Category: Music

Some preliminaries: First, as you may know from other posts, I’m particularly emotionally susceptible to certain songs (hymns), sights, gestures, words, scenes from films, even though I’m pretty stolid in other affairs of everyday life. Neurology and psychology have a lot to do with this, I’d bet, but it’s how I am in deep ways. Second, I have known about ‘The Whole of the Moon’ and much of the Waterboys’ catalogue from when things were first released, at least up until the turn of the century when I stopped listening to radio in favour of listening to semi-random shuffle of digital files.

More recently — perhaps five to seven years — I was listening to my usual shuffle (crudely: star-weighted and recency-balanced) when ‘The Whole of the Moon’ came on, and it struck a hammer blow to my heart. I had heard it before, but not listened so carefully, and the song bowled me over. Since then I’ve put a higher priority to listening to Waterboys tracks, and Margaret and I listened to the recent Life, Death, and Dennis Hopper album a lot in preparation to catching their tour when they rolled through Oxford. As I’ve had a chance to pay closer attention to my favourites from their work, I thought I’d write one of my ‘what makes it good’/‘Great Moments in Popular Music’ posts about ‘The Whole of the Moon’.

At the heart of the song, Mike Scott proposes a simple but quite powerful metaphorical comparison between two people — one who sees the obvious, the manifest (‘the crescent’ [moon], easily visible and beautiful, but partial), and another who sees more comprehensively (‘the whole of the moon’). The comparison is so straightforward but insightful that in lesser hands it could have been an impressive dénouement to a workmanlike song of romantic aspiration.

But instead, Scott embeds the couplet as a refrain among verses that repeat the gesture with different metaphorical settings. That’s risky, especially with so striking a pivotal instance recurring throughout the lyric; again, most writers would end up with an array of more or less colourful paired comparisons that contrast with, and ultimately drag down, the refrain. But Scott selects sequential contrasts that with inventive imagination reinforce the overall premise. Just in the first verse, the ‘more obvious’ partner pictured a rainbow, had flashes (presumably of insight), wandered (aimlessly) out in the world — whereas the more profound partner holds a rainbow in their hand, knows the plan, and stayed in their room (in a state of sufficiency). Subsequent verses follow a similar pattern, each summed up with the ‘moon’ couplet (the first time I heard the song, the contrast between seeing ‘the rain-dirty valley’ and seeing ‘Brigadoon’ was what caught my attentive interest).

Between the verses Scott develops a refrain characterising the secondary protagonist as having transgressed boundaries ‘too high, too far, too soon’ in apparently causal conjunction with their having seen ‘the whole of the moon’, the only time he ascribes costs to the partner’s wisdom. Thus the refrain casts an additional light on seeing the whole: Scott voices the admiring perspective of one who hasn’t reached the heights of the other, but who has not been as high, as far, as soon. The profound partner has paid for their perspective a cost that the more cautious Scott hasn’t, and possibly wouldn’t pay.

In the final verse, Scott sets aside the paired contrasts and unleashes a flood of evocative images he associates with the partner’s vision: ‘Unicorns and cannonballs, palaces and piers / Trumpets, towers and tenements / Wide oceans full of tears / Flags, rags ferryboats / Scimitars and scarves…’. By opening the sequence with ‘unicorns’ (the national animal of Scotland, cheers!) he signals that his subject’s wisdom reaches beyond mere expertise or calculation but extends into the realm of fantasy, an effect that the alliteration and internal rhyme in subsequent lines tends to accentuate; factual knowledge doesn’t come in such richly ornamental parcels. (Listeners from outwith Scotland should remember that ‘tenements’ refers not to American slum dwellings but to the distinctive Scottish arrangement of flats in multi-storey buildings, here contrasting somewhat with ‘towers’ and more distantly to ‘palaces’, but not specifically invoking deprivation.) The verse concludes with a summation that affirms the fantastic range and value of the subject’s imagination: ‘Every precious dream and vision underneath the stars…’. And in the last iteration of the refrain, the wise one no longer has ‘a torch in your pocket and the wind at your heels’ as in previous refrains, but has ‘the wind in your sails / You came like a comet / Blazing your trail’, again underscoring the fabulous advent of the visionary partner.

Apart from the stunning lyrics, the musical performance too intensifies the song’s impact. It provides evidence for my abiding conviction that rock songs that can incorporate a horn section should incorporate a horn section; here the horns add a hooky fanfare flourish that sticks in one’s memory, along with the remarkable effect (I think I remember having read that Scott ascribed it to the late Karl Wallinger, but, rechecking, I see that Scott uses ‘we’) of the explosion in the background at the word ‘cannonballs’, as though the song itself was exploding into the world.

