatin’, travellin’, and hurtin’ rockabilly; and even a few plaintive, sentimental “revivalist” songs of worship.

If Miller’s High Tone catalogue testifies to his range as a writer/performer, his latest disc (and first with his new label, New West), Universal United House of Prayer, finds Miller actually testifying, embracing the gospel song form to create a disc that is profoundly, courageously subversive.

It would be easy to summarize Universal as a simple celebration of Miller’s faith, but such a summary would be sadly shortsighted. Miller’s testimony is also an unflinching critique of a Christianity that focuses on the salvation of the soul but ignores the poor, the lost, and the broken.

Indeed, Miller’s record of old-fashioned revivalist hymnody is the best anti-war/ protest disc since Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On? Universal reveals other commonalities between Miller and Gaye, finding its musical soul somewhere between the clapboard steps of the old country churches and the smoky, back-road speakeasies that wrestled so intensely for Gaye’s soul.

To ensure this unique musical alchemy, Miller invited Regina and Ann McCreary (daughters of the Rev. Sam McCreary, founder of The Fairfield Four), to sing on every track.Their ecstatic, exuberant wails and moans, suggestive of old-fashioned, Pentecostal, Holy-Ghost power, give the disc an authenticity and desperation that suggests that “a higher power”is immanent.

But Miller’s embrace of the handkerchief-waving gospel song doesn’t so much showcase either his own faith or the genre itself. Rather it subverts our expectations of both of them. Miller’s PRISM 2004

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“testimony” is as terrifying as it is uplifting (and it is uplifting), his exuberance tempered by his realization that in our worship we encounter the God of justice and righteousness. Our celebration and praise may be genuinely ebullient, but it brings a sense of calling with it, too, a calling that echoes throughout the record and all of history, too.This collection of low-slung, bluesy, rockabilly gospel becomes prophetic if only because it understands that we do not worship in a vacuum, that there are costs in praising the Prince of Peace when, outside, we puff our chests and celebrate a questionable war.

And so Miller opens Universal with Mark Heard’s “Worry Too Much”—all self-doubt, desperation, and forwardlooking fearfulness—setting a mood that suggests Miller might be wondering if the bright, rosy, consumerist paradise promised to us middling classes might not, in fact, be so promising. Miller’s praise rings true, if muffled, as he realizes that his “higher power’s” ability to “shelter” him is proclaimed under the banner of loving kindness that the Creator holds up for the least, the last, the lost. The truth is that even when singing exuberant praise, Miller is a troubled soul, asking God “Is That You?” in an extended prayer for discernment (written with Julie).

This inversion of expectations finds Miller’s spirituality much closer to Johnny Cash’s than Toby Keith’s.The latter exudes

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confidence, obliviously certain who the good and bad guys are, so certain in fact that he’s spending his war-time tax cut on just the right kind of devil/terrorist/evil-doer ass-kickin’ boots.

Miller, however? Not so sure.

There’s no grandstanding, flag-waving, fist-shaking, audience-baiting, or self-righteous brow-beating when Buddy plays—only an exquisite, heart-wrenching, crescendo-rising, nine-minute version of the oft-over-sung and under-realized Dylan classic,“God on Our Side,”grounded in a simple,profound humility that finds Miller’s most certain sentiments in his assertion that we need all the help we can get.

The publicity materials for Universal suggest that the record company has a big dose of the prototypical liberal nervousness that arises when artists who are neither black nor “white trash poor” play songs of faith they might actually believe.

In a funny and pathetic kind of reverse religious, racial, and social profiling (and discrimination), the “bio” assures us that while this is actually a “gospel” record it is not in any way a CCM disc.

No kidding.

Not that secular radio will do much better with Universal. With the notable exception of Rickie Lee Jones’ Evening of My Best Day, Miller shames most contemporary would-be protest singers, whose maddening caricatures and selfrighteous self-pleasuring serve only to assure fellow anti-warriors that they are smarter, wiser, better, truer, and more American than their opponents. (And yes, you get a gold star if you’re connecting the dots and realizing that this also describes CCM—Contemporary Christian Music —or CLM—Contemporary Lesbian Music—for that matter, to a “t”.)

And this is where Miller most distinguishes himself. Universal’s wounded, worldly, and deeply political gospel song cycle is a rare, brave record that is both uncompromising and genuinely inclusive. If there is justice in this world (and there isn’t), this disc would place Miller

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among American music’s most elite artists: Dylan, Springsteen, Guthrie….

But Buddy doesn’t give a rip. Indeed, throughout the 11 songs on Universal United House of Prayer, Miller’s ego is thoroughly prone, his considerable talents offered only to serve the songs, the questions they raise, and the Lord whose praises they sing.

Indeed, Miller knows his place, and knows that in that place standing for justice, truth, grace, and—finally—peace is costly. And worth it.

Pierce Pettis, Great Big World Compass Records First, when talking about this disc, I’ll dispense with any pretense of objectivity.

Pierce and Michelle Pettis are among the best of our friends, holding a place in our hearts cemented by a hysterical typo in a PRISM review of his disc Everything Matters.

Now, having declared my subjectivity, I shall say this about Great Big World:After nearly 20 years recording for a national audience, and writing hits for some of the biggest stars in the adult music industry, Pierce has produced his best record. Smart, lovely, heartbreaking, sensual (even erotic), full of faith and godly yearning, it’s worth every single penny.

Pierce’s songs are smart, lovely, and exquisitely simple—unadorned with any fancy production tricks, musical gadgets, or attempts at sounds he could never duplicate in concert—where the focus is solely upon his guitar (which he plays with exceptional skill), his voice (which is rich with pathos and emotion), and the songs themselves.

Not that there isn’t instrumentation.

It’s just that Pierce and producer Garry West rarely veer far from the sounds you can make on a big, gothic, Southern front porch: Banjoes, string and electric bass, fiddles, guitars, and small percussion sets (far different from big percussive sound) provide the disc’s foundation, occasionally enhanced by an old Hammond b-3 or PRISM 2004

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lap steel.The resulting sound is organic, playful, and delicious, arranged to bring the focus to the singer and the story he tells.

