Going For the Bronze; or, Now the Deluge

I've fallen prey to the TikTok invasion of Facebook, and I finally know what doomscrolling is.  I was enjoying short videos, or "reels," of cute old Mexican men dancing, but lately the algorithm has decided that I should see the work of many religious nuts, especially but not only Christians.  It's partly my own fault, of course: I don't have to click into the reels.  And it doesn't help that I've been commenting on many of them, and receiving comments in return.

So, one clever fellow informed me today that the Bronze Age Bible is best classified as fiction.  He posted the same statement under other comments, so it wasn't just me.  It's the same sort of simple-minded snappy comeback that all of us like at some time in our lives.  Christians have them too, such as "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist!"  Which, when I think about it, isn't as clever as they think it is.  Bragging about their shortage of faith?  Really?  I understand the point they're trying to make, but it really doesn't work.  This is a matter I hope to return to.

But back to Mr. Bronze Age Fiction.  While it's true, there's a lot of fiction in the Christian Bible, there's a lot of non-fiction as well: proverbs, sermons, and so on.  In this respect much of the Bible is like Plato's dialogues, which use a fictional framework for philosophical discussion.  What got my goat, though, was "Bronze Age." The Christian Bible, both Testaments, is a collection of Iron Age writings.  The odd thing is that I can't recall ever seeing a fellow scoffer dismiss the Bible as Iron Age fiction.  Doesn't it have the same pizzazz?  "Bronze Age" seems to have caught on among village atheists like a radioactive virus. 

Naturally, I spend more time correcting factual errors from Christians under these videos.  Many of them like to invoke what they call "Biblical facts," which also isn't the win they think it is.  Biblical facts are like, say, Tolkien facts, or Harry Potter facts.  If someone were to say that Frodo Baggins is an elf, or that Harry Potter was assigned by the Sorting Hat to Ravensclaw house, it would not be factual within those imaginary worlds, but it would still not be factual outside of the books. Recently I got into a little scrap on Twitter with someone who jeered at fundamentalist for thinking that the Bible is real -- but they announced in their profile that they were in Hufflepuff.  No, they aren't, and claiming that they are isn't a Potter-universe fact.

You're All F***ing Peasants As Far As I Can See: Rock Theology

I'm surprised that I never posted this here until now.  It originally ran in the Indiana University student newspaper as a letter to the editor, sometime in the 1990s, responding to a friend's careless remarks in his opinion column about John Mellencamp.  Now, I've never been a fan of Mellencamp, but I find his music inoffensive, and my friend's comments reflected a kind of snobbery that I've been guilty of too, but have tried to outgrow.  Still, this piece wasn't an attack on him, though he took it as one and was afraid that it would upset his editor.  It didn't, but it bothered my friend.

As I hope my readers will see, this piece is meant playfully.  I think it describes tendencies in pop music that are real enough, but it was fun to write and I hope it's fun to read.  The musical references are dated, but most of them will be recognizable even to younger readers. Their recordings are still in print, and many get regular reissues to commemorate the anniversaries of their original releases.  That's one reason to post it now: these musicians are now saints, if not Elder Gods.  As for newer musicians, classifying them and their work can be left as an exercise for the reader.

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I was extremely annoyed by Scott Smith's elitist remarks on Hoosier rock in Thursday's ids until, like a bolt from Heaven, I realized that his objections to John Mellencamp were not musical but religious.  Sectarian and theological, to be exact, not spiritual.

Scott is a gnostic; he believes, that is, that there is one true spirit of rock & roll, which ought not to be polluted by sharing it with the masses.  For they are iron, and rock & roll is gold.  Gnosticism has universalist pretensions, for it speaks of the spark of divinity in all human beings, whom rock & roll will save from the darkness in which they are kept by the record industry.  But in practice it holds that the masses love their darkness, preferring the path that is wide and easy, and leads to Paula Abdul.  The upshot of this is that any music which becomes too popular will be denounced by gnostics automatically.  Gnosticism is also distinguished by its dismissal, indeed hatred of the flesh -- sex and women are evil – and of fun.  Sexual references for shock value are gnostic, since they buy into the idea that sex is nasty.  Punk is not always gnostic, but it has strong gnostic tendencies.  Johnny Rotten/John Lydon is a prime example of gnosticism in punk and postpunk.  Metal is often strongly gnostic, though this loses credibility when it plays to arena-sized audiences.  Frank Zappa is a gnostic, as are Ian Anderson, George Harrison, rockabilly revivalists, and purists of all kinds.

From this you can see that the theological positions I'm sketching out transcend musical genre.  George Harrison, for instance, has access to a mass audience by virtue of his having been a Beatle; this enabled him to make the great gnostic album All Things Must Pass -- austere, inhuman, boring -- with expensive production that few gnostics could afford.  (The other post-Beatle gnostic album, John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, was also produced by Phil Spector.)  Zappa's probably the only other gnostic in the same league, though Yes' Tales of Topographic Oceans, Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Tull's Passion Play, and certain other British art-rock bands approach it.  It's not so much the kind of music you make or listen to that counts, but your attitude to the audience.  Is Prince gnostic?  No, but he'd like you to think he is.

Like any musician who embraces (or at least seeks) a mass audience, John Mellencamp is catholic.  Rock and pop catholicism is, in the original sense of the word 'catholic', all-embracing.  It's also capital-intensive (lots of expensive, fancy equipment), oriented to spectacle, and professional, like High Mass in St. Peter's with vestments and incense.  It has in common with gnosticism ambivalence about the flesh, and a distrust of women and sex, but as an institution which intends to last awhile, it makes uneasy provision for human love and marriage, and even for pleasure -- as long as it can charge you for it.  Popular catholicism tends to the veneration of relics, tacky but innocent vulgarity: Elvis Presley's "It's Now or Never" being the paradigm case, Graceland Inc. its logical outcome.

Unfortunately, catholicism also encourages distance between the performers and the laity, I mean audience.  This can lead to cynicism on both