Perhaps you missed it in the midst of your New Years’ Eve revelry, but during a national broadcast of the Times Square ball drop, the singer Cee-Lo Green blasphemed one of America’s major religions. Singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in front of thousands of drunken partiers with cameras trained on him from CNN and NBC, Green substituted words in the verse that reads:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do,
Nothing to fight or die for,
And no religion, too.

Green’s interpretation of the final line: “And all religion’s true.”

This immediately set off a flock of angry twitterers, mobbing the former Goody Mob singer’s account with curses and invective. Typical responses from Twitter included:

@Austin McCarty: @CeeLoGreen All region is true = no religion is true.

@Occupylvcampout: @CeeLoGreen you don’t change the words to one of the best songs to what you believe go to hell fat boy I wish you a heart attack…

@Vegardkvaale: @CeeLoGreen who are you to change the words of a true artist. So fucking disrespectful and ignorant.

@SKYENICOLAS: @CeeLoGreen Look man, you’re nothing close to John’s intellect. You editing the song makes it a Pro Religion song and not a SECULAR song!

These critics seem unaware of just how religious their responses are. Other commentators used terms like “iconic” to describe the song, and “desecration” to describe what Green did to the song. They were essentially accusing Green of heresy against a system of spiritual beliefs that might be called “Lennonism.”

Lennonism sets itself against a perception of institutionalized, dogmatic religion, not the broader, less judgmental expressions of spirituality that have become part of the modern Western landscape. Surely Unitarian-Universalists would disagree with @AustinMcCarty’s assertion that all religions being true means no religion is true.

But whether using Thomas Luckmann’s suggestion of religion as a life-integrating discipline or Paul Tillich’s “matter of ultimate concern,” the responses to Green’s performance reveal the deeply religious meaning Lennon’s “Imagine” has for his fans. “Imagine” is the central creed of Lennonism. More than a pop song, it is a hymn to secular utopian spirituality.

Like the many evangelical Christians who misunderstand the American Founders’ deism as being compatible with their own theocratic agenda, some of Green’s critics seem to have equated Lennon’s song with contemporary “new atheism.” New atheists like Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens believe in an aggressive rationalist or scientific materialism that would be pretty incompatible with the hippy utopianism of “Imagine.”

Lennon’s belief seemed to be more of an “anti-ism-ism” in which the lines of ideology would be erased in favor of a simpler and less-contentious mode of enlightened being. In the 1960’s, a time of heightened conflict between ideologies of Marxism and capitalism, nationalism and individualism, Eastern and Western religion, Lennon played the media trickster, subverting expectations of politicized celebrity opinion by promoting “bag-ism,” “hair peace,” and “bed-ism.” The solution-based striving of political and religious ideologies were replaced with slogans like, “Together we can get it together;” “War is over…if you want it;” and “All you need is love.” The idea was that the power you needed to change the world was inside you.

Furthermore, Lennon in the late 1960’s styled himself as a guru of this so-simple-its-obvious religion. The height of his spiritual influence was the Montreal Bed-in of 1969, in which Lennon and Yoko Ono took to their hotel bed for a week, and invited in counterculture celebrities, including Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers, and Dick Gregory. Visually emulating the Beatles’ former teacher, the Maharishi, Lennon and Ono led the assembled disciples in the recording of “Give Peace a Chance.” It was the founding moment of Lennonism, the sacred moment of the 60’s that gives life to much of the nostalgic passion the Baby Boomers have for their rock-n-roll messiah.

Non-religious figures John Lennon and Yoko Ono

What’s disturbing is how dogmatic the latter-day followers of Lennonism have become. Like many believers, after their founder’s death, they become unyielding in their faith in an attempt to show “true discipleship.” How perverted is it to lay claim to Lennon’s philosophy by telling someone to “go to hell fat boy I hope you have a heart attack.”

Cee-lo’s expression that “All religion’s true” is surely as innocuous (and ultimately impractical) as Lennon’s wish for no religion. Many of us share the ideals of peace and harmony Lennon and Cee-Lo were attempting to express, but believe that it’s only by capturing the spirit of the human religious impulse and using it for good that real peace will come about. This is a faith of addition instead of subtraction. Not “no religion” or “any religion you want” but belief in the transformative power of the most enlightened elements of religion. This is ultimately closer to Martin Luther King’s statement, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice and brotherhood,” than a negative statement of eliminating peoples’ systems of meaning-making in pursuit of some nihilistic desert of anti-conflict.

Whatever you are, though, Lennonist, Cee-Lo Universalist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist, by all means, let’s Give Peace a Chance. You can start by keeping it civil on your Twitter account.

“God must get awfully tired of hearing the same thing over and over again, and in His all-embracing wisdom could certainly embrace a dissonance—might even enjoy one now and again.” – Charles Ives

“Stop being such a God-damned sissy! Why can’t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man!” – Also Charles Ives (presumably in a fouler mood).

At my undergraduate music school in the early nineties, we spent a significant portion of our theory and history classes wrapping our heads around the avant-garde sounds of the Twentieth Century. These were the composers our instructors told us were now “important,” as opposed to the classical Beethoven and Bach, pop-classic John Williams and John Rutter, and concert bandmasters like Alfred Reed that had motivated us to go into music in the first place. We feigned a knowing appreciation of Charles Ives’ dissonant polytonality, John Cage’s chance music (one piece involved people walking around tuning radios to different stations) and the tape loops of Steve Reich and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Our professors self-assuredly told us this was the “classical” music of the future.