Only here—where the writing is so exceptionally, meticulously focused and precise in its ability to evoke the most vivid of images—does Pierce come close to showing off.The songs on Great Big World are profoundly good, conjuring worlds of young love (“Cracker Jack Ring”), the sensual (“Song of Songs” and “Rodeo Around the World”), history (“Alabama 1959,” “Leonardo”), growing up (“You’re Gonna Need This Memory”), and just plain worldly wonder (the title cut).

A song like “Alabama 1959” is nearly terrifying in its ability to breathe life into its lyrics, dropping listeners into the center of the last few years of Jim Crow and all the emotional and spiritual ambivalence that it evoked (and provoked) from believers struggling with the way things “have always been.”

Even “Another Day in Limbo,” the Mark Heard song with which Pierce begins the disc, finds Pierce pulling the reins back on a song frequently interpreted with a throat full of anger, finding resignation and exasperation more than anger and resistance. It’s a bold move, in its own way, allowing us to see how most of us non-Che Guevera types actually live “pre-kingdom”—casually, calmly, with only a hint of fear or genuine outrage.

It’s this kind of simplicity that makes Great Big World one of the year’s better records.

A freelance writer and organizational consultant, Dwight Ozard (www. dwightozard.com) was PRISM’s senior editor from 1994-1998.

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jazz, or even the touchstones of patriotic hymnody—singing “Georgia On My Mind,” “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” “Let’s Get Stoned,” or “America, the Beautiful”—he was first and foremost a pop artist, committed to using his music to touch the masses—and that is why the man had soul. May he rest in peace.

Worth Waiting For

From Mourning to Dancing

BY DWIGHT OZARD

As I write, Ray Charles is being laid to rest.

In her song “Spiderweb,” Joan Osborne conjures a world where Charles could see: He said, “Since I got my eyesight back, my voice has just deserted me.

No ‘Georgia On My Mind’ no more.

I stay in bed with M.T.V.” Then Ray took his glasses off and I could look inside his head.

Flashing like a thunderstorm, I saw a shining spider web.

Nearly every eulogy at his funeral mentioned not only Charles’ genius, but also how hard he worked to expand upon and tighten that genius, a discipline that arose from his commitment to using his gifts to serve others. Charles was endlessly curious as a musician, but whether playing gospel, the blues, country, R&B,

Seventeen years ago Leslie Phillips released The Turning (Myrrh/WORD/ DCC Compact Discs), easily among the finest “Christian” records ever made— and her swan song to CCM as well.

Angry and frustrated at what she perceived as its moral hypocrisy and confining, burdensome aesthetic, she quit Christian music, changed her name to “Sam,” married producer T Bone Burnett, inked a mainstream deal, and released several critically acclaimed discs, evolving into a leading light in the burgeoning smarter-than-your-averagechanteuse scene of the early ‘90s.These were good records, hampered only by her inability to write a love song that wasn’t a tortured metaphor for fundamentalism.

On A Boot and a Shoe (Nonesuch), Phillips seems at last to have abandoned this “Lot’s-wife” approach to songwriting, and the results are spectacularly whole. Boot finds Phillips cultivating the range of possibility in her reedy alto, as an exceptional singer in full control of her voice. Musically, Boot is shamelessly indebted to both Revolver-era Beatles and cabaret songsmiths like Nina Simone and Jacques Brel—a torchy (“as in tortured,” she jokes) saloon record that conjures a melodic intimacy and emotional immediacy out of the trace of coffee, cigarettes, and her recent divorce.

Often funny, frequently heart-wrenching, and always convincing, her songs are precise, powerful meditations on fidelity, betrayal, power, sex, religion, and politics. Indeed, the songs on A Boot and a Shoe exhibit a timelessness and PRISM 2004

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sophistication sorely missed in today’s popular songwriting.

The only record better than Sam’s Boot this year is Impossible Dream, the fourth release from Patty Griffith (Ato Records). Griffith’s voice is pure wonder—a rare, perfect collision of wispy fragility and unparalleled power. That Griffith’s songwriting is worthy of her voice only adds to the charm. This is weak-in-the-knees good.

Roots Are Showing The roots and future of contemporary music are brilliantly confused on Van Lear Rose (Interscope), the latest from country legend (and Coal Miner’s Daughter) Loretta Lynn and produced by Jack White (of the uber-hip The White Stripes). It would be easy to dismiss their partnership as an imitation of the alchemy that saw Rick Rubin make Johnny Cash “cool” again a decade ago. Don’t. The intense, furiously played rock-and-roll arrangements juxtaposed against Lynn’s honky-tonk vocals make Rose among the most exciting discs I’ve heard in years.

The Secret History of Rock & Roll, a new series of compilations released by Bluebird Records in June, is perfect for anyone interested in the roots of American popular music. The first two volumes —The Sacred Roots of the Blues and East Virginia Blues: The Appalachian Roots of Honky Tonk—feature restorations of some of the oldest recordings in existence.

Sacred Roots includes cuts from early radio preachers, traveling vocal groups, and formally trained soloists, each suggesting cadences and rhythms that would later find their way into both Memphis blues and the black church,

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and then into any Jerry Lee or “premovie” Elvis.The Appalachian disc likewise finds bluegrass pioneers like the Carter Family and the Monroe Brothers delivering an energy and intimacy suggestive of the rugged, moonshine-peddling, after-hours music that would eventually be known as “Honky Tonk.”

This is very fun, and very, very cool.Who knew learning could be so much fun?

Finally, worth noting is Rest, the latest (and exceptional) offering of intimate worship music from Canadian pastor/singer-songwriter Glen Soderholm.

This disc can be purchased online at w w w. s i g n p o s t m u s i c . c o m or www.glensoderholm.com

Shake Your (Godly) Groove Thang Once upon a time, good evangelical kids didn’t dance.

No, wait, that’s not true.We weren’t allowed to dance.

And I’m not just talking about “suggestive” dances like the Mashed Potato, the Bump, or the Twist. Nope, the forbidden matrix of all things rhythmic included even the square dance inserted into your second-grade class play.