The whole of ‘The Whole of the Moon’ unfolds brilliant musicians outdoing themselves in supporting an artfully crafted lyric. It occurred to me to write this after listening to it this morning (Margaret and I scrambled to play some excellent tunes to purify our heads of eagworms after somebody played ‘Season in the Sun’ on Radio Four this morning); I could listen to it again now, and through the day. As someone who sees the crescent, but knows there must be a whole moon there beyond my grasp, the song speaks to me of the joy of celebrating imaginative expression beyond anything I can evoke — and I’m. very thankful for that.

I have for a while reported my recent music listening on The Platform Previously Known as Twitter, but since that’s increasingly barren of my friends (rightly, in my view), I thought I’d begin modulating toward posting the report here. It’s broken into tweet-sized bits, which has the advantage of keeping me from going on and on about random topics, but does incline toward a bare-bones style of reporting. Here we go:

It’s been a while, so perhaps time for my last fortnight according to last.fm:

1 Elvis Costello [& The Attractions] 15 scrobbles
2 The Beatles 10
3 The Band 9
4 Beyoncé 7
5 Kirsty MacColl 7
6 The Clash 7
7 Frank Zappa 6
8 Juliana Hatfield 6
9 Michelle Shocked 6
10 Steve Earle 6

As always, this omits the Mountain Goats, which always turn up in a high slot in my play count, in part because they release so much music that random shuffle (my default*) will turn up more of theirs.
Sadly, this also misses out a couple of my favourites from the past weeks:

A flashback to ‘Mongoose’ by Elephant’s Memory…

Ed Watson pointed me to ‘Endurant’ by Bloodywood:

(Great as the cut is, this vocal style makes my flesh crawl, as I feel it in my throat.)

The world may weary of my promoting the music of my late friend Mikey Iafrate, but every time I hear his voice I think how strong this or that track is, and then feel the wave of grief to remember that he’s died…

Oh, and I rediscovered in the last week that my memory transposes the lyrics of the Marshall Tucker Band’s ‘Another Cruel Love’…

… with the defining melodic hook from the Allman Brothers’s ‘Jessica’.
(As Dickie Betts plays the riff, just sing along ‘It’s another cruel love, passing me by-y-y…’)

* Actually, I don’t use a strict random shuffle, but an awkward simulation of a weighted shuffle that favours tracks that I haven’t heard recently, and tracks that I’ve given higher rankings (on Apple’s five-star scale). But it’s a kludge, and I’d relish a chance to adopt a music player with a more sophisticated shuffle function.

The other day my colleague Sarah Apetrei called the attention of our Theology Faculty to the the fact that our hard-working, thoughtful Graduate Studies Administrator Nick Fowler (Sarah identified him as ‘Nick “Growler” Fowler’ but I don’t know if that’s an official nickname) is touring Norway as bass player in Gaz Coombes’s back-up band (keep an eye open for him in these appearances on Jools Holland’s Late night BBC show). No one seriously accuses Theology Faculties of being the centre of coolness, but I’ve worked among (and just plain ‘met’ incidentally) some impressive musicians, from my Disseminary pal Trevor at Seabury (and Tripp there also) to Doug at Glasgow and now Nick here at Oxford; and Margaret had a connection with Thomas Joseph White of the Hillybilly Thomists when she was at Duke).

That reminded me that I was listening to one of my favourite singer-songwriter cuts a while ago, when I though I’d look up her home page to see whether I’d scoured it for all her recordings. Shannon Campbell had let her web presence lapse, alas, but the Wayback Machine has a long memory and I was pleased to see her music archive is preserved in digital amber. Better still, the Archive preserves all the lyrics and backstories she supplied.

My favourite is probably also her best-known recording, ‘Dreaming of Violets’ (with Scott Andrew LePera); her cover of ‘Landslide’ is strong, too, and there are a lot of other recordings here (many that I hadn’t downloaded before). I’m going ahead to download them all, so that if the Archive ever succumbs to entropy, there will be at least a chance that my copies will have survived — so you can ask me if you have any trouble downloading them from Wayback. I promised Shannon to download all I can to save them and pass them along to as many people as I could — she’s a lovely friend, and I’m very happy and proud to call attention to her work.

So listen to and ask others to listen to ‘Dreaming of Violets’; there are tons of recordings that have gotten more attention with less finesse, and it would be a great thing for Shannon to see a fresh wave of people enjoying her gifts again. Download, pass ’em along, and thank you, Shannon!

A couple of online interventions lately have turned my thoughts to one of my favourite schemes, namely a journal that published reviews of books, music, films, and so on from a set interval in retrospect. None current, none still angling for awards or clinging to the last weeks of box-office receipts: all post-hype, based strictly on the staying power of what the work accomplished. Since no one has commissioned me to found the NME of retrospective reviewing, and since it’s on my mind, I’ll devote the rest of this blog post to a few comments on cultural production from the year 1989; if I’m satisfied with how that turns out, I’ll post further retro-views on a more or less fortnightly basis, working backward and forward from 1989. (I did this one time before, and never followed it up, ’til today.) I’ll talk about music today, and film tomorrow (if I remember).

