Jon Cogburn's Blog

O.K. maybe a couple of other religious songs

Many, many, many people claim to be "spiritual but not religious." 

This always mystified me, because I am almost compulsively the opposite, religious but acutely anti-spiritual (and I won't belabor this here other than to point out that this is an ethical issue for me, and not out of any misguided scientism).

Anyhow, as with any stance, one becomes in consequence a characteristic sort of mark, gullible with respect to various things relavent to the stance.

In THIS POST I claim to have discovered the only overtly religious songs I've ever written. But my wife Emily took umbrage, citing four other songs. But I don't think she's correct.

Exhibit A,Santa Sangre, which I've posted at right (the timbre's horrible for the first thirty seconds; hang on to the beginning of the second verse and you'll see that it actually gets much more bearable). The title means "Holy Blood," but it's really just about the movie of the same name. Anyone who has seen the movie can associate the lyrics with the relevant scenes (I actually have a video from the movie, but can't post it because of copyright; weirdly, youtube is not sure if what I did post is really open source, thus the advertisements which do not benefit me at all, but rather profit the group who claims that they might have a copyright on some of the posted visuals; it's actualy an honor that somebody thinks that they might make money off of this).

Exhibit B, The Zoo. This song mentions God, but most people would consider it irreligious, as the narrator claims in the opening verse that "God is a little retarded kid." But I actually had intended to write a song about Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" and this is what fell out. I think it becomes clear as the song progresses.

Exhibit C, song titled  Sheep, twice contains the lyrics "said Lazarus to Jesus // No one will believe us // and I want to be dead." This is frankly the most nihilistic thing I've ever written in any medium. . . Weirdly though, the muse gave me the lyrics and melody in graduate school when Emily and I were walking back to the department from a restaurant called "Burritos as Big as Your Head." And it was almost exactly after realizing that I was hopelessly in love that I came up with it. But Emily did not think I was a weirdo when I shared it with her, and the rest is history. All this being said, contra Emily, I still don't think it's a religious song. The nihilistic schtick is just a common gen ex trope and isn't really about anything theological per se.

Exhibit D, song titled Babylon. This is the most minimalist melody I've written thus far. I think there are only three notes in the whole thing! But it does have the rather portentious lyrics "You're not the Whore of Babylon // I am not the Christ // But they stuck you on a tree // and they treated me real nice." But this was actually about an ex-girlfriend, not really about anything religious, and in any case, the whole thing veers dangerously close to U2 type anti-rock suckitude (for a much better, vastly more punk rock song about dead love that never actually go produced, check out THIS ONE; it's objectively better than any of the ones linked to here).

One weird thing that I've just noticed. None of the recordings of any of these songs have any distortion in the guitar. Someday (all my music friends with kids only start playing again at the point when their youngest enters first grade) I'm going to write a song with religious tropes that has distortion (as do most of my songs).  I can't think of any good religious songs with distorted guitar off-hand. . . maybe something from Hedwig and the Angry Inch? I don't know; this is worth exploring.

The only overtly religious song I've ever written

As a general rule, any song containing the word "world" sucks. This is the exception that proves that.

Anyhow, for some reason, reading about the Battle of Midway provoked this song.

Given that I learned to play guitar in a charismatic church, and in fact provided background music for all sorts of purported violations of the laws of nature (healings, prophecies, speaking in tongues, etc.), it actually surprises me that I haven't written more things like this. . .

As usual, my ability to get a decent timbre in the recording is completely undermined by high frequency hearing loss and Van Gogh level tinnitus in my right ear. I mean, I can still hear underlying melodies, but that's about it. But, as usual with me and Emily's stuff, if (big if) you can get past the timbre it's actually an O.K. tune.

One final note: People are often weirdly embarrassed for you when you share creative eructations. I actually think most readers of this blog have experienced this with respect to some media, e.g. songs, poems, paintings, theatrical reinterpretations, novels, Dungeons and Dragons modules, ideas for philosophy books, uncharitably read articles, etc. etc. etc.

And that's fine. I have no problem with that. For all that Jack Kerouac sang the canonical hymn to all of us who never succumbed to the execrable Generation X sneer from nowhere, it is still just a fact that being on the receiving end of somebody else's attempted and not obviously successful creativity is weirdly and almost constitutiviey inappropriately intimate. As a result, repulsion is in no way an irrational reaction.

But here is the main irony. The phenomenology of creative activity is so passive that the humiliation from people who find our endeavors embarrassing never really registers. This is true for me and I think all of my wonderful weird friends who sustain me with analogous crap that goes far over and above the coffee spoon tasks that house and feed them (Neal Hebert, Mark Silcox, Graham Harman, Chris Bateman, Emily love of my life, Levi Bryant, Derrick Huff, Eric Ward, etc. etc. etc. . . .).

I mean, Kant was wrong about all that stuff about determining one's own teleology. Kerouac's weirdos are just not responsible for very much. If you don't like what we're up to, file your complaint with the muse. 

Rock is Dead, Long Live Rock

In three recent posts ((1) Bands with which I used to jam: Lusting after Mary, Steel Fury, Three Lesbian Folksingers, (2) Kommunizm (Egor Letov) - Stop The Rolling Stones, and (3) Rock is Dead, and I Know who Killed it) I was able to explain exactly why rock and roll died. The first was some memories of my service as a humble foot soldier in the army of Rock, the second meditations on how Rock died (and punk and genuine industrial music arose) in the Soviet Union, and the third pulling all of that together to show exactly who killed Rock. Of course, good analyst that I am, I have thus discerned conditions necessary for Rock to live. These are

1. Being within fifty years of a folk musical culture rooted in catchy melodies where most people who can play instruments do play instruments.
2. Being within fifty years of a time when copyright was not enforced well.
3. A social milieu where it is not utterly irrational to collectively hope for things to get better.

Of course none of these things any longer hold in the United States (see the third post above for the argument).

Thus it seems to me that all of us former footsoldiers in Rock's Army really need to be asking ourselves the following empirical question. Are any parts of the world that do satisfy all three of these conditions?

My guess is that the best options are Brazil, Turkey, recent Arab Spring states (if things go well), and those sub-saharan African contries that have had really good decades (this never makes it in the American news). Possibly Indonesia as well?

I don't know enough about the ecosystem of folk music in Arab countries or Indonesia. One thing I think that might hinder rock there is that Muslim worship does not use music like Christian (especially evangelical and charismatic) worship does. I may be biased here, because I learned to play guitar myself in a charismatic church (as a child I actually provided background music to several violations of the laws of nature, and probably would not have become a philosopher had I not reacted as a child so strongly against the serial hypocrisy of Christian conservatives). But it is just true. So much of the blues and early rock had a symbiotic relationship with American Christian churches, for example Jerry Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart are first cousins and in fact learned to play piano together both at church and at honkytonk bars they'd sneak out to as teenagers.

This being said, several people have told me that Constantinople has perhaps the most exciting music scene in the world today, with what people are doing with traditional Turkish folk tunes in the manner that early rock took from the blues and Appalachian music (actually blues and Appalachian and Cajun music were all influencing each other long before recordings), and some of the music from Tahrir, Tunisia, and Libya was pretty amazing.

Who knows how all this will turn out? But just as it gives me great joy to know that it is not impossible that there is some planet in the universe with creatures like us, but not nearly so flawed, it gives me great joy to know that Rock may be being reincarnated as I speak in entirely different cultural millieus.