Apparently, the “Hokey Pokey” was a gateway dance.

Sure,trying to explain to your “pagan” friends how dancing was “of the devil” was embarrassing, but we survived— with loads of irony-drenched character to boot.

Now that I’m older, however, evangelicalism has become, for better or worse, permissive. Dancing is now okay.

Most evangelical theologians now agree that my aunt was wrong when she asked,

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“Do you think Jesus will go into a discotheque (or movie theater) to get you when he returns?”

This isn’t so bad, I guess—backbeats and backseats are wasted on the young, anyway.And yet I still find myself conflicted as I anticipate newly dancepositive social functions like my nephew’s upcoming nuptials. Giddy at the prospect of finally throwing down in the company of the Ozard saints, I remain pathetically fearful that halfway through the night they’ll change the rules and I’ll be found out.

You see, I can’t dance.

Now, I have plenty of rhythm, but somewhere between the boom-chunkaboom-bow in my head and the 1-2-3 Arthur Murray footprints on the floor there’s a full-blown short-circuit. I don’t know if it’s hardwiring, or if I can blame it on spending my adolescence associating school dances with imminent hellfire, but when I “dance,” it’s not pretty.

I’ve been thinking about dancing a lot lately. Since I can’t afford a sports car, my cancer-fueled midlife crisis is a deliberate, musical exploration of the “rebellious youth I never had.” Having spent the spring with The Clash, I’ve now arrived at James Brown.

This may not be an exciting landmark if you’re under 40, given Brown’s Rocky IV travesty (“Living in America”), his jail time for spousal-battery in the ’90s, and his immovable, wholly unnatural hair. But trust me, please, and find your way to Brown’s seminal early-’60s recordings when he was actually creating funk.

Now don’t be fooled. Funk is not soul, disco, or R&B. Put on Marvin, Smokey, Sam, Otis, or even Aretha and you may want to dance. But you may also want to make out, march on Selma, pray, or just spend the afternoon listening alone in your room, overcome.

These are good things, but they are hybrids, alchemies all. But funk is pure, and elicits purity.

And James Brown,“the hardest workPRISM 2004

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ing man in show business”? Those early tracks find him inventing funk, a wholly distinct, bottom-heavy groove—best played by black men in funny glasses (Bootsy Collins) or wearing costumes (George Clinton, Prince)—that leaves its fingerprints everywhere. (For example, the late, great Adam Again doesn’t exist without Brown.) Indeed, the grooves constructed by Brown’s unspeakably disciplined band on early tracks like “Get Up (Feel Like Being a Sex Machine Part I),” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” and the ubiquitous “I Feel Good” are the closest thing to perfect, carnal righteousness imaginable in popular music. Call it what you want— “getting down,” “bogeying,” “tripping Dick Clark and the light-fantastic”— but when Brown gets played, it elicits a Kierkegaardian, “purity of heart is to will one thing” response, and there’s just one thing to do: Dance.

Indeed, I believe with an almost creedal intensity that funk has transportive, rapturous powers; if you allow it, it will transcend everything else around you—politics, anger, fearfulness, injustice, cancer, whatever—and in that moment, exaltation and celebration are within reach. (This was never more apparent than on the evening of April 4, 1968—the night Dr. King was killed —when Brown’s public statements and insistence that his concert go on as planned quelled a riot in Boston.)

But Brown’s greatness remains centered in the utter irresistibility of his funk.

Put it on and we can’t help ourselves— eventually we’ll try to imitate how he moves his feet. We can’t, of course—in the shadow of Brown, we’re all pathetic oafs. But here’s the great thing: We won’t care, and that’s just this side of miraculous.

A freelance writer and organizational consultant, Dwight Ozard was PRISM’s senior editor from 1994-1998 (see more of his writing at www. dwightozard. com).

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Best Laid Plans

BY DWIGHT OZARD

I confess: Sometime in the past five years, I somehow went from being fully conversant in “hip” to being one of those old guys who are regularly dismissive of the crop at the top of the charts. Devouring bowls of tripe Pho at a Vietnamese joint in South Philly with my best friends, nearly yelling to hear each other over Justin, 50 Cent, and The Darkness on the restaurant’s apparently “hipper-thanthou” radio, I actually heard myself say, “This crap just can’t stand up to the songs we grew up with.”

Ahhhgggg.

I used to love to ride the wave, to be on the cutting edge. Even if I didn’t like cool, I at least could claim to “get it.” I’d spent a decade nurturing a reputation as a pop-culture guru, and while I wasn’t actually cool, I at least knew what cool looked like, got to hang out with it, and occasionally was asked to give lectures or write liner notes about it. But now? I had become my father.

Aware of my devolution into an old

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fogy, I made a resolution then and there to expand my musical palate and reclaim something like a “clue” about what is “cool.” Alas, the best laid plans….

I have purchased a handful of popchart toppers. My wife helped me love the soaring, moody, theological naiveté of semi-gothrockers Evanescence, and I remain charmed by playful hip-hoppers OutKast. (The ghost of Tipper Gore demands I warn you that OutKast’s Speakerboxx/The Love Below, while a long way from “gangsta,” is equally removed from suburban, church-withcarpet sensibilities—they earned the parental-advisory sticker; my inner contrarian demands I remind listeners that their big hit, “Hey Ya,” contrasts the singer’s parents’ life of marriage and fidelity favorably with his own desire to be promiscuous; and my white-boy-inhis-40s-can’t-dance-but-still-loves-da funk transparency admits to not getting the layers of urban, black irony that bathes this disc.) But aside from these exceptions, I mostly ignore chart-toppers (Reuben? Clay? Love American Idol but hate the music) or uber-trendy ironic rockers (The White Stripes? Didn’t like Zeppelin the first time; The Darkness?

Puh-lease. I have a Queen album).

Instead I’ve been shoring up my collection of old records—buying Motown classics, the entire Clash catalogue, the skid-row infused and heartbreakingly terrific Pogues, and a couple dozen discs from grown-up, alt-country singer/songwriters and rock bands.

