Music for living

For starters, I'd like to thank whoever posted the Jeremy Clive Huggins' article that I referred to in my own article. It really helps broaden the discussion. It also helps to clear up some of the things I was trying to tackle in my article, as I apparently failed to properly do.

It's unfortunate that this turned into an anonymous, mud-slinging internet conversation and that no one has bothered to actually respond in print, with a name to it. That could be really beneficial conversation in print (or even here I suppose), as people tend to be more cautious and mutually respectful about what they say when they have to put their own name to it. I seem to be the only one who has been willing to do that so far, and I'd encourage others to do so as well. Also, it's apparent that this is a bit of touchy issue, due to the slightly hostile feedback I've received, but if you read the article carefully you will note that I wasn't "crapping all over" contemporary christian music, as anonymous so elegantly put it. It has it's place, as I granted. That being said, let me at least attempt to deal with some of the (rather good and thought provoking) points that you guys (and girls?) have raised here.

As for the challenge to to explore more Christian bands, you may be right there. I may not be open-minded enough on this issue. It's been a while since I've checked out the music section at any local Christian bookstores. However, Caedmon's Call is one of the few contemporary Christian bands that have stayed with me and that have been, in my opinion, honest with their struggles. Take a song like "Center Aisle". It's about suicide, about the fact that a life can become so broken that the person is no longer willing to live it. Derek Webb's Friend's sister killed herself, and in the song he asks "What crimes have you committed, demanding such penance, you couldn't wait for five more minutes, and a cry for help." In the end, and this is what I really appreciate, Webb ends the song with tears, with a "young girl lying on all our hearts". He allows for people who have dealt with suicide and who have been deeply affected by it to share in his pain and in his broken humanity. He offers unhurried time. You don't find in "center aisle" the rushed redemption that is found in so many Christian songs, such as Casting Crown's "Set me free". Sure, the song is about depression, but it allows the listener absolutely no time to dwell with that pain and just be broken about it. By the end of a four minute song, they're singing "you are free!"... Well, what about the person who isn't free from it yet? What about the person who is still struggling and crying and feeling sick to their stomach with sorrow? Like Huggins says in his article, music like this doesn't respect a person as a "complex and glorious ruin". It hurries you to the redemption, almost forcing you to get over your depression by the end of it.

And here's where it gets tricky. I completely and totally, 100% believe in the power of Christ to set us free. Free from depression, from wounded relationships, from addictions... And, I absolutely believe there is a time and place for songs like "Set me free". I am almost willing to guarantee that the song has lifted people during times of sadness and helped people who would maybe otherwise be stranded. Casting Crowns is doing great work for the body of Christ, and it seems like that's what they're called to do.

What I think this world needs more of musically, and obviously this is part of my opinion and something I'm working through, is more Christian artists who are willing to be transparent about their struggles, and the fact that they are still dealing with them. Now, there's a fine line between glorifying sin and struggle and then actually dealing with it, and I recognize that. Cal Seerveld recently spoke at Redeemer and, if you'll allow me to paraphrase, that Christian art must do one of two things:

1. It must be GOOD art. There is no sin greater for a Christian artist than to do be plain lousy work. I won't hesitate to say that, in my opinion, much contemporary Christian music doesn't live up to even industry standards at times, often not in musicianship and most often not in imaginativity. To put that more clearly, there seems to be a lack of imagination in songs that simply say, in a copy/paste kind of structure, "Here's the problem, Here's the answer: Christ is King".

2. Present, at the very least, the reality that the world is broken, and in need of redemption. everyone in the world will recognize this, will empathize with it, and they won't get turned off by quick conclusions and a hurrying to the resurrection and salvation. Christ was dead for three days. Think about that. three whole days. His followers, his loved ones, wept at his death, were left to struggle through the incredible pain and disappointment. Yes, he did rise, and yes, there is redemption, but I'm not convinced we have to squeeze it into the last 30 seconds of a four minute song.

my hesitant suggestion, and I'm interested in dialogue here, is that a song in itself need not be redemptive. We should be allowed to struggle through our pains, to have people come around us and say, "yeah, that's how it is... sometimes life really does suck". When you lose a loved one, it's rarely best for your friends to say "well, they're in heaven, no worries". I tend to feel like punching people who say that, because, while it is true, it's also offensive to the truth of the matter: that you're hurting. Sometimes it's better for them to say "yeah. I feel your anger. Things can get really ****ed up at times." As much as I like the idea of this, I can't help but fear that any Christian musician who writes an struggling, broken song like that and manages to get it on Christian radio will likely be judged incredibly quickly. We seem to almost expect any Christian in the public to be flawless, and this is a huge problem when it comes to honest artistry.