What I think they imagined is that one day we would go to concert halls and listen to abstract acoustic and electronic soundscapes that would challenge our notions of musical theory and form. What they, and we, didn’t realize was the “music of the future” would happen according to its own anarchic patterns. As electronic mixing technology spread, innovative musicians like Aphex Twin, Nullsleep, Deadmau5, Daft Punk, Moby, and Bjork, would not wait for the stuffy approval of the “formal” music world. The “serious” composers we studied in music school, when drained through pop music’s democratizing sieve, would become what we now know as electronica.

In The Age of Adz (pronounced “odds”) Sufjan Stevens (pronounced SOOF-yan STEEV…you get the idea) has produced a remarkable album of acoustic and electronic soundscapes that represent a clear break from his previous work. Already the songwriter/performer of what may be the best indie album of the last ten years (Illinois, 2005) Stevens put his growing audience on the line to produce a wild song cycle of clashing beats and electro-noise. The response from the fans that know him as the aching, banjo-playing, latter-day Elliott Smith who wrote such exquisitely produced chamber pop as “Come on! Feel the Illinoise!,” “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” and “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!” has been nothing short of consternation.

To understand this reaction, you have to know who Stevens’ audience is (or used to be). An alumnus of both an evangelical Christian high school and college, Stevens has been an Emerging-church poster boy. His previous albums have included spiritual music that has caught on with both the secular indie scene and the post-Christian-pop crowd. For evangelicals of a certain hipness who were tired of defending the artistic merit of (or lack thereof) of CCM, Stevens was proof that “Christian” music could produce a real innovator. The fact that several of his songs have homoerotic undertones that would have sent their culture-warrior parents into fits of banshee-like rage only added to Stevens’ appeal for evangelical X-ers and Millennials. But after waiting for five years for his post-Illinois LP, only to be confronted by the experimental musique concrete of The Age of Adz, it is his young Christian fans who have been thrown into a rage, and a palpable sense of betrayal.

The opening song on Adz, “Futile Devices,” lulls the listener with a more typical Stevens sound: acoustic guitar and piano, and vaguely homoerotic lyrics. “You are the life I needed all along/ I think of you as my brother although that sounds dumb/ and words are futile devices.” Is this written to a friend? A lover? Jesus? Who knows?

“Get Real Get Right” is pretty inoffensive as well, dedicated to the album’s muse, African-American outsider artist Royal Robertson, whose work adorns the album cover and booklet. The song is a funky groove with drum machines, willowy woodwinds and a horn line. It refers to Robertson’s apocalyptic obsessions: “Prophet, brother, priest and king/ Snake-skinned master at your feet/Barricade the bathroom doors/ Find some things you can’t ignore.” But the chorus is a classic gospel music message, “Get real, get right with the Lord.”

“Too Much,” when not overwhelmed by scratchy white noise, seemed to be channeling Stevens’ inner Devo, at least when I saw the clip of him on Jimmy Fallon. “Vesuvius” is a repeated chant that builds in intensity like a lava flow, slowly erupting with strange, bubbling electronic sounds popping around the vocal line, culminating in a descant of elementary-school plastic recorders. Just as the chaos is about to explode, an anti-climax of chopped-up vocal and electronic shards brings us down the other side of the mountain.

Stevens has said in interviews that Adz reflects an evolving interest away from long-form narrative songwriting towards the musical gesture. There are plenty of musical gestures—repeated vocal lines, riffs, and patterns—on this album. This is not entirely a departure, as Stevens’ previous album, while sounding much more conventional, also showed a tendency toward the kind of looping American minimalism of composers like Steve Reich and Terry Reilly.

“I Walked” demonstrates Stevens has not lost his narrative skill in the midst of the new electronic tone-world he is creating. Addressed again to a nebulous “lover,” the song has remarkable lines like “For when you went away I went crazy/I was wild with the breast of a dog/I ran through the night/With the knife in my chest/With the lust of your loveless life.” If that’s musical gesture over narrative, I’ll take it.

“Now That I’m Older” starts with a remarkable wordless arrangement for voices that has the doleful, bluesy sound of a field chant or spiritual. (Perhaps a musical theater version of a field chant or spiritual). Either way, it’s haunting. If a middle-class guy from the Michigan suburbs can sing the blues, this is it. “All for Myself” benefits from a similar repeated scratched-record blues riff.

This Sufjan-in-a-blue-funk vocal style is used to less positive effect in “Bad Communication,” which plods like a funeral march being led by a Casio keyboard. Other songs that don’t “communicate” so well are “The Age of Adz,” which starts with a grinding robotic apocalypse and morphs into several other overwrought innovations during its seemingly interminable eight minutes. It’s a bad sign when you’re checking your iPod for the number of minutes left in a song because you can’t believe the thing is still going.

A song that definitely challenges a pop-music listener’s sense of time, but is more likely to reward patience, is the 25-minute epic, “Impossible Soul,” that rounds out the album. This is the kind of musical adventure that would have covered the B-side of an album back in the days of vinyl. (Look it up on Wikipedia, kids.) The song seems to be about woes in a relationship using some nebulous, possibly closeted gender-switching language. (The song is addressed to someone Stevens calls “Woman,” but is spoken like a man who has never addressed a lover as “Woman.”) The song might just be Stevens’ version of Bob Dylan plugging in at Monterey (look it up on Wikipedia, kids) with the folk singer shredding a spiky, screechy electric guitar solo, and even using (gasp) auto-tune. Even more remarkable, it sort of works. I doubt we’ve heard anyone with Stevens’ musical skill and vocal sensitivity use auto-tune before; it’s usually a tool of rappers and tonally-challenged soul divas.