There’s no escaping it: I’m old. But does that mean, as I wondered a few months back, that “death” is creeping into my record collection?

I hope not. It’s just that with a short “sell-by” date tattooed on the back of my neck (stupid cancer nonsense), I can no longer endure pretense. For my hardearned (and scarce) cash, I want genuine, soulful, enduring surprise that moves me toward something like delight.

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And so, to that end, here is my take on a few things that have crossed my desk of late.

Closer to the Edge One of the discs I’ve fallen in love with recently also happens to be the most avant-garde bit of pop I’ve actually paid for in years. (It’s important to remember that one of the reasons I started to write about music was free records.We are not objective.We are harlots.)

Seven Swans, the sophomore release from Danielson Familie protégé Sufjan Stevens, is absolute, giddy, glorious fun —a banjo-driven, front-porch, countrypunk record-on-valium cornucopia that offers insight into a left-of-center artistry and faith that is at once effortless and painstakingly focused. Quirky, to be sure, but this disc got under my skin before the first track was finished and never let go.

Passions I was deeply ambivalent about Mel Gibson’s celluloid meditation on “the stations of the cross,” The Passion of the Christ, and deeply troubled by the implications of its full-frontal PR/media assault on the conservative American establishment. (I mean, honestly, it was a movie, not a catechism, but the PR machine was so successful that in many churches believers who didn’t like the film—for whatever reason—found their faith called into question. Many years ago in PRISM, I called this phenomenon the “spiritualization of commodity” in an article now available at www.dwightozard .com/lq-article.asp?id=3.)

I am not, however, in any way ambivalent about the new CD Songs Inspired by the Passion of the Christ (UMG Soundtracks). This is not John Denby’s original score for the film, which is reminiscent of, but far less interesting than, Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack to Martin Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Christ, but

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instead a gathering of genuinely interesting, thoughtful, and surprisingly offthe-beaten-track pop songs from the likes of Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan. I dig this.

A Passionate Bandwagon Over the past few years I’ve offered occasional criticism of CCM’s current obsession with “worship” music, largely because much of it is so shockingly selfabsorbed (by definition,“worship” music cannot be self-absorbed, right?). Thank God for the projects produced by former Choir lyricist Steven Hindalong, including the recent City on a Hill and the hard-to-find At the Foot of the Cross, which have been glorious exceptions.

New from Hindalong (and Common Children front man Marc Byrd) is The Christ, His Passion: Remembering His Sacrifice, another thoughtful multi-artist release (including Third Day, Paul Coleman, Jars of Clay, Phil Keaggy, and Sixpence None the Richer’s final recording) that begins a new trilogy of meditations on the life of Christ. The fact that the label decided to release His Passion, intended as the last of this series, first, and Hindalong felt obligated to include songs already part of both the City and Foot series, suggests a Gibson-esque timing too opportunistic to ward off cynicism, and it’s too bad. Hindalong and company—and this project— deserve better.

Garth Hewitt Garth Hewitt has been making music in England for 30 years, a career celebrated by his latest release, 30 Songs Spanning 30 Years 1973-2003 (ICC). A Christian rock “pioneer” in the United Kingdom, Hewitt is also an Anglican missionary who has become a leading champion of progressive Christian politics, and this disc artfully chronicles his quite important career. (The liner notes

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are fascinating history, suggesting a subtle indictment of American evangelicalism as they chronicle Hewitt’s late-’70s and early-’80s flirtation with the U.S. CCM scene.) While the literalism of some of Hewitt’s more political songs—especially the later ones—can be a little off-putting (and a bit dull, too), there are enough examples of his ability to write songs of exceptional depth and insight (his tribute to Johnny Cash, for example) to make this a delightful little history lesson. (www.amostrust.org)

TransJazz ESA member, speaker, and author Ron Mitchell leads the NYC-based ensemble TransJazz, whose debut, Transitions (EBL Entertainment), is grounded in delightfully fine—though far from edgy—jazz chops.The players here easily hold their own, and with guests like saxman Ron Brown it’s hard to go wrong. So, too, the singing of Vanessa Daley, whose smooth, sultry voice suggests she’s a find.

Transitions’ songs, however, fall short.

When interpreting “traditional” hymns and gospel songs, Trans Jazz offers compelling fun. But Mitchell and Daley’s original songs feel immature and underdone, suffering from a lyrical obviousness that is sadly dull. Transitions is a disc full of promise but not enough surprise. (www.ebl-entertainment.com)

What if Cartoons Got Saved?

If you’re a youth minister you probably already know Chris Rice’s compelling, frequently playful songs, and Short Term Memories (Rocketown) collects his “best” in one place. Of these, the most fun and most troubling is “Cartoons.”At once a praise song and paean to pop culture, it asks Saturday-morning TV “stars” like Elmer Fudd and Fred Flintstone,“What if cartoons got saved?” It’s fun because it answers the question with playful and perfectly dopey sing-along moments like “yaba-daba-lujah.” And it’s troubling

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because when Rice gets to asking the question of Beavis and Butthead he pauses and says “nah….” What? Fart jokes and an adolescent love for bad metal take you out of God’s reach?!

Moreover, Rice never actually calls Butthead by name, referring instead to “Beavis and that other guy.” Such parochialism is suggestive of what is so desperately wrong with contemporary American evangelicalism. Rather than offering us redemption from moralism, our modern-day “old-time religion” is grounded in it, taking the very kind of wild, unwieldy swaths with the scythe at the “wheat and tares” that Jesus forbade.

Hardly reminiscent of “suffer the little children….” Sigh.

This Idol Voice Is the Playground of the Spirit I confess to being a fan of American Idol (see www.dwightozard.com/lq-article .asp?id=40).The first season had only a couple of great singers, and I didn’t consider RJ Helton to be one of them.

Convinced that RJ’s doe-eyed, matineeidol good looks far outweighed his vocal abilities, I wasn’t terribly disheartened when my health forced me to turn down a several-day gig in NYC last fall doing media training with him. Imagine my surprise, then, when I heard RJ’s debut, Real Life (GospoCentric/Zomba).