That being said, when it comes to music, as a whole record, considering a compilation of work over an extended period of time, I believe that there should be a theme of redemption, that the biblical narrative should be reflected in it's entirety. There needs to be life to overcome death and joy to overcome sorrow. We cannot submit something as large scale as an entire album to our culture and to our God without somehow reflecting Christ, his sacrifice, and his already-not yet kingdom. And I think there are some Christian musicians, outside of the contemporary scene, who truly do this. Sufjan Stevens is an obvious one. Anberlin is another (When asked what a main theme of the album "Cities" was, he replied: "I guess Cities is more like letting all the skeletons out of the closet and exposing it"). Derek Webb, more with his solo stuff now, is another great example. Unfortunately, the honest stuff he is writing is getting rejected by churches who expect the Christ-pop sort of contemporary stuff that I really struggle with, and he's not allowed to play in some churches now when he tours with Caedmon's Call.

These are things I'm thinking about, and I was hoping this article would create a bit of a launch pad for a mature discussion about it. I just ask that next time, before ruling me out (I happen to be a 'twenty-one year old Presbyterian Church of America, Redeemer Student'... or anyone else for that matter) as a 'close minded old man who writes articles about things he doesn't bother to research', you'll show a little respect for the complexity of an issue and for the person behind the article, because it may just be something that they are struggling with and attempting to articulate in a responsible, vulnerable matter.

Blessings.

-Tim Selles

“What does a good father look like? [half a page of space] How do I embody this role? [full page of space] What am I supposed to be doing for my son right now? [blank stare of space]” So begins and, two weeks later, presently ends my book-length manuscript. I decided, around nine months ago, that when my son were born, I would start chronicling year one of both his life as my son and my life as his father. I chose the chronicle format over a standard memoir or collection of personal essays because I wanted the form of the book to model its content: discovery, over the course of time. With a chronicle, I would write as I experienced, immediately record impressions and understandings; and by proxy, the reader would experience a sense of immediacy with the subject matter, neither of us knowing exactly where the present moment would lead. The thing that’s so unnerving about the chronicle format, though, with its adherence and devotion to the present, is that the potential to expose deep personal folly is steep, unavoidable even. Another issue, with this subject matter, at least, is responsibility. Clearly, though I admit the tendency to overvalue my writing as a living, breathing organism, my responsibility is to my living, breathing, sometimes screaming infant son: Imagine: He screams because his feet are cold and I run to my notebook to write about his neediness in a way that will really move my audience. To my shame, I actually can imagine that.

And yet. Those few sentences in my notebook found the beginning of an answer shortly after I wrote them. I supported my son, Hiro, on my chest as he slept. I was pinned to an uncomfortable hospital couch, he to me. I dared not move for fear of waking him. And how else, I thought, could I possibly father him right now besides being still with him, being present here, being generous with my body and my time? Obvious for some, perhaps, but that’s a difficult position for me because my default mode is performance, busyness, beginning-middle-end. Presence is difficult. What I desperately hope for is that when my son looks for me, I will be home.

I will be home. I will dwell here for my son. He has rights to a land shaped like me. This is abstract. Reader, I haven’t forgotten that this is an article about music. Specifically, the editorship of Comment asked me, several months ago, to write an article about my “favourite new music of 2007.” I’ve spent months not knowing how to approach the subject; as someone whose ears harden in the absence of headphones, my uncertainty about writing this has been somewhat surprising to me. I love music. I love talking about music. I love reading about music. Currently, I love the music of Page France, which I will get to, I promise. But I haven’t known what this is supposed to be about. The topic has been clear, but its meaning hasn’t. Why do I care about this music, specifically? What does my caring mean?

Perhaps, as is often the case, I can best serve you by telling you what I don’t mean. This is not intended as a discussion on the role of Christians in the arts (Calvin Seerveld and Hans Rookmaaker and Francis Schaeffer have said anything I might think to). This is not specifically about the current phenomenon, and I think there is one, of Christians making genuinely good music that attracts, respects, and delights the secular music-place. Nor is this about the goodness to be found in secular music, and there’s so much. I do not want simply to tell you that I adore certain music; my goal has been to tell you why, and, honestly, that why is not something that I’ve spent much of my music-all-the-time life thinking about. Thus, my lingering uncertainty about this article, why I’ve been attempting to listen to myself as I’ve listened to music, why my notebook for this article read “Page France [blankety blank blank pages]” for so long.