There are times when Stevens’ range-straining Bobby-Brady-hits-puberty vocal stylings are too weak for the sheer muscle of the horns, beats, and bleats he has amassed. It would take a considerably more powerful singer—perhaps Tom Jones—to out-sing some of this cacophony. Stevens the producer and arranger also continues the penchant for his clatch of “just the girls” backup singers (one imagines three white Brooklyn women-hipsters with requisite nose piercings and tattoos) with perfect diction but no sass or jazz in their voices. Their bland vocalizing eventually grates when used in nearly every song, both on Adz, and on the more listenable Illinoise.

“Listenable” is less the description of Adz than “challenging.” But opening your ears to an artist stretching his talent can be an enlightening experience. Stevens’ next album, however and whenever that comes about, will hopefully combine the best of this new sound and some of the old sound that his fans love (unless he’s really a sucker for art at the expense of financial success). The noise of The Age of Adz may very come from the construction of something quite exciting and new.

One more word about the gendered address of Stevens’ songs. An indie folk singer was never hurt by a little sexual ambiguity. Presumably, at the age of 35, Stevens knows which way his sexuality trends—and it doesn’t appear to be exclusively heterosexual. This would be nobody’s business but his own, except folk singers tend to sing about relationships a lot, leading to natural curiosity. And LGBT people are not yet free. There are queer evangelical kids marooned at Christian academies and colleges who could use a role model. Some of them would rather kill themselves than face their families, churches, and friends with the truth of their sexuality. If they could see a man with immense God-given talent, who tours around the world performing creative and sensitive music, and who just happens to be queer, it would them a lot of good. The Age of Adz represents a bold new beginning, what may be seen as the first of the mature work of an important musician. It will be interesting to see if Stevens matches this adult album with an adult admission of who he is.

‘CAUSE GOD MAKES NO MISTAKES.

Lady Gaga continues to spread her gospel of self-acceptance.

Lady Gaga was born again last Sunday night at the Grammy Awards, emerging onstage from her fiberglass cocoon with an upbeat anthem of personal empowerment, “Born This Way.” The song was aimed particularly at her fans in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Encouraging her listeners to love who they will (“Don’t be a drag, just be a queen”) and even invoking the possibility of Divine favor (“I’m beautiful in my way ‘cause God makes no mistakes”) while her half-naked dancers did their standard bump-and-grind, the performance is already raising alarms from religious conservatives.

The gospel according to Gaga appeals to individuals and communities that have been marginalized from traditional religion. She has an innate understanding of how these exiles have found spiritual expression in dance and theatricality, and have come to see their diversity and nonconformity as a sign of spiritual favor, not rejection. Lady Gaga has become a spokesperson for her congregation of “Little Monsters”—perhaps even a pop messiah.

If “Sister” Gaga’s message of radical welcome is controversial, it is only because so many churches and denominations have abandoned the message of God’s love. If churches have forgotten how to uplift, encourage, and affirm, they should not be surprised if society turns to such pop culture messiahs to receive the message that God loves us as we are.

One of the song’s concluding lines is, “Whether life’s disabilities left you outcast, bullied, or teased, rejoice and love yourself today.” This encourages separation of self-perception from the judgments of family, religion, and society. If you’re different, it’s the inability of the world to embrace or interact creatively, and not judgmentally, with you that’s the problem—not the fact that you have listened to the call of your own truest self. The Church would do well to heed Sister’s advice: Love people as they are, and “don’t be a drag.”

Also check out Richard Lindsay’s review of Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” video.

I’m going to start by saying I’m not even an objective critic when it comes to Bryan McFarland. Over the years I’ve known him, he’s proven to be too genuine, too creative, and too insightful to think anything he did wouldn’t be worth engaging or listening to.

He was one of my campus pastors when I started at the University of Louisville in fall of 1993. I was way too serious a Christian at age eighteen. When I met him, Bryan was unlike any minister I’d encountered before. I’d never met a pastor who would sing the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” to the tune of Gilligan’s Island, or met a member of the clergy who was so obsessed with Animaniacs. I don’t mean he wasn’t serious. But he was serious about life and not just religion. He embodied a combination of earthy piety, ready humor, and the questing spirit of a true pilgrim that was a revelation to me.

If you had to take a vote on “guy most likely to quit his job and become a folk singer” it would have been Bryan. His guitar was always on call for worship services, campouts, or jam sessions in his office. He’s one of those musicians whose skill comes from living and breathing music as much as formal training. Sure enough, in 2003, he began a new phase of his ministry as a professional singer-songwriter.

His current recording project is called Until All Are Fed, and brings together his music and his work as Hunger Action Advocate for the Presbytery of Salem, North Carolina. I got to talk with Bryan in preparation for this review, and he was kind enough to let me listen to advance tracks as the project took shape.

Bryan says this album is “mashup of ‘We Are the World’ and ‘O Brother Where Art Thou,’” and I buy his description. The music on this album has a rootsy, Celtic, world-music, spiritual feel. It reminds me of the music of Mumford & Sons, not so much for its subject but for its striving idealism. The folky sound and passionate lyrics about relieving hunger for food and hunger for God make this music unabashedly uncool—as if it’s time to let go of coolness and stand for something.

The project had a fascinating genesis. Realizing that “I couldn’t just complain about the lack of contemporary music that speaks the faith and not do anything about it,” Bryan started raising funds for the album through the Web site Pledgemusic.com. The site lets listeners support independent artists by pledging the price of the album to production costs before the album is released. At the same time, artists can designate a portion of production costs and profits to a charity. Ten percent of production costs and twenty percent of profits from Until All Are Fed will go to the Presbyterian Hunger Program.

“This project just reared its head saying ‘Do me! Do me!’” Bryan says. “I wondered when I was going to do an album of hymns and sacred songs. Because of the charitable aspect, this seemed to make sense.” Bryan says the response has been moving. “I can’t believe in this economy in 3 months we raised 107% of production costs for a project people didn’t know about.”  Some Presbyterians might call the intersection of talent, charity, and technology that went into making this album, “providential.”