To the point: this very “Christian” experiment in pure,unadulterated R&B-tinged pop is very, very good. RJ clearly learned a lot from Simon et al, and he has become a singer of satisfying subtlety (a trait rarely encouraged on Idol, but absolutely necessary to succeed on it).The songs, many co-written by Helton, are good, too. I’ll get letters, I’m sure, but I dig this disc.

A freelance writer and organizational consultant, Dwight Ozard was PRISM’s senior editor from 1994-1998 (see more of his writing at www. dwightozard. com).

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CCM News: Collaborations and Compilations Worth Owning

BY DWIGHT OZARD

In the Name of Love In the last issue, I spent several column inches in lament, yearning for something like adventure and passion and purpose from our musicians and from each other. Having grieved that a concert like Nelson Mandela’s 46664 AIDS benefit could be nearly invisible in America, I learned only days later of Bono’s proposal to the NFL that he and Jennifer Lopez introduce his AIDS awareness song “American Prayer” during the Super Bowl halftime show. The NFL, along with MTV (whom the NFL had

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hired to produce the intermission) turned the Irish superstar down flat, declaring that a social-issue song was “not appropriate” for a Super Bowl halftime.

We don’t need to “undress” the tragic irony that comes next, do we?

But there is good news.Around the same time that the evil empire—NFL, MTV, CBS, and Viacom—was showing itself to have the substance and depth of an empty tube of K-Y Jelly, Sparrow/ EMI Records, working with World Vision, was releasing In the Name of Love, a 13-song compilation of U2 covers by CCM artists like Pillar, Starfield, Nicole Nordeman,Jars of Clay,Delirious, Toby Mac,Tait, Grits, and (the now disbanded) Sixpence None the Richer.

The disc benefits a couple of excellent HIV/AIDS ministries in Africa (www. inthenameofloveCD.com/whyafrica).

You should buy this record.

But understand that as important as this disc is as a cultural marker, as a collection of songs it’s just plain flawed, especially for diehard U2 fans like me.

The bands on the disc are clearly fans, too, and it shows in their far-too-faithful, almost reverent, on-the-verge-ofkaraoke covers.

There are, thank God, exceptions.

Sixpence’s take on “Love is Blindness” works well, largely because the song is U2’s bleakest and therefore not susceptible to CCM sheen. Tait’s moving recording of “One” highlights the dc Talk alum’s voice and passion. Grits’ take on “With or Without You” suggests why they are the undisputed kings of “Christian” hip hop. And let’s be honest: Delirious has always sounded like a U2 cover band anyway, so their take on “Pride (in the Name of Love)” is exactly what you might expect. Most of the rest of the covers are decent, but not surprising or exciting in any way.

But you’re not going to buy this disc to stretch your musical tastes.You’re going to buy it because a bunch of artists in

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an otherwise very conservative, cautious, and occasionally narrow world are doing two very noble things.

First,without compensation,they have committed themselves to raising awareness of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and making it the social issue for CCM consumers. Right now, CCM is actually leading the evangelical subculture in championing this cause—and evangelicals have become the force that has turned lawmakers’ heads on this issue and made it a budget, as well as a rhetorical, priority.

Second, these artists have gone into a fairly narrow marketplace and declared the music of U2 a good thing. If nothing else, perhaps this disc will encourage a few CCM fans to investigate actual U2 recordings and find something other than last year’s Golden Globe Awards to talk about.

Like I said: Buy this record.

Full Circle Twenty years ago this month I was a Bible-college graduate, had just moved back to London (Ontario), and was still nearly a year away from being fired from my first (unpaid) ministry job at one of the largest churches in my (soon to be former) denomination. In those earnest days, I spent nearly all of my (very limited) disposable income in one of two places: Forsey’s, an exceptional, charming, date-friendly, dessert-only restaurant (you know you’re a regular when the waitresses give you Christmas presents) and Sam the Record Man’s—specifically, the downtown London branch of the nowdefunct legendary Canadian record chain.

Looking back, I can clearly see that both establishments served essentially the same purposes for me: the nurture of either romance or soulful conversation.

And so, when I learned that John Stephenson, my favorite Bible-college professor, would be visiting London, we arranged to meet at Forsey’s.

Now, understand this about John.

More than any professor I’ve had—in

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Bible college, university, or grad school —John encouraged me to wrestle with the margins, to resist the temptation to settle, and to nurture restlessness and curiosity.And that challenge extended far beyond academics.An insatiably thoughtful student (and fan) of pop-music culture, John taught me to slow down and discover how a song or film or television show could teach us about our lives of faith and the role of all things—beautiful, terrifying, or godly—in those lives.

Better still, John insisted on reciprocity, inviting us to challenge and share with him the things that moved us most deeply. And so, just as he helped us discover Barth or Neibhur, we introduced him to U2, Bruce Cockburn, Midnight Oil,The Clash, and, that night in 1984, Charlie Peacock’s debut: Lie Down in the Grass.

John called a week before we met to ask one question—“Whatcha listening to these days?”—so that he could get a copy of the LP before we met.And after seven days of listening, it was clear to both of us that no other questions would be necessary.We spent the entire evening talking about a record so oddly, deliciously out of place in Christian music that neither of us knew where to start.With its intricate rhythms and chord structures, playful, jazz-influenced arrangements (reminiscent of the first Joe Jackson record), thoughtful, impressionistic lyrics (that actually assumed the intelligence of his listener), and Peacock’s light-as-air yet solid-as-the-earth-beneath-us voice, Lie Down was a revelation.

But the most remarkable thing about Lie Down was how unapologetically grown up it was. Peacock brought nothing of the poseur, trend-seeker, or opportunist to this LP; rather, Lie Down was a record that could only be born from unselfconscious thoughtfulness, absolute transparency, and extraordinary, glorious curiosity (both musical and lyrical). Against the backdrop of the accelerating sameness of

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most pop fare,Peacock’s music was intoxicating in its expansiveness. Something exhilarating and new emerged at every listen, and because of that it was nearly impossible to take it from the turntable.