And yet. Two days ago, the beginning of an answer: “Loren . . . posture.” Loren is an acquaintance, a friend-in-becoming, I hope. I met Loren at Meshuggah, my favorite coffeeshop, and got to know him while working at Subterranean Books, the local independent bookseller two doors down from Meshuggah. We talk about authors and architecture-based community development—authors because we both have interest, architecture because he does. He’s in the midst of figuring out what to do with himself, his studies, his desires, his gifts. Loren is incredibly thoughtful, gifted, interesting. Loren is not a Christian. I have a lot to learn from Loren. Two days ago, I was sitting outside Meshuggah, listening to music, lost in the blank pages of this not-yet article. The deadline for a draft was staring me down (if one can hear an abstract idea laughing at him, the deadline was doubled-over, crying even). Loren came outside and sat down next to me. Reluctantly, I pulled off my headphones and nudged my notebook to the side. I asked how he was doing, if he’d come to any resolution regarding vocational decisions. And he began explaining where he was, why he struggled with his decisions, what he hoped for. At some point, I looked at myself listening to Loren. I was sitting on the edge of my seat; my headphones were in my left hand, my pen in my right hand, ticking. My question to Loren said “I care what you value and who you are,” but my posture said “I’m freaked out right now and don’t have time for this.” I set my stuff down, slid back in my seat, and heard what he was saying.

Several hours later, I considered that moment. All the people I love, I trust, I want to be around, all of them answer, with varying volume, “yes” to the following basic question: “Will you be there for me?” It’s the question, I’ve come to believe, that houses all my other questions, fears, and longings. Their answers are variations on “Rest, Jeremy, I’m here, and you have my time.” This is a generosity, a gift, a grace—unhurried time. Behind all else, one of the main reasons why I enjoy the music I enjoy is that it offers unhurried time.


It’s now two days since I wrote those last words, “unhurried time.” I’m mulling over exactly how I want to talk about that idea. It’s a bit abstract. Perhaps some help from the four children outside the coffeeshop right now. Their parents, looking for something to keep their children busy, looking for some way to afford themselves some time to talk, suggested that they stand by the entrance and “make a play.” “What’s that?” one of the kids asked. “That’s where you make up a story that isn’t true,” replied one of the mothers. I instantly wanted to object, wanted to bust in all Scorsese-like and yell, “No! You might only be two, three, three, and four years old, but you will have integrity!” I thought for a moment how I might direct my own children in the same situation. Perhaps I would say that what they should do is tell a story that is true, even if it’s never been told the way they imagine it, even if it’s never happened exactly like they think of it, even, or especially, if they can’t believe it themselves.

And yet, despite the misdirective, the kids huddled in the entranceway, deciding what story they would tell, until the youngest of the bunch flopped on the sidewalk and began crying—a great actor in the making. His mother asked him what was wrong, and the other children piped up: “He doesn’t know what hero he wants to be.”

The others suggested the standard fare: Superman, Spiderman, Flash Gordon, SpongeBob. I had my own suggestion. “How about,” I wanted to tell him, “you be ‘Happy Ending.’” Could any role require more imagination? If those kids did make that play, I’d suggest Page France’s album Hello, Dear Wind as musical accompaniment. The first Page France song I heard is “Chariot,” in which God is a “wrecking ball with a heart of gold”; in which there will be a “wedding feast for the snakes and bees with the angel teeth” wherein we’ll be married to “the blushing circus king and dance like elephants”; in which Jesus is “one of us, plays the tambourine, breaks the bread for us and sings”; and in which Michael Nau, the frontman for Page France, both asks for assurance (“Tell us that you care for us / We need to hear a word for us”) and resolutely imagines: “So we will become a happy ending.” It is a mystery.

This album is filled with such tension: We see rust, yet we imagine, as vividly, shimmer. There are soldiers and thieves, and there are kings and queens. Uncertainty and confidence. Figure and literality. Anxiety and rest. The already, as theologians like to say, and the not-yet.