With the cash in hand, he was able to work with some of the best session musicians in Nashville, including instrumentalists that have recorded and toured with Garth Brooks, the Mandrell Sisters, The Chieftans, John Michael Talbot, and Michael W. Smith. We listeners can thank Bryan and his producer Shawn Conley for putting the infusion of talent to good use. When you put fiddle, piano, bass, tin whistle, and uilleann pipes with Bryan’s deft guitar playing and burly tenor voice, you get a stirring sound. He’s calling the band “Jacob’s Join,” which is another name for a potluck supper. It’s fitting, because this is an album where everyone brings something to the table and no one goes away hungry.

The album is structured like a worship service (another simile Bryan uses is “Frampton Comes Alive Comes to Worship”). Just to add a slice of real life, the “gathering song” is “Uyai Mose,” which starts from the perspective of a couple rushing in late for worship.  The first hymn is “Hope of the World,” a Reformation-era rocker with a mid-Century lyrical update by Georgia Harkness (one of the pioneering women of theological education). The stirring four-part vocal arrangement, along with guitar and doleful fiddle, sounds like something out of the old shape-note hymnals Sacred Harp or Southern Harmony.

The next track, “Lord Search My Heart” would be as welcome in a Zydeco bar in Cajun country as it is in the church. This is a nice song of self-examination without lapsing into the usual Presbyterian obsession with group chest-beating. (Seriously, you can’t get Presbyterians together for worship without them breaking into some pre-written litany of confession, read in a Calvinist monotone.)  Bryan follows with a couple of really lovely solo songs that fit his voice quite well – both with lyrics that get to the heart of the matter on hunger. “Christ You Walked Among the Grain Fields” is a nice update on the folk hymn tune “Beach Spring,” with lyrics by Presbyterian songstress Carolyn Winfrey Gillette.

“Lord, you shared God’s Kingdom bounty,

Yet you know our pain and need.

Some are poor in lands of plenty,

Often hurt by others’ greed.

Some possessed by their possessions,

Look for more to buy and keep,

Others long for simpler blessings:

‘Let my hungry children eat.’”

“Christ, Be Our Light” is in a more contemporary style, but shares the social justice theme. The 6/8 meter has a nice rolling feel with the guitar and tin whistle. A later track, “Bread for the World” starts with this simple solo style, then ends in a “We are the World” style clapping chorus through the magic of multi-tracking.

Tracks six and seven are the Bryan McFarland-composed songs on the album.  The title track, “Until All Are Fed” is simultaneously a song of protest and hope. “How can we stand by and fail to be aghast, how long ‘til we do what’s right? How could we stand by and choose a lesser fast, how long ‘til we see the light?” The answer: “We serve until all are fed.”

“Singing for OUR Supper,” takes a more rhythmic approach, with some upbeat percussion and a bit of Byrds’-style jangly guitar. Lyrics like “We are hungry and misled, undernourished and overfed” speak to the conditions of both spiritual and physical hunger. And increasingly, as the gap between rich and poor grows wider: “We all need daily bread, for more and more it’s daily dread; It’s hard to live and harder to survive.”

“Bendice Señor Nuestro Pan/Come Share the Lord” benefits (as do several of the tracks) from Bryan’s collaboration with a North Carolina local, Sally Ann Morris. Morris is a church music director in Winston-Salem, but is also an internationally recognized hymnodist, with compositions in the popular Catholic Gather series and the UCC’s New Century Hymnal. The collaboration led to an arrangement of a Spanish-language blessing composed by John Bell and the communion song classic “Come Share the Lord.” After this recording, it will be hard to imagine these two songs separately.

More John Bell and Morris, and more Spanish, round out the worship experience. Bell’s music makes an appearance in the form of a rousing sing-along of “The Summons,” the instrumentation bringing out its Celtic glory. “Pescador de Hombres (Fisher of Men)” is a treat with Leslie Rodriguez singing in Spanish and English to Bryan’s guitar accompaniment. It closes with a benediction from Bryan. “Go in Peace, Go in Love,” a Sally Ann Morris composition, with text by Mary Louise Bringle, ends the set as a kind of postlude, with a rocking back-beat and SNL-style saxophone.

The problems of global and domestic hunger are complex. The short of it is, we waste enough food in the United States alone to completely eradicate hunger around the world, and this is just one developed country.   Bryan hopes the album will be just the beginning of the musical work on hunger. He wants to work with churches and organizations across the country to perform this album live as a hunger action. “The key words are ‘activity, action, engagement,’” Bryan says. “Hunger is a downer of a topic, but hunger action is energetic, is hopeful, is making a day to day difference in the lives of people who wonder where the next meal is going to come from.”

For more information on hunger, check out the Presbyterian Hunger Project on Facebook and Bread for the World. Your giving won’t be misspent by either of these organizations. But the easiest and most enjoyable action you could take against hunger this year is to order Bryan’s recording, as either an MP3 download or CD. You can learn more about the project and order the album here.

Eminem wraps (and raps) his latest effort in the language of one of the most popular religious movements of the last century, “Recovery.” Although Recovery has five more tracks than the Twelve Steps, it’s notable for the Steps it covers, and for those it leaves out.

First, any serious critic has to pause and name the most problematic element of Eminem’s music—his vicious and unrepentant misogyny.  It’s a problem throughout hip-hop, but Eminem revels in and illustrates his fantasies of abuse of women beyond the usual feral “b-word” boasts of most rappers.  His insistence on devolving into violence damages good songs on Recovery about the vulnerability of relationships like “Space Bound” and “Love the Way You Lie,” and permeates almost everything else on this album like a poison haze.