More importantly, Lie Down nurtured those same qualities in us.Pop junkies that we were (a year later I became a radio producer/host to enable the addiction), my roommate and I spent many evenings listening to and reflecting on great music, and when we started with Peacock, we were inevitably drawn toward the deeper things.

But however sophisticated we might have thought ourselves, we quickly discovered that Peacock’s music demanded that we put aside any self-importance in order to make room in our conversations for silence—something that most pop music usually can’t abide—and intimacy, kindness, gentleness, wisdom, and grace.

It was, perhaps, the most important and formative lesson of our young lives.

And it spoiled me for anything less.

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to get to know Peacock a bit, and more than anyone else, he reminds me of John Stephenson. Peacock’s commitment to excellence, thoughtfulness, curiosity, gentleness, and grace, exhibited so masterfully 20 years ago, remains—and is evidenced in every aspect of his life and work as an artist, songwriter, producer, student, author, theologian, activist, and friend.And as with my friend and teacher John, in Peacock’s company I’ve experienced the gentle calling of the Spirit to that same commitment.

To top things off, Sparrow has just released Full Circle.At once the first new Peacock record in five years and a celebration of his 20th anniversary as a recording artist, Full Circle finds Peacock collaborating on 11 old songs and two new tunes with a diverse group of artists whose lives and work have been influenced by him over the years.This group includes Mike Roe (77s), fellow Vector

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member Jimmy Abegg, Bela Fleck, Sarah Masen,Toby Mac, Sara Groves, Jon and Tim Foreman, Michael Tait, Sixpence None the Richer, Steve Taylor, Margaret Becker, Bart Millard, and Phil Keaggy.

The result of all these collaborations is a rarity—a “special event” album that actually works.

In fact, Full Circle is fantastic. For example, Peacock recreates “Lie Down in the Grass” with the brilliant and thoughtful Steve Taylor and the endlessly delightful, classy, and creative Margaret Becker as a hybrid cross of new wave manic pop with a gutsy, guitar-driven industrial under-belly, a la Nine Inch Nails. Sixpence helps Peacock deliver an understatedly blissful cover of Peacock’s Amy Grant mega-hit “Every Heartbeat,” while a surprisingly soulful Avalon,Darwin Hobbs, and Michael Tait find a slowburn funk in “Down in the Lowlands.”

And former dc Talk artiste Kevin Max puts the reins on “Big Man’s Hat” and makes its fat, irrepressible soul simmer just this side of the boiling point.There’s not a bad song in the bunch, making Full Circle, to state it plainly, the best “CCM” disc of the year.

Go buy it now. I’ll be buying a second copy and sending it to John.

A freelance writer and organizational consultant, Dwight Ozard was PRISM’s senior editor from 1994-1998 (see more of his writing at www. dwightozard. com).

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Death in Our Record Collection?

BY DWIGHT OZARD

“Death begins in your record collection,” Bono once said. But this warning is neither a critique of the sad state of pop music nor a parental caution regarding the dangers of heavy metal on sullen teenagers. Rather, it is an admonition —whether in music or in life—to stretch ourselves beyond the familiar,and a warning that when we decide that we have literally had enough—that we no longer want to be challenged or surprised—we have decided to stop growing.

While such a choice offers an illusion of safety (ask the programmers at Clear Channel or the self-appointed guardians of the truth at the Evangelical Theological Society and the National Religious Broadcasters), the inevitable result of such false contentment is rigor mortis—a deathly inflexibility that is both unChrist-like and, well, boring.

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How sad I am for those people.

Honestly, without surprises, why bother?

Those moments when something new dawns before us and suddenly everything in the universe has changed—they are everything. Admittedly those moments are harder to come by as we get older, but the rarity of genuine surprises should increase our motivation to seek them out. The possibility of inspiration and delight should drive us from the middle of the road at every opportunity, first to the “highways and byways,” then towards the margins, and then, the gutters.

So why do we spend so much energy limiting our experience to only the comfortable or familiar? It’s not as if we have to stop liking Norah Jones just because we discover Fugazi. And yet if you travel across America today it’s nearly impossible to find a radio station anywhere that doesn’t have an inflexibly narrow, dreadfully predictable playlist.

But as sad as corporate radio is, Christian pop—as well as the booming “worship music” subgenre currently paying most of its bills—is worse: It actually manages to be boring. (How can this happen?) While there are some noble, lovely exceptions, there is very little of the “consuming fire” left.

But, glory to God, surprises still happen.The Spirit will find a way, even in something as appalling and predictable as pop music.

Last year, on the day before World AIDS Day, a couple dozen artists from South Africa and around the world, including Bono, Beyoncé, Bob Geldoff, Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox, the Corrs, Queen, and Ms. Dynamite gathered in Cape Town for “46664,” a huge benefit concert that was to be the largest single TV/media/internet event in the history of the world, all designed to focus attention on the largest single health crisis in the history of humanity: the AIDS pandemic. Unfortunately, here in America, MTV broadcast only a painfully edited 90-minute re-broadcast PRISM 2004

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of the concert at odd times, making this one of the few places in the world where viewers couldn’t see the concert in its entirety.

MTV did show a few highlights that were VCR/Tivo-worthy, including Annie Lennox’s luminous set and Bono’s duet with a quickly maturing Beyoncé Knowles (please lose the go-go get-ups) on a new song called “America’s Prayer.”

That song, as well as Bono’s introduction to it, calls for a new “sanctuary” movement in America’s churches, for believers to make room in our cathedrals (and lives) for those who are affected by or infected with HIV. “God loves them,” Bono said. “So what’s our problem?”

Today, when 65 percent of those infected with the disease in Africa are either monogamous, faithful, married Christian women or their (soon to be orphaned) children, it is fundamentally irresponsible for Western Christian gatekeepers to lecture AIDS patients about “values and ethics” or to tie relief and development funding to certain programs designed to accomplish social engineering here at home. Our patriarchy has had a long, deadly reach.

MTV and Congress must have shuddered when Bono used this platform to talk explicitly and exclusively to believers, but I heard the rush of angels’ wings. Death was pushed further back in the collection.