There is a lightness to the music. Glockenspiels and accordions and tambourines seem, initially, to suggest that we not take these lyrics too seriously. And I want to take that musical directive seriously, but I won’t take it literally. In the same way: Were Loren to ask me, if the subject of Christianity enter our conversation directly, how the God of the Bible could be so vindictive, I would be careful to take that question seriously, but I would be equally as careful not to take it only literally because Loren has a rust and scar history, has family and friends, knows people, maybe including himself, who have been burned by Christians, belittled by poor exegesis, frustrated by circumstances. There is more than surface, something shoving the stated. We have reasons for our questions and fears, even if we don’t always know their source or possess certainty concerning their expression. “We know,” as Esther Meek says in her excellent book Longing to Know, “more than we can say.”

So I fight the temptation to set “serious” lyrical subject matter (creation, fall, redemption, consummation) against “light-hearted” instrumentation, refuse an either-or fallacy. To do so would be akin to the Christian who says, “If we really believed in sin and salvation . . . if we really believed in judgment, then . . . .” That kind of conditionality is often a result, I believe, not of increased seriousness about spiritual matters, but of an impoverished imagination, of the fear of living with uncertainty, of a God who never laughs or dances or wouldn’t dream of playing a tambourine as long as there’s so much work left to be done. Perhaps taking myself too seriously is a result of not taking God seriously enough, of refusing to live with uncertainty, with finitude, with a God-man who breathes his last on a Friday and eats fish on a beach with his friends a few days later. “What if we really believed [insert something serious about God here]?” Marilynne Robinson, in her essay “Facing Reality,” answers:

I find no evidence that such beliefs were felt to be discredited or that they were consciously abandoned. They simply dropped out of the cultural conversation. And, at the same time, we adopted this very small view of ourselves and of others, as consumers and patients and members of interest groups, creatures too minor, we may somehow hope, for great death to pause over us. If we do still believe in the seriousness of being human, while we have lost the means of acknowledging this belief, even in our thoughts, then profound anxiety, whose origins we would be at a loss to name, seems to me an inevitable consequence. And this may account for both the narrowness and the intensity of the fiction that contains us. It is our comfort and our distraction. We are spiritual agoraphobes.

Here then, is one of the discomforts I often encounter when I listen to music that emanates from a Christian worldview. I do not feel taken seriously because everything is so literally serious. I’m not trying to take on the Christian music industry; I believe that many Christian artists do their work in good faith and to the glory of God, but so often I’m left feeling malnourished, small, disrespected as a complex, glorious ruin (to use Schaeffer’s term). In short, I feel hurried. I feel hurried lyrically; I feel hurried instrumentally; I feel hurried existentially. In contrast to a band like Page France, I’m not given room to live and move with my uncertainties; not allowed to walk around with the image of myself as “buried in the junkyard,” “rattl[ing] with the car parts” “every time the herald Cherub sings” (“Junkyard”); not allowed to seek fresh, extra-worship-service expression for my seeking; not allowed to exit an album, or sometimes even a song, without a literal explanation of and solution to my problems. In short, I’m left anxious, harried, hurried.

What I love, finally, about Page France, and other bands who appeal to my desire for unhurried time (Iron and Wine, David Bazan, Kelley McRae, The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers, Dolorean, Ill Lit [named after a collection of poems by Franz Wright, whose poetry refuses to hurry me], and Sufjan Stevens, to name a few), is that they allow me to feel whole. I am not made to feel malnourished because of my real doubts, my real fears, my real need to live with apparent contradiction. Jesus is hard, and Jesus is gentle. Peter knows, John the Baptist knows, Thomas knows. Jesus calls people to repent, and Jesus leaves people with open-ended questions. Every Sunday that I meet with other believers, Jesus calls me to confess my sins, and Jesus allows me to break bread and sing. I have not seen Jesus, but Jesus makes the most sense of everything I do see. Jesus’ message is urgent, and Jesus doesn’t force Himself on anyone. Jesus will come with a sword, and Jesus will also come with a backing chorus of angels playing trumpets and tambourines.

I don’t know whether Page France (or most of the musicians I appreciate) shares my religious convictions. I’ve never had a conversation with them. I do know that Christians, myself included, have a tendency to want to hurry and claim musicians as “our own,” as if they, and not the reality they sing of, will revive us. I do know that the members of Page France met at a potato sack race in San Francisco, and that’s a good place to meet. And I know that they play instruments and express ideas so admixed with sobriety and joy that many Christians would quickly dismiss them as liberal, at best, heathen at worst. I cannot personally defend them, but I will defend the value of music that rings true to the human condition as I partially understand it, music that doesn’t spoil a mystery, music that, if it hurries me at all, hurries me to dance, to plea, to cry, to sing, to imagine me as a happy ending.