That being said, it’s important to see the irony in Eminem’s offensive lyrics—to understand a performance is not necessarily a literal endorsement of an action, but rather a take, a perspective, a voice on it.  Furthermore, we point the finger at Eminem only to find it pointing back at ourselves.  Eminem is as much a reflection as a cause of a culture of violence against women.  For some reason, he relishes embodying this societal shadow of sexism and misogyny, perhaps as a means of purging his own tendencies toward violence, perhaps as a means of attracting the disapproval that brings about the self-martyrdom he seems to need like oxygen.

On the first track, “Cold Wind Blows,” he says this is just the way he is:  “I’ll be nicer to women/When Aqua Man drowns and the Human Torch starts swimming.”  Although I don’t believe Eminem’s misogyny is immutable, I breathe the Serenity Prayer, “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…” and move on to explore the rest of the album.

Recovery features a lot of rap about Eminem’s recent drug problems, particularly his near-fatal overdose on methadone.  The recording booklet also features Eminem sitting in a glass house (the kind from which one should not throw stones?) in the middle of downtown Detroit, his hometown.  The visual joke frames the album title with the kind of double meaning Eminem relishes in his rap–it’s about Recovery from drugs, Recovery of the economy, Recovery of a career.

Eminem starts his comeback in the first song.  Although his bluster is as strong as ever, halfway through the song, he gets a smack from above, in the form of a lightning sound effect interrupting his rhymes.

“Cause you’re fake, [lightning crack] ahh what the fuck, that hurt wait!

[Lightning crack] Ahh what the fuck, I just got struck by lightning.

Alright then I quit, God I give up.

Call it evil that men do, Lord forgive me for what my pen do.”

Not exactly a “decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.”  But there’s at least a recognition that some Higher Power might be affecting his life.

The three songs that show Eminem at his most vulnerable are “Talkin’ 2 Myself,” “Going through Changes,” and “Not Afraid.”  Taken together, this trio might parallel the dark night of the soul and transformation that those in recovery go through in the Twelve Steps.

In “Talkin’ 2 Myself,” Eminem raps: “You’re lying to yourself, you’re slowly dying, you’re denying/Your health is declining with your self esteem, you’re crying out for help.”  In another line he says, “Hit bottom so hard I bounce twice suffice this time around/It’s different them last two albums didn’t count/Encore I was on drugs, Relapse I was flushing ‘em out.”  This sounds like Step 1:  “We admitted we were powerless over drugs—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Eminem continues to Step 4, conducting a “searching and fearless moral inventory,” admonishing himself by his birth name:

“Marshall you’re no longer the man, that’s a bitter pill to swallow/All I know is I’m wallowin’, self-loathing and hollow/ Bottoms up of pill bottle maybe I’ll hit my bottom tomorrow… I’ve turned into a hater, I’ve put up a false bravado.”

A deeply moving account of Eminem’s struggle with considering suicide, “I’m Going through Changes,” features Ozzy Osbourne on the chorus track. This song continues the self-reflection theme and the cry for help:

“I feel like I’m losing control of myself,

I sincerely apologize if all that I sound like, is I’m complaining,

But life keeps on complicating, an’ I’m debating,

On leaving this world, this evening, even my girls,

Can see I’m grievin’, I try and hide it,

But I can’t, why do I act like I’m all high and mighty,

When inside, I’m dying, I am finally realizing I need help.”

Eminem also covers steps 8 and 9:  “We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”  In “Talkin’ 2 Myself,” he admits:

“Hatred was flowing through my veins

On the verge of going insane

I almost made a song dissin Lil Wayne

It’s like I was jealous of him cause of the attention he was gettin’

I felt horrible about myself

He was spittin and I wasn’t

Anyone who was buzzin back then coulda got it

Almost went at Kanye too.”

In the Top 40 hit, “Not Afraid” he continues these steps by apologizing to his fans:

“And to the fans, I’ll never let you down again, I’m back/I promise to never go back on that promise, in fact/Let’s be honest, that last Relapse CD was ‘ehhhh’”

The chorus has some of the same, us-against-the-world feel of his Oscar-winning song, “Lose Yourself.”  As he reaches out to fans that might be in pain (the album is dedicated: “2 anyone who’s in a dark place tryin’ 2 get out.  Keep your head up…It does get better!”), he even intimates the Twelfth Step:  “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others…”

“I’m not afraid to take a stand

Everybody come take my hand

We’ll walk this road together, through the storm.”

There’s still that matter of where Eminem’s Higher Power comes in, beyond a lightning bolt, but first let’s take a look at some of the other album highlights.

“W.T.P.” is a funny and roof-raising groove (the initials stand for “White Trash Party”) that gets Eminem back to his working-class roots.  “Pull up to the club in a Pinto like it’s a Porsche/Garbage bag for one of the windows, spray painted doors/ With the flames on ‘em, Michigan plates and my names on ‘em…”  The song’s a tribute to low rent fun, “tramp stamps,” doing doughnuts in a parking lot in a Gremlin, and the curious chemistry of “Mixing Hennessey and Fanta with Pepto and Mylanta.”

The genius of hip-hop rests in both its reuse of recorded music, samples rather than individual notes becoming the building blocks of a song, and in the wildly creative use of words, what MC’s call “flow.”  On the latter quality, no one’s better than Eminem.  Wordplay flies at the listener—sometimes in quick spurts, sometimes taking several lines for extended metaphors to evolve.  In “W.T.P.,” he explains, “I’ll rip a tree out the ground and flip it upside down/‘fore I turn over a new leaf clown.”  In a boast over other rappers in “almost Famous,” he raps, “Ya’ll are Eminem backwards, you’re menime’s” (mini me’s).  Explaining his superior oratorical skills in “Won’t Back Down,” he raps, “these other cats ain’t metaphorically where I’m at man/I gave Bruce Wayne a Valium and said/settle ya fuckin ass down I’m ready for combat-man/get it “calm Batman?”  Yes, Eminem, we get it.  You pun more than the French.