1990 Grammies went to — whoa! — Bette Midler for ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’, Bonnie Raitt for Nick of Time (both Album of the Year and Rock Vocal, Female), the Traveling Wilburys for their eponymous album, Don Henley’s ‘End of Innocence’, Living Colour’s ‘Cult of Personality’, and the Indigo Girls’ first album (Contemporary Folk Performance). 1990 was also the year Milli Vanilli got a Grammy, only for it to be revoked since lip-synching isn’t the same as musical performance. The Village Voice set the top five as De La Soul, 3 Feet High And Rising; Neil Young, Freedom; Lou Reed, New York; the Neville Brothers, Yellow Moon; and Neneh Cherry, Raw Like Sushi. Rolling Stone chose Don Henley’s The End Of The Innocence as Album of the Year, with the Pixies Doolittle, Neil Young, Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, and The Rolling Stones’ – Steel Wheels as their top five.

If you had asked me to name my top albums from 1989 without priming me with the above, I’d have said:

The Pixies, Doolittle — speaks for itself, doesn’t it? ‘Debaser’, ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’, ‘Here Comes Your Man’… That’s a top release from 1989 if anything is.

Neneh Cherry, Raw Like Sushi — I’m a big Neneh Cherry supporter, and ‘Buffalo Stance’ is a favourite of mine.

Lyle Lovett & his Large Band (eponymous) — Lovett’s wry-Texas-swing-country sensibility hits several of my favourite points: his wit, the tight ensemble playing, the outsider/underdog perspective. LL&hLB includes some terrific Lovett cuts — ‘Which Way Does That Old Pony Run’, ‘I Married Her Just Because She Looks Like You’, ‘Here I Am’, ‘The Blues Walk’ (!), ‘Good Intentions’.

The Beautiful South, Welcome to the Beautiful South — And not just because Paul Heaton namechecks our daughters Philippa and Jennifer in ‘Song for Whoever’. Cf. also ‘You Keep It All In’.

Bob Mould, Workbook — ‘Heartbreak a Stranger’, yes, but ‘See A Little Light’ is so wonderful a composition — and the album could only be by Bob Mould, you recognise it a mile away.

De La Soul, Three Feet High And Rising — If you were to play something from TFHaR for me — except probably “The Magic Number’ — I’d have to look it up and say, “Oh, that’s from Three Feet High, too?’ But a great upsurge of originality (in the good sense) from a formative interval in hip-hop.

Beastie Boys, Paul’s Boutique — I can’t single out particular tracks from this, but as a whole they put together a remarkably woven album.

The Connells, Fun & Games — Not just for North Carolina local band reasons, but I relish the Connells’ version of jangle pop, and on this album especially “Hey Wow’ and ‘Uninspired’. Speaking of which…

Trashcan Sinatras, Cake — The Trashcans’ first album, with ‘Obscurity Knocks’, leaning forward into their subsequent brilliant albums. And…

The Reivers, End of the Day — A terrific indie album, top to bottom. “Star Telegram’, ‘Discontent of Winter’, ‘Your Secrets Are Not Safe’, and ‘A Cut Above The Rest’, all very fine.

Lou Reed, New York — OK, it’s not Reed at his very best, but some of the cuts are a good reminder that even his just good enough work does a lot better than most performers’ best. However, his spouse…

Laurie Anderson, Strange Angels — I think ‘Baby Doll’ may have gotten the most airplay, but ‘Strange Angels’ breaks me open a little bit every time.

Indigo Girls, (eponymous) — I don’t hold the Grammy against them. If you can’t listen to ‘Closer to Fine’ one more time, there’s ‘Kid Fears’, ‘Land of Canaan’, and ‘Tried To Be True’ and ‘Love’s Recovery’.

That’s less soul and R&B than I’d have thought, but the late ’80s weren’t a generative time for the soul and R&B I love. Some hip-hop, but there would be more if I included late ’88 and early ’90.

What makes ‘Come On, Eileen’ great?

In the first place, plenty of people don’t think it is great, and even people who think it’s great can agree that it’s painfully overplayed. Whether you like it or not, it would probably sound better if you hadn’t heard it seventy krillion times.

It’s overplayed for a reason, though: there’s a lot to admire about it, mostly in the arrangement — The lyrics are all right. The repeated ‘thoughts verge on dirty’ (then ‘Well, they’re dirty’) motif provides an ingenious turn on outright explicit candour, or cloying romance, the first time you hear it; but it doesn’t wear well. Kevin Rowland’s singing as a grown-up, and we get what he’s referring to. It might do well as a device lightly deployed, but instead the Dexys hammer it home. The trope of ‘we’re different from those people’ does its usual work, though the song is unassuming enough* that it doesn’t seem too condescending, and ‘beat down eyes sunk in smoke dried faces’ is a fresh way of making this characterisation.