Note, too, the subversive quality of the concert’s name: 46664 was Nelson Mandela’s prison number when he was jailed during apartheid. Mandela made a short speech during the concert in which he talked about the function of that number, noting how during his captivity he was never referred to by his given, “Christian,” name. As long as he was only a number, he told his audience, his keepers could dehumanize him and his opponents could ignore him.

The broad analogy is easy to make, and he made it. There are 30 million

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people with HIV/AIDS in Africa right now. By the end of the decade, there may be that many AIDS orphans. It’s staggering.

Those of us in the West—those of us who can afford to have extended conversations about record collections—live most of our lives with little thought of that ghastly number. Indeed, the only reason we can give it little thought is because for most of us it is only that— a number.

But then again, it’s not as if the Christian book or music industry (or even most of our churches) are anxious for us to consider them—they don’t want to be “left behind” at the shareholders meeting.And so the middle of the road is cluttered with dreadful rehearsals of the most pedestrian of Christian notions, and the Spirit finds itself hanging out in the gutter with the children who have no name.

Now for the good news: Something is happening in the CCM world that is genuinely monumental. It started in the summer of 2002, when Steve Taylor, Charlie Peacock, and Jay Swartzendruber, a guy you’ve never heard of but who has been creeping around the Christian music scene for a decade or so doing good, called our boy Bono and asked him if he’d help them talk to Christian musicians about AIDS. Bono made a video, it got played at Creation Fest and at a few backroom meetings in Nashville, and suddenly a groundswell of artists started to ask how they could help. Jars of Clay, Third Day, Michael W. Smith, Toby Mac, Plus One, Natalie Grant, and a slew of others came to the table. Last winter Bono stopped in Nashvegas on his “Heart of America” tour with Ashley Judd and Chris Tucker and met with these artists, and since then, they’ve been championing this issue with their fans.

Most of the charities you’re used to seeing Christian artists working for— World Vision, Compassion, the Bible Society, etc.—in one way or another pay

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artists to represent them. In the case of some artists, there are actually bidding wars for their services. But in the case of this new AIDS push, the artists have led the way, and they’re doing it at their own expense because they are committed to leading the American church into becoming the beacon of hope, love, and justice that it ought to be. There is no real organizational beneficiary of their activism; rather, these artists are simply raising the issue and calling those who might listen to “have ears to hear.”

It’s a revival in Nashville.The Spirit is dancing.The nameless are being named.

CCM has finally found a place in the gutter. Hallelujah.

And so, this little rant ends with a prayer that death is a long, long way from your record collection, that life is finding its way to breathe deeply whenever you hit “play.”

Maybe you’re 16, in love for the first time but heartbroken, balled up in the corner of your room, shaking with grief as you listen over and over to something as pedestrian as John Waite’s “Missing You” or Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.”

Perhaps you’re in college, filled with anger at the injustice in the world and frustration that nobody else seems to care, when a friend lends you Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?” or the Clash’s London Calling or Bruce Cockburn’s “Call It Democracy” or Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire or Midnight Oil’s “Beds Are Burning” or Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and suddenly you know you’re not alone.

Maybe it’s the ten-thousandth time (at least) in your life you’ve sung “Jesus Loves Me,” except you are alone in your 5-month-old nephew’s nursery and suddenly your soul is soaring against the inside of your chest and you think you might explode because those words suddenly say exactly what until that moment had been entirely inarticulate yearnings for that boy.

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Or, perhaps you’re a 41-year-old preacher/writer/communications consultant lying on your couch, exhausted from a week of high-dose steroids and experimental cancer drugs and completely frustrated with your inability to work or even leave the house to take your wife out for dinner, listening to Emmylou Harris’ “Here I Am” on her new Stumble Into Grace, and you’re suddenly transported by the absolute assurance that we are indeed not alone.

For three-and-a-half minutes, at least, the Spirit is not for sale, and we bathe in the free gift of his nearness.

A freelance writer and organizational consultant, Dwight Ozard was PRISM’s senior editor from 1994-1998 (see more of his writing at www. dwightozard. com).

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Bang the Drum Loudly

BY DWIGHT OZARD

WARREN ZEVON The Wind (ARTEMIS RECORDS)

I’ve observed Warren Zevon’s 25-plusyear career from a largely disinterested perspective, although I liked what he was up to in general.A master of great little narratives that veer off the beaten path, he imbued his records with a twisted, dark sense of humor that was obsessed with the slightly seamy. And a few of his songs, like the playful and obvious “Werewolves of London” and “Excitable Boy,”were cool enough to make me want to borrow Zevon LPs from friends so I could include them on mix tapes (filesharing, old school). But when push came to shove, I just couldn’t imagine myself wanting to listen to his stuff often enough to shell out the cash for an entire disc.

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Zevon’s final record, The Wind, has changed all that for me. Smart, funny, and defiant, it proves that rock-and-roll songwriting can be decidedly grown up—even whole. More importantly, however, The Wind is an example of a man using his art to come to terms with what really matters in life and love.

Zevon wrote and recorded The Wind after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer late in 2002.While he might have prolonged his life with certain therapies, the songwriter chose to forgo treatments in order to have the strength (and voice) to make this record—a choice that allowed him to document his feelings and experiences while making his “peace” with a kind of emotional precision and intentionality that is both heart-wrenching and laugh-out-loud funny. (It also allowed him to gather a band of all-stars that sounds like a who’s who of classic ’70s folk-rock, including David Lindley, most of the Eagles, at least one member of Styx, Emmylou Harris, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, T-Bone Burnett, and even The Waltons’ John Waite.)

As someone living with incurable cancer, I can tell you that this musical “testament” rings very true. But I can also tell you that you don’t need to be sick to find a whole bunch of grace, wisdom, and kindness in this disc.

The Wind opens with “Dirty Life and Times,” a folk-country sing-along reminiscent of an old Hank Williams lament that features the tweedy background vocals of Dwight Yoakum and Billy Bob Thorton and a classic Ry Cooder slide-guitar countermelody. A playful appeal for companionship in the waning days of life, the song establishes a perfect balance of self-deprecation and genuine desperation, straddling the deadly serious and laughable with a plea to find a “woman with low self-esteem to lay me out and ease my worried mind while I’m winding down my dirty life and times.”