Eminem’s delivery varies between a rat-a-tat spit and a drawl that mashes words together, shouted through a nasal punk tenor that still sounds adolescent despite his pushing forty.  Nowhere is the contrast between rap voices more acute than “No Love,” in which he teams up with (the currently incarcerated) ‘Lil Wayne, who croaks his lines in a Dirty South twang.  The sample in this case is the head-bobbing disco hit “What is Love,” by Haddaway, which Eminem and Wayne twist into a chest-thumping rebuke to other rappers that show them “no love.”

If there’s such a thing as a rap ballad, Rihanna and Eminem pull off a good one on Love the Way You Lie.  Rihanna’s pretty chorus is accompanied by piano and acoustic guitar.  Eminem’s words are about the pain and frustration of a “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” relationship.  Even some of his more aggressive lyrics work within this doomed relationship in obsessional mode.  Until the end.  And then the misogyny takes over.  And an otherwise good track is ruined.

So where is Eminem’s Higher Power?  It seems like he skips steps 2,3,5,6, and 11, which have to do with letting go to God, and having God remove your “defects of character.”  But I can’t help but feel this album represents some kind of turning point for Eminem.  He’s come to some pretty difficult conclusions about himself and his own limitations.  Where did his “salvation,” if that’s what we want to call it, come from?

I read an article recently in which Eminem spoke of rap as the drug that saves his life.  And maybe here is his Higher Power.  Part of the reason the recovery movement uses the language of a Higher Power is precisely that an inability to conceive of a theistic God should not be a stumbling block to recovery.  Sometimes the sharing and compassion felt in an AA group meeting is the Higher Power.  It might be a parent’s responsibility to a child, which Eminem seems to feel.  I’ve heard of one case for an addict where a doorknob was his Higher Power, because it was the only thing working in his life.  The Higher Power is that which draws you out of yourself, your problems, your addictions, and encourages you to live into the fullness of your being.  For Eminem, this talented but troubling performer, rap is what saves his soul.  Maybe someday, it will enlighten him enough that “Aqua Man drowns, and the Human Torch starts swimmin’,” and Eminem finds respect for women.

(Hint: There is none.)

Frequent Pop Theology contributor Richard Lindsay offers his take on the music video for Lady Gaga’s new song, “Alejandro,” after the jump.  You can view the video here on the Pop Theology home page.

Lady Gaga’s new video “Alejandro” pushes all the right buttons for a full-on controversy. The fascist imagery, religious symbolism, and sexual acting out are both provocative and a sure-fire formula for success in the pop music industry. So far, Gaga appears to be in for a mega-hit, as all the right voices are playing their roles in the PR Passion play.

Gaga plays the roll of the Important Artist, making a “statement” and being misunderstood in the process. As The Lady Twittered: “So many will try to destroy me. So many, over and over, coming in periods of greatness. Prejudice is a disease. And when they come for you, or refuse your worth, I will be ready for their stones.” Okay.  The director, Steven Klein, plays the role of Collaborator and Defender, carrying out the misunderstood brilliant artist’s vision. As he told MTV News, The video “represents the character’s battle between the dark forces of this world and the spiritual salvation of the Soul”. Whatever.

Katy Perry plays the role of the Rival, adding public drama through backhanded commentary and calling the video blasphemous. Lacking a significant follow-up hit to her lesbionic “I Kissed a Girl” (not blasphemous at all), the lesser singer got her name in the news by dissing the better singer on Twitter: “Using blasphemy as entertainment is as cheap as a comedian telling a fart joke.” Right.  Bill Donohue from The Catholic League has cast himself as the Moral Scold, a roll he plays often, and with villainous relish. “[Lady Gaga] has now become the new poster girl for American decadence and Catholic bashing, sans the looks and talent of her role model, [Madonna].” And if anyone knows about American decadence, it’s the Catholic Church.

Not content to stand by while the cultural elites battle it out, the Great American Middle must be heard. “Has Lady Gaga gone too far?” Moms Like Me in Tallahassee want to know. (In case you’re wondering, it’s running about 50/50 between “Love her” and “She’s gone too far.”)

We’ve covered this territory before with many pop artists, most notably Madonna: Is using religious imagery in conjunction with sexuality blasphemous? Do female pop stars who use their sexuality to sell songs empower or degrade women? And my favorite — sure, she’s free to express herself as explicitly as she wants, but what about The Children? Dissertations will be written. Academic cottage industries will be formed. But does it all mean anything?

What’s clear, and to her credit, is that Lady Gaga has revived the music video, a moribund genre that has failed to produce any significant pop culture buzz in nearly twenty years. After the mid-nineties, when MTV stopped playing music videos, there was no longer an incentive for labels to drop millions on a video that would at best get a brief clip on Total Request Live. Videos, rather than being an art form unto themselves, reverted to their former function as advertisements for music. As the recording industry began an implosion brought on by its own arrogance, the collapse of local radio, and the MP3 download, even this commercial function became questionable. The result was less funding, low production values, bored stars and directors, and thousands of static shots of people in fashionable clothes shouting at a fisheye lens on a stationary camera.