He’s sweet-talking Eileen, but he invites without threatening (in the song; the video shows Rowland and another member of the band grabbing and holding Eileen against her will, though it concludes with Eileen joining Rowland and walking into the distance arm in arm with him). Partial credit.

But the art lies in the arrangement, in several ways. First, the arrangement underscores the lyric’s hopefulness with brightness, but without drama (contrast ‘Born to Run’ — another ‘we’re not like them’ song). Predominantly up-tempo, with prominent hooks in the upper-register fiddle, banjo, and tinwhistle (and a high-end piano part), the arrangement is both full and at the same time airy and light. Langer and Winstanley did their job well.

More important, I’d argue, is the episodic structure of the song. If you count the outro, the song shifts among five distinct portions: verse – slightly slower chorus – verse – chorus — slow, but accelerating bridge – chorus, slightly faster – fade to outro. The very distinct sound of each portion flows utterly convincingly into the next. I’m a sucker for episodic structure in popular song, and ‘Come On, Eileen’ hits that squarely.

I can hear out people who don’t like it, but even when I try to be too sophisticated to like it, many subtle touches in ‘Come On, Eileen’ win me over. At the second modulation from verse to chorus, Rowland sings ‘We’ll hum this tune forever’ — I probably will.

* Does anyone think that the role Rowland’s playing really believes that his/their youth and cleverness ensures that they will escape resigned fatalism? The music expresses hopefulness and confidence, but the lyric sounds to me as though they’re self-aware that they’re enmeshed in the same circumstances that beat down their older neighbours. Maybe that’s me as an old, arguably beat-down, guy.

The other day, Toots and the Maytals’ classic ‘Pomp and Pride’ (that image on the video doesn’t look like Toots Hibbert to me — hmmm, someone needs to learn that not all Black men look alike) popped into my memory-worm register, and I’ve been thinking about it and singing along since then. Nothing so surprising about that — par for the course, that a geriatric rocker should recall fondly the music of his twenties. And also not surprising, the non-Reverend Dr Adam rolled her eyes at this, particularly since I didn’t know all the words and was making up gibberish to fill the gaps.

So to satisfy my curiosity and to give Margaret something different to roll her eyes about, I decided quickly to look up the lyrics. Google Play covered all the relatively intelligible (to my time and volume-abraded ears) lyrics, and provided for one of the trickier lines

Is it an opulin, Iceland, calm down

Now, you have to admire Toots’s poetical ingenuity, working Iceland into a song about popular discontent with luminance (‘when they see it, they see it’s not bright’; cf. also ‘Tropical Iceland’ by the Fiery Furnaces). But ‘opulin’? Sorry, that — in the words of another line of the song — that can’t be right.

No worries — a quick look at another database provides

Ease it and happily, nicely calm down

which works well and seems plausible in context. I should also note that yet another source suggests ‘Isolyn, Jacqueline, Everton, come down’ — but mixing football teams with women’s names seems unlikely to me.

This all points to the problems of bridging Jamaican pronunciation and patois with [British] standard English, the classic article on which being Steve Cotler’s ‘Draw Your Brakes — A Jamaican Creole Shout,’ which explains the otherwise opaque

Forward and fiaca
Menacle and den gosaca

(‘Opaque,’ that is, to foreign ears.) Not only are the words themselves puzzling (if indeed those are the words in question), but Scotty intones them with an ominous, prophetic intensity. If we don’t know what ‘Forward and fiaca / Menacle and den go sa-ahkah’ means, how are we to respond to its urgency?

Cotler consulted experts (imagine that! In your eye, Michael Gove!) Peter L. Patrick of Essex, and Kenneth Bilby of the Smithsonian, who explained that

“Forward and payaaka, manhangle (manhandle) and den go saaka.”

In the “youth man slang” of the time, “payaaka” was a verb, meaning “to take away another man’s woman/girlfriend.” In this “slang,” “saaka” meant “to fuck.” So the song’s intro meant, “go and take away a next man’s girl, grab her and then go have sex with her.”

So if this be prophecy, I guess I will fall far short of its mandates (and will not proclaim it so ardently when The Harder They Come comes round on my playlist). Good to know, right?

And while we’re on the topic of difficult-to-parse accent-and-patois expressions, what (you will probably ask) (actually, you won’t have thought of this, but I’m putting my thoughts in your mouth since it’s my blog, so there) ‘But what about the beginning of ‘007 (Shanty Town)’ by the giant Desmond Dekker?’ I applaud your good taste — I too am a great admirer of Desmond Dekker — and I too have had difficulty figuring out what’s going on in the song.

As it turns out once one investigates the lyrics, the song concerns rude boys who have been released from custody (‘them out of jail’ — Dekker pronounces the noun with more of an ‘ee’ sound, as happens in some Scottish patterns of pronunciation), who are obliged to behave themselves as part of the conditions for their release (‘them must get bail’, likewise leaning toward ‘ee’). This also clarifies the ‘weel’ sound at the end of the first line — it’s ‘wail’ — and the line ‘Dem rude boys deh pon probation.’ ‘At ocean eleven’? Well, not all mysteries are easily explained.