“Disorder in the House” expands PRISM 2004

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upon Zevon’s desperation—a full-on bruiser of a rock song that strings together a collection of metaphors for his body’s dysfunction. It features Bruce Springsteen’s harmony vocals and a razorsharp, viciously executed guitar solo that near-perfectly captures the physical dissonance at work in Zevon’s body. So, too, does “Rub Me Raw,” an old-school electric-blues-boogie-romp that finds Zevon at his contrarian best, insisting that “I’m gonna sit up straight, I’m gonna take it with class” while demanding that his death-obsessed, internet-chat-room fan base get a life and stop obsessing on his disease.

This is welcome insight.While some might be tempted to spend their final days pondering the mysteries of the universe, karma, and the injustice of “why bad things happen to good people,” Zevon clearly saw those “big” questions as distractions from what really matters most.Trust me, I know about these things —those broad philosophical quandaries (whether framed in secular or theological terms) might be interesting in the abstract, but they offer absolutely no comfort or mercy in the immediate.

And so Zevon wisely gives them a pass and focuses on more immediate, intimate, and ultimately much more profound territory.

“Numb as a Statue” finds Zevon at a loss for words and feelings in the face

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of his diagnosis, declaring that he will “beg, borrow or steal/ some feelings from you/ so I can have some feelings too.”

It’s a declaration of emotional neediness that is as dead-on as it is tender, a realization that however independent he might have been before his illness, detachment is a luxury he can no longer afford. In the face of certain death, everything becomes a function of community and companionship—even the limits of sentiment.

“The Rest of the Night” is an invitation to pure revelry and comraderie that in another context might seem a caricature of rock-and-roll excess.Against the backdrop of “numbered days,” however, it rings as absolutely responsible.

Zevon understood that the certainty of death must not stand in the way of a throaty, defiant laugh and a long night of merriment. Indeed, death demands such things.

But most moving about The Wind is its straightforward sentimentality. If death demanded playfulness it demanded even more tenderness from Zevon, and he responded in droves, crafting a few of the most poignant, immediate love songs in recent memory.

“She’s Too Good For Me” is the romantic equivalent of an evangelical “testimony” song, and finds Zevon overwhelmed by the pure grace he has experienced from his lover. He knows he doesn’t deserve the love she gives him, and that makes him cling all the more.

“El Amor De Mi Vide” is a rich and lovely hymn to the constancy of his lover —the kind of heartbreaking, soul-satisfying love song that would make even Shakespeare blush. “Please Stay,” meanwhile, is a song of desperation, pure and simple—a yearning for company and companionship and “the other side of goodbye.”The disc ends with “Keep Me in Your Heart,” a song that in lesser hands might have veered into the maudlin or pathetic. Here, however, it becomes a simple, prayer-like plea that Zevon be

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remembered and cherished after he’s gone.

Now, I admit I’m way too close to this record. The Wind was released just a few weeks before I learned my own cancer was resurgent, and since then it’s become a kind of emotional primer for me, a means to acknowledge sentiments (good and bad) that otherwise might have remained painfully inarticulate.This has been especially true as I’ve found myself overwhelmed by my wife’s patience and kindness—these songs have allowed me words where there might have been only stilted, pathetic silence.

But as good as this record might be as a companion to those who are sick it is a better mentor to the living.The fact is that in his death (he died just a few weeks after The Wind was released) Zevon found his way to the heart of things that matter most: laughter, a loose grip on things, the company of friends, and the steadfastness of a lover who values you more deeply than you deserve.These are lessons you shouldn’t have to wait for death’s approach to learn, and Zevon’s chronicling of them offers an invaluable shorthand to anyone who wants something like wisdom. I wish you these things.

Short Takes If it’s been too long since you’ve heard a genuinely progressive-sounding and intelligent garage rock band, check out the sophomore release from The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Take Them On Your Own (Virgin). Primed at the pump of post-punk adrenaline and grounded by an unquestionable sense of melody, BRMC is a smarter-than-average alternative to the pabulum currently in rotation at most rock radio:a rock band of genuine political and spiritual seekers that possesses an agenda without a heavy hand.

Which is exactly how to describe the evolution of San Diego-based metalrapper-reggae innovators POD, whose latest disc, Payable On Death (Atlantic), released this past November to a PRISM 2004

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groundswell of critical praise. Having emerged from the fringes of the margins of the alternative “Christian” music scene, POD has managed to forge itself a huge, immensely loyal mainstream fan base (they’ve been headliners on big touring festivals like Ozzfest) even as it has maintained (and deepened) its reputation for relevant, fiercely uncompromising faithbased rock and roll. While they can slump into occasional sloganeering (too many Christian bands and youth leaders adopt the rhetoric of “revolution,” for example), POD strikes a thoughtful balance between personal redemption and a gently understated commitment to the practical love of neighbor. Combined with the fact that they rock as hard, loud, and as artfully as almost any other band in the world, POD can hold their own against anyone out there—no small feat.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for something hopeful from the heart of the CCM scene, check out Lose This Life, the sophomore release from dcTalk alum Michael Tait. Blessed with a voice that could make angels weep with envy (he is alternately reminiscent of Brit pop sensation Seal, crooner Nat King Cole, and folk-rocker Jeffrey Gaines),Tait has emerged from the shadows of dcTalk with a record whose songs strike a balance between thoughtful, cliché-free exhortations, subtle, believable narratives, and even some purely playful covers (he offers a very modern take on the ’80s Eddie Grant reggae cross-over hit “Electric Avenue”). Flawlessly produced and sung with near effortlessness, Tait’s shimmery modern rock is “Christian” music at its best, suggestive of a fully integrated and mature artistic vision, as well as a grown-up’s respect for his audience’s intelligence. A real inspiration.

A freelance writer and organizational consultant, Dwight Ozard was PRISM’s senior editor from 1994-1998 (see more of his writing at www.dwightozard.com).