Enter Lady Gaga, an artist with an unparalleled knack for self-promotion in the Internet age. Transforming the video into a viral advertisement not just for her music but for a slew of product placements, (everything from high-end vodka to Miracle Whip) she has brought the economic oomph back to the genre, and thus the resources needed to reset the bar for quality. With Gaga, we have witnessed the return of lengthy narratives full of pageantry, passion, and choreography unseen since the days when artists like Madonna, Michael and Janet Jackson, and Prince competed to outdo each other with ever more elaborate productions.

Following in the wake of stunning visual spectacles like “Paparazzi” and “Bad Romance,” “Alejandro” features a Gaga as a steampunk Queen Elizabeth, catwalk-strutting models dressed like fascists, the singer dressed as a latex nun (complete with a cross over her crotch) and shirtless male dancers in black high heels and (inexplicably) Moe Howard haircuts. This video has all the danceable hooks, overwrought artistic pretention, and humorous camp we’ve come to expect in a Lady Gaga video.

Viewers who try to make sense (or offense) of the religious imagery are wasting their time. Religious symbolism in music videos has been drained of meaning since Madonna made the crucifix a fashion item. What we are seeing in Lady Gaga is a reference to references, a never-ending simulacrum built out of pop culture kitsch.  Washing over the viewer in “Alejandro” are essences of David Bowie, Annie Lenox, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Devils, Triumph of the Will, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and of course, the life opus of a certain Italian-American singer from Detroit. (Viewing the video, I’m reminded of Evita, “Erotica,” the Sex book, the cone bra, “Vogue,” “La Isla Bonita,” and “Like a Prayer.” Madge must be either furious or flattered.)

There is no God remaining to be offended in the symbolic language of Christianity as appropriated by pop culture. This includes “secular” and “religious” popular culture. Lady Gaga’s use of the cross is no more exploitative than evangelical corporations who sell “Bible-zines,” Not of This World fashion apparel, and MP3 players in the shape of a cross that can be filled with gospel music or death metal.

Religious people need to learn to see their faith not in symbolism, which can be bought, sold, and manipulated, but in God’s image reflected in the endless creativity of the human spirit. God is there, even as we forge our icons, idols and graven images, not inhabiting the product of our art, but inhabiting the soul of the artist emulating the Creator. Posing feminist, religious, and moral questions of a piece of fluff like “Alejandro” only lends unnecessary depth to a video in which the pleasures lie on the surface. Let’s just say that Lady Gaga has revived an art form and pushed the limits of creativity in her field. For these reasons alone, Gaga is good.

If any of you, like me, had tickets to U2′s second leg of their American 360 tour, then you were sorely disappointed to hear about the cancellation due to Bono’s surgery.  Yet, last week’s release of their DVD, U2 360 at the Rose Bowl, the recording of last Fall’s record-setting concert, should help ameliorate that pain and tide you over until the dates are rescheduled next year.  After the jump, check out mine and Richard Lindsay’s review of the concert and the DVD.

It had been a long time coming for me. I had wanted to see U2 ever since my early years of high school well before I fully grasped their significance or realized how deeply influential their lyrics and music would be in my own life. As such, my experience of the concert and reflections on it are tainted by, pardon the pun, rose colored glasses.  I was initially struck by two observations. First, I was interested to see the interactions between the four members of the group during songs that they’ve sung thousands of times.  I am well aware that they are putting on an act…a performance…and therefore much of their interaction is staged, but the stage itself is, as everyone is well aware, big enough for them to never cross paths.  Yet they frequently came together in what appeared to be needed support for one another.  In his book, We Get to Carry Each Other:  The Gospel According to U2, Greg Garrett highlights other examples of the ways in which their friendship plays out both on stage and off throughout their career.

Secondly, at times I felt like I was intruding on their own worship time/space, especially on songs like “Mysterious Ways” when Bono was pleading for the Spirit to move him and teach him. I heard from many people and read that attending a U2 concert is akin to a spiritual experience but no one ever suggested that, first and foremost, the band might be having one as well.  The DVD only enhances this aspect of their concert as the cameras zoom in on Bono engaged in particularly worshipful positions or movements.

I’m also more and more aware that U2 are cognizant that they are in a pivotal position at this point in their career, and are using it to not only say something but to make something happen as well.  I’m thinking about the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, who was an anthropologist and theologian, who believed that our technology would become an extension of human consciousness, causing us to form a completely independent, but completely connected species-wide consciousness. He believed that evolution, instead of branching outward toward greater diversity, was now, with humans, branching inward toward greater connection. His eschatology is that we will eventually reach an “Omega Point,” in which all things are brought mystically back to God. The diagrams he drew depicting this look strangely familiar.  I think U2 is into this vibe of trying to create a world consciousness.  It’s difficult to ignore the parallels between de Chardin’s drawings and the 360 set, regardless of whether or not the designers were thinking about this.  As the four arms meet in the middle the do so at a point that rises to the heavens.  In watching the DVD, I was also aware that the open air stage and the 360 degree video screen made everyone in the 90,000+ audience look in the same direction, thus enhancing the shared, communal experience.

This will continue to be a don’t-miss tour when it re-starts next year.  Until then, check out the DVD.  It is loaded with bonus features and the editing and the presentation of the concert footage is flawless.  Being able to see the enormity of the crowd in motion and in song from helicopter flyovers only adds to the notion that their concerts are akin to worship experiences.  Aside from the full length concert, the DVD features a documentary short about the creation of the stage, clips from the tour, a bonus concert track, a time laps video of the creation of the stage, video from both the European and North American tour openings, videos from three songs off their new album, No Line On the Horizon, and two making-of featurettes about these videos, and photos, screensavers, and wallpapers.

Recent Pop Theology contributor and self-proclaimed Bare Naked Ladies addict (seriously, we need to conduct an intervention), Jessica Margrave Schirm, reviews their latest album, All in Good Time, which releases today.