Daniel posted his Mountain Goats talk, so I’ll join in with mine (as distinct from the longer article on tMG from several years ago):

Whereas in many popular interpretations, the Bible figures as an oracular repository of sacred law, or as a textbook of science and metaphysics, or a sourcebook for general spirituality, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has developed a repertoire of songs that draw on the Bible as an utterly human expression of how the world is (and will be), even in the face of appearances that suggest otherwise. In so doing, the Mountain Goats make the moral and theological ambivalence of the Bible audible again without resolving that ambivalence into cloying pieties, defiant blasphemies, or historical criticism.
Darnielle frequently invokes the crisis of Genesis 3 — without, however, focusing on “man’s first disobedience.” Instead of telling tales about temptation and fruit, Darnielle parses the effects of the primordial transgression: exile, alienation, labour. The serpent in particular draws his attention. In the lyrics of “Cobra Tattoo,” “How To Embrace A Swamp Creature,” and “Supergenesis,” Darnielle draws out ways in which the snake of Genesis 3 not only shares the curse that falls on humanity, but shares, and expresses, some aspects of humanity as well.

The earliest of the songs, “Cobra Tattoo,” narrates at the same time three interactions — perhaps more. In one setting, the song follows a scene of courtship and flirtation between two human contemporaries, a singer and a tattooed woman. At the same time, a figurative reading may regard both characters as snakes; the singer self-identifies with the serpent of Genesis 3 (“You will bruise my head, I will strike your heel”), and the girl bears the totemic tattoo identifying her with the cobra. Or one may finally see the scene as an interaction between the Genesis serpent and Eve (marked by the serpent’s prior seduction). On this last reading, the snake imagines wooing the marked woman from a position of celestial authority — Darnielle cites from the Daystar/Lucifer passage from Isaiah 14 in the second verse — “Higher than the stars / I will set my throne” — but then adds to it John the Baptist’s warning to the crowds, “God does not need Abraham / God can raise children from stones.” The serpent of “Cobra Tattoo” patiently awaits the time when he will be transformed from his reptilian condition to the dominion to which he aspires; he urges the girl to “dream at night,” in which dreams he may communicate with her (“Try to let these garbled transmissions come through”).

On a more recent album, Darnielle returns to the serpent’s longing for transformation with the song, “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature.” As in the earlier song, the most prominent aspect of “Swamp Creature” concerns two ordinary humans (in this case they’re ex-lovers who meet one another and embrace in a perhaps-spontaneous encounter after they’ve broken up). Here the refrain makes explicitly impossible what “Cobra Tattoo” leaves undefined — that the two lovers, or would-be lovers, belong to two different species (“I’m out of my element / I can’t breathe”), as in comics and films that portray male aquatic monsters who lust after, and ultimately kill, human women. Thus the resonance with the third possible dimension of “Cobra Tattoo” — the singer again identifying himself with the reptile aspiring to a relationship with a human woman — comes to the fore. Although in the first half of the first verse he knows himself accursed with serpenthood, the second half reflects the perspective of the human visitor who stands in a doorway with his arms at his side. In this song, then, Darnielle invokes the myth of the Swamp Creature to characterise the situation of an ex-boyfriend, neither stranger nor lover, simultaneously human and reptilian. As in “Cobra Tattoo,” the singer is ultimately barred from the connection he longs for; Cobra Tattoo’s invocation of Isaiah 14 foregrounds the snake’s aspiration to be a star, but neglects Jehovah’s implacable determination to stymie any such transformation; in Swamp Creature, the way back into the Eden of the lost relationship is barred by the flashing swords of the cherubim. Although they may for one night fulfill God’s command that they be fruitful and multiply (“but not in those words,” as Woody Allen said), no more good can come of this liaison than did women’s unwilling encounters with the Swamp Creature. He’s out of his element, he can’t breathe; he panics and flees.

The transfigured serpent reappears in “Supergenesis,” although in this song Darnielle sticks solely to the snake’s longing to regain use of his lost limbs, so as to mount an attack against the forces that hobbled him. He “tries] to hoist myself up right / Again, try again,” because “someday, someday the call will sound / We all, we all are gonna get up from the ground.” (Darnielle also refers to Genesis 3 in the most recent Mountain Goats album, The Life of the World to Come, but this song (“Genesis 3:23”) concentrates solely on the expulsion of the human occupants from Eden: “See how the people here live now / Hope they’re better at it than I was / I used to live here….”)

Though the serpent in these songs looks forward to a rebellion, indulges in ill-planned sex, and imagines a battle for revenge, none of the songs vilifies him for these actions as do traditional interpretations that ascribe to him diabolical evil. But neither does Darnielle present the snake as the wronged victim of an unjust judge; “in the twinkling of an eye, my sentence gets passed” (“Supergenesis”), but the snake doesn’t protest that he was innocent. Darnielle describes how it might be to be the serpent, perhaps eliciting sympathy, but mainly opening up a rich imaginative connection to serpentine existence (and specifically to the existence of a Genesis serpent). In contrast to biblical scholars’, and most popular interpreters’, determination to prove a point for or against God, Darnielle doesn’t damn or praise his subject. He listens for the serpent’s voice, and finds the serpent in very human predicaments.
In so doing, Darnielle defies the binary mania of the recording industry by refusing both the controlling embraces of categorically Christian music (on one hand) and the defiantly secular (and in many cases “anti-ecclesiastical”) mainstream rock marketplace. The Mountain Goats’ presentation of biblical tropes is generally sympathetic, even when it’s contrarian; the frustrations and challenges that characterise The Life of the World to Come remain as steadfastly within the ambit of the biblical world as do the Psalms and Lamentations. Nonetheless, Darnielle’s qualified fascination falls far short of the norms expected of official, Gospel Music Association-certified Christian rock (even more so when one considers the catalogue of Mountain Goats’ songs with Vedic and Meso-American religious themes). The Mountain Goats sing of a more ambivalent sort of faith — steadfast and wounded, sin-soaked but hopeful — and instantiate it as a standpoint their audience may recognise, and may identify with.
They also exemplify a way of reading the Bible that doesn’t comport well with the sorts of distinctions that conventionally inhabit the interpretive discourse of professional biblical criticism. One would seek in vain for Darnielle’s lyrics to suggest that a historical reading of a particular verse legitimates his exposition. Neither, of course, does he back up his interpretive approach from creedal or magisterial authority. The standing of the Bible relative to Darnielle’s compositions derives from the extent to which he and his audience sense that he is telling the truth about the world in his (biblical) idiom.
As we theological professionals range from smoky concert venues and solitary mp3 players to the fluorescent lights of seminar rooms, lecture halls, and conference panels where we propound our own interpretations, we do well to bear in mind the limitations that arise from excluding middle terms. The texts we study provide ample grounds for complementary and contradictory readings, historical and theological, social-scientific and liberatory-political. Our best, most enduring interpretations derive their power to convince not from overheated claims about bias, ideological correctness, or methodological legitimacy, but from reading carefully and well, and from attending well to the myriad ways of heartbreak and hope in this world, for men, women, and serpents.

This morning I opened an email from someone who professed admiration for and interest in my blog — which is a good start, although that’s often the sign of a request for a link exchange, ‘maybe this would be of interest to your readers’ (as though that were more than a bedraggled few), and a website with a name such as ‘Things you should know about universities’ or ‘My herbal remedy for administrative bloat’ or whatever. I delete ’em pretty fast.
 
The message was lightly personalised, but it introduced me to a band — Wayfarer — whose repertoire draws mostly from less-well-known hymn lyrics set to freshly composed arrangements (not just new arrangements of old tunes, but new tunes altogether).
 

 
I was sufficiently intrigued to listen and watch (except the ‘eating a fried cockroach’ clip), and I’ll be adding them to my library. I suspect I may recognise more of their hymns than they do, but I’m old and enthusiastic about pre-contemporary hymnody. I’m not sure whether they look authentically like Seatlle hipsters, or ironically like Seattle hipsters, but I’m not looking at their pictures while I listen, so it probably doesn’t matter that much. The field for theologically-interested hip alt-folk is getting a little crowded; I wish these guys the best in their endeavours, and will keep my eyes open for what comes next. Don’t be strangers!
 

About a year ago, maybe more, our friend Rich pressed me to articulate the grounds for my music snobbery. ‘If,’ he reasoned, ‘you are going to sneer at my taste, you at least owe me an account of why your taste is better.’ [Editorial note for the sake of Truth: Rich did not say that, nor did I actually sneer at his taste. I just don’t share his fondness for most of ELO’s or the Eagles’ oeuvre, and I did perhaps eyeroll or arch a brow at his playlist. OK, that’s the rough equivalent of a sneer. I’m sorry.]
 
Rich suggested that I might like or dislike music in an inverse proportion to its popularity, but that’s not it. I like plenty of popular artists, and haven’t acquired a taste for lots of acquired tastes.
 
At the time, I felt sure that I must be able to sketch some criteria for my taste, but every time a candidate occurred to me, I thought it sounded hollow, and I tallied a number of counterexamples from among my favourites. I decided to let the matter rest for a while, and as time passed and I compiled a list of grounds for admiring a particular selection, the composite list looked more reputable. It is not rigidly consistent; some songs hit one particular characteristic brilliantly, but only that one characteristic; others combine several characteristics, though none extraordinarily. And none really hit all the different points I’ve thought up, in part because some of my desiderata are contradictory.
 
But it’s time for me to begin speaking out in public about what makes music good (as far as I’m concerned, and that’s not just a pro forma qualification — though I think I have good taste, mostly, I really firmly believe that other people, you for instance, may have strong grounds for reaching different conclusions than I). So with that, I’ll being by stating the obvious: Good music can be identified, most of the time, by good musicianship. Skill, technique, precision, virtuosity, all contribute to a performance I might admire.
 
OK, counterexamples first: Much punk rock, and a lot of old-timey music (to name just two genres) place little emphasis on technical musicianship. ‘Anarchy in the UK’ as performed by John McLaughlin and Buddy Rich would… lack something. They might bring something else to it, but I’m not saving my farthings for their cover version.
 
But at the same time, the cult of the great guitarist (or the ‘general admiration for other musicians’) symptomatises something pertinent to my theme. When Eric Clapton and Duane Allman dial in to the same musical wavelength on Layla, something happens that you just don’t mess with. Intuitive musical gifts are not antithetical to technical musicianship; some extremely gifted musicians intensify the quality of their work with trained musicianship (though others rely principally on their casual understanding of music, to very great effect, and some attain greatness from sheer diligent determination). OK, now I’m just sounding pedantic and dull — but you take my point.
 
So, some moments where stunning musicianship carries the day? I suspect that most of what sustained the brief incandescence of jazz-rock fusion was musicianship*; certainly the roster of noteworthy performers associated with fusion included some breath-taking musicians. The Jeff Beck albums Blow By Blow and Wired have a lot going for them, but musicianship might be the albums’ leading quality. Whatever else one might say about Frank Zappa, he upheld the very highest standards of musicianship for his bands. Mark Knopfler’s work in Dire Straits really stood out for its distinctive, right, guitar lines (even when the other bits didn’t interest me so much). Carlos Santana’s work, especially his early work, demonstrates stunning musicianship, sometimes overshadowed by the distinctiveness of his Latin-rock synthesis. I’m a big admirer of Phil Manzanera’s solo albums, again exemplifying fine technical performance. Josiah reminds me to include the Roots, to which point I assent though without feeling that I really have lived into their recordings enough to say so on the strength of my own observations (though when we saw them in New York a few years ago, the musicianship in their performance was staggering). Andrew Bird, maybe?
 
One of the besetting problems of musicianship in popular music is the sense of formality, sterility, that sometimes attend it. One of the afflictions of popular music in the 70’s came from the sense that rock musicians were trying so hard to prove their worthiness that many of them adopted painfully over-serious, over-technical styles that just didn’t rock (and often didn’t satisfy the serious audiences they were trying to impress). Musicianship blends over to ‘professionalism’ (in the pejorative sense) and commercialism, too. When Rich caught me out for disliking music for being ‘popular’, much of what he was right about involved my lack of interest in bands that struck me as so professional that I didn’t feel especially drawn to them. ‘Commercial’ generally tastes bad to me.
 
That’s plenty as a starting point; I’ll put up another criterion sometime, and eventually develop it out into a whole series. There are lots of characteristics of the music I love, so it’ll take time to get more than a narrow slice of them written out. But now I’m at least beginning to pay the world hat I owe for my snobbery, and now to listen to the feedback from friends who know their stuff better than I do, or who remember artists and compositions I’ve neglected.
 

* And jazz, and ‘classical’ music, of course. They’re not the focus of my inquiry, perhaps as much for reasons of my taste and the limitations of my understanding as for any other reason, but I’m just not going to think first of Mingus Ah Um when I write on this topic even though I love that album.
 

(You will not be surprised to note that I am simultaneously working on tomorrow’s sermon and listening to my iTunes DJ playlist.)
 
People frequently comment on the physicality of my sermons, the extent to which I preach with my full body. That comes in great part from having been taught to preach by the congregation I served in Florida, at St James’ Church, Tampa (before it merged with House of Prayer). A good part of it, though, comes also from my fondness for r & b and rock’n’roll music. While I’m devising a sermon, I typically have an implicit soundtrack — sometimes just one song, sometimes two or more — playing in my imagination.
 
This morning, the playlist brought up the Dream Academy’s “Life In A Northern Town”, which illustrates and intensifies my practice. As I was listening along, I awaited (and mimed, I confess) the signature double-drumbeat that comes at the beginning of the “Ah hey a ma ma ma” refrain, and noticed that as tremendously powerful as that drum figure is, the arrangement reserves it only for the beginning of the refrain. One could throw it in at several positions, but it arrives just once at each iteration of the “Ah hey” in the first refrain. After the first verse, the refrain is sung only once; in subsequent verses, the refrain is sung twice through (each time with the double-drumbeat on the first two “hey”s). As the song develops, the drummer (Ben Hoffnung) leads into the drumbeat with fills that heighten the anticipated duh-dum.
 
OK — that might satisfy one the “Great Moments’ posts I’ve written before, but the point this morning is that the drum track defines an acoustic and affective space for the song. And our sermons are not categorically distinct from this sort of musical composition. The double-beat in “Life In A Northern Town” contributes a point of orientation to the song; it signifies by accenting the chanted refrain and by contrasting with the relatively quiet arrangement of the rest of the song.
 
When putting together a sermon, we may well ask ourselves “What’s going on in the drum track?” or “How are we heightening the crescendo to which this repeated motif is leading?” For many sermons, the answer is all too easy: there’s no drum track, there’s no crescendo, there’s only a relatively monotonous meander. There are no ornaments, no hooks, only time passing slowly. Preacher: if your sermon were a song, would you willingly listen to it more than once? Would you even listen to it all the way to the end?
 
Churches often devote vast amounts of individual and institutional energy, money, and time to figuring out why people don’t come to church. Here’s a very quick, but demanding, tip: if the worship and the sermon don’t affect congregants and visitors, then the clever poster campaign, the cool-ly ironic name of the congregation, the bare feet or the coffeeshop ambiance or the incense or the elaborate planning will probably not enliven, perhaps not even sustain, the congregation.
 

(This is not to say that every sermon should be bombastic: no, no, no. “Life in a Northern Town” is actually a relatively subdued number, and one can imagine meditative sermons that work in the ways a minimalist composition does. But if you haven’t even thought through the ways that the sermon involves a great deal more than the cognitive work of “thinking something up and saying it”, or “looking up a cute, or touching, or striking, story to illustrate [what you take to be] the point of the Bible reading”, I’ll lay heavy odds that the sermon is missing a great deal that could strengthen, deepen, and extend the impression that the sermon leaves. Or doesn’t.)
 

The great Amy Morrison (that link isn’t working right now, but it might start again so I’m including it anyway), two decades ago, in the context of an Honours Seminar at Eckerd College, reminded me of the classic Schoolhouse Rock quatrain,

As your body grows bigger
Your mind grows flowered
It’s great to learn
Cause Knowledge is Power!

I bring that up today partly because it}s fun to remember Amy, and partly because the other day someone on a Mountain Goats webforum asked what I had to say about John Darnielle’s bonus track “Enoch 18:14,” which he played several times on last year’s tour (and in the movie/DVD of his play-through of the songs from The Life Of The World To Come), though it wasn’t included on the main CD release. Darnielle has said any number of times that the song grows from a line in the concluding cut-scene of the game Odin Sphere, in which one of the characters speaks the line that forms the refrain of the song: “You and your brother, you both escaped the curse. You can’t comprehend what that’s like.”
 
I hadn’t written about “Enoch 18:14” — “The angel said: ‘This place is the end of heaven and earth: this has become a prison for the stars and the [rebellious] host of heaven.’ ” — in my article, so I gave a rough overview of the verse in its literary context and history and observed,

I take it that the point of reference is “the curse,” which with reference to Enoch would refer to the damned angels and stars, and with reference to Odin Sphere to the game-curse, and the interpretation of the song as a whole with the sense that some people (the song’s spokesperson) have been afflicted in unchosen, arbitrary ways, whereas others go about unaffected by “the curse.” Too often, perhaps always, people who have escaped the curse figure that the afflicted are just gloomy, negative personality types. They can’t understand what it’s like, so they treat the accursed as though they were really just the same, only insufficiently optimistic. JD knows, and the accursed character knows, that there’s a real curse, that there’s no just opting out of it by being perky and glib (cf Romans 10:9 or Philippians 3:20-21), and the pain of the curse is only intensified when people like you and your brother try to reach beyond the green-grass sunlit world into the dry-ground, black-sun world to say, “Cheer up!”

But the reason to post this all here, in the context of Amy’s Schoolhouse Rock quotation, is that while I was poking around the interwebs for research material on the pseudepigraphal passage, I learned much more. For instance, I had assumed that Enoch was venerated as a saint (as numerous other Old Testament figures are), and it turns out that he is indeed venerated by Armenian Christians. I didn’t know, though, that he is customarily given the name Idris in Arabic; that intrigued me because the previous Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway is named Idris Jones. Moreover, in Glasgow (where Idris/Enoch was bishop), there’s an subway stop named St Enoch Station on St Enoch Square, adjacent to a very posh shopping mall, the St Enoch Centre.
 
But — this is not the same Enoch after which the song, the saint, and maybe even the bishop are named. Contrariwise, this St Enoch is not even male! It turns out that the St Enoch of Glasgow was in orthographical actuality the mother of St Kentigern (a/k/a St Mungo), St Teneu. (We have friends named “Tenev,” but it would just be too eerily uncanny if they were somehow connected to Glasgow and St Enoch.) In years of transcription, her name apparently went from being “Saintteneu” to “Saintenoch”; improbable as that may sound, I’ve marked enough student papers to find it quite within the bounds of my imagination.
 
Anyway, that’s a whole planter of mind flowers, all come from looking into the background of one simple pseudo-biblical verse.