Whether or not you consider yourself a Barenaked Ladies (BNL) fan, chances are you’re more familiar with their music than you might think. If you were in high school or college, like me, during the 90’s or the early part of this decade then it’s likely that the BNL and their hits such as “One Week,” “Pinch Me,” and “If I had $1,000,000″ have a home on the soundtrack of your youth.

Despite my familiarity with their hit singles, I didn’t become a BNL fan until after my son was born. As a Christmas present in 2008, my brother gave us Snacktime!, their Juno Award winning children’s album, and I began to realize I had been missing something. I found myself listening to Snacktime! even when my son wasn’t in the car, and I knew I needed to dig a little deeper into the BNL archives to see if there was more to the band than those early hit singles conveyed. Much to my delight, discovering them again for the first time was like coming home.

But just as I began to fall in love with all the songs that didn’t make them their millions, and as soon as I realized that their brilliant, sometimes haunting, sometimes hilarious lyrics and their captivating instrumental diversity stirred up something profound within me, it all started slipping away. Ed Robertson, a founding BNL member, had a near death experience in a plane crash, and Steven Page, the other founding member of the band, left to pursue a solo career after an image-tainting arrest for drug possession.  After more than 20 years together, the future of the Barenaked Ladies seemed bleak, to say the least.

But Ed (guitar/vocals) and the three remaining Ladies–Jim Creeggan (bass/vocals), Tyler Stewart (drums/vocals) and Kevin Hearn (keyboard/guitar/vocals)–decided to revamp the band as a four piece and headed back into the studio in 2009.   In a recent interview with CHARTattack.com, Ed reflected,

For a while there, it had gotten pretty dark. I think it caused all of us to pull away from the band a bit. When we parted ways with Steve it was a chance to reassess and say, ‘Do we want this? …We’ve been really fortunate… We’ve done the thing that everybody wants to do when they start a band and they’re kids. The dream has come true for us. So what do you do now? Do you try and do it all again? That’s a fairly daunting prospect and is anything short of that a disappointment? …Well, no. You re-examine that and you say this is what I want to do because I enjoy doing it and I write songs as a part of the way I express myself and I entertain people because I love to do that…I always say I do the music for free. I get paid to sleep in hotels and wait around in airports and sleep on tour buses and stuff. The music is free…So we reassessed everything, the four of us, and we said we can’t hope to have the same ride we’ve already had. We have to do it because we want to do it and if success follows, then great.

So, what’s the result of a year’s worth of reflection, writing, soul-searching, recording and promoting?   All in Good Time, available in the US on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010, is the Barenaked Ladies’ 11th album, their first as a four piece, and as all the reviews suggest, it is by far their most stylistically daring, musically diverse and emotionally candid album to date.

What I appreciate most about All in Good Time is that, both lyrically and instrumentally, we are invited as listeners to experience the band working through their individual and collective grief.  From denial to anger…through bargaining and depression…pressing onward to acceptance and then back again, All in Good Time creates the space for us to feel angry and disenchanted, and yet reflective and hopeful; to look honestly at the things that have come undone and to ask why, and how long, and what if; to mourn our own should haves, could haves, and would haves.  All in Good Time demonstrates the Barenaked Ladies’ ability to press on through and to make the most of this ordinary moment.  They’ve learned there’s nothing left to be taken for granted.

With that said, All in Good Time isn’t actually full of doom and gloom. Quite the opposite.  The album is life-giving, spirit-lifting, and empowering.  As is the case with most musical separations, Steven Page is the target of his fair share of scathing lyrics as the band explores his leaving. But when all is said and done, the album isn’t hindered by Page’s absence. In fact, I’d concur with a review in The Globe and Mail that suggests “… the overall sound of All in Good Time is so rich, melodic and powerful you’d almost think BNL had gained members.”

All in Good Time does not disappoint. Ed explains it this way to Macleans.ca, “’We haven’t just moved on. [...] We went through the f–kin’ wringer and figured out how to do this so it was better. It’s not like just one guy left and we’re just walking out on stage and trying to do it without him; we’re putting a lot of energy into doing something good. We’re proud of it, and it’s great that people are responding to it because we care. That’s why we do it—we f–king care.”

And all I can say is thank you for caring.  All in Good Time proves what BNL fans have known for years–this band is infinitely more talented as vocalists, musicians, and songwriters and more socially engaged than their more popular hits might suggest.  Though he’ll be missed (especially at the live shows) Steven’s leaving creates room on this album, particularly for Kevin and Jim, to step up and show the world that though the Barenaked Ladies have been creating music for more than 20 years, they somehow brilliantly manage to make each album more current, more prolific, and more authentic than the one before.

Religion Dispatches has an interesting article up this morning entitled “When the Gods Die:  Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett Take the 70s With Them” by Anthea Butler.  Butler is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester and teaches in the areas of African American religious history, American religious history, and women and gender studies.  Follow the link after the jump.

“When the Gods Die:  Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett Take the 70s With Them”

Unless you’re working the night shift and have just woken up for work, you probably already know that Michael Jackson, the self-proclaimed King of Pop, died earlier this afternoon of a heart attack.  Since his passing, the cable news networks have been debating his place in music history:  who is greater Elvis, The Beatles, or Michael Jackson?  This is a fruitless debate.  What matters is that he was an incomparable entertainer whose influence cannot fully be measured just yet.  At the same time, few artists or celebrities have been as controversial.  Today is not the time to criticize or judge but to celebrate an amazing artist whose music brought joy to millions upon millions of lives.  Videos after the jump.  What’s your favorite Michael Jackson song and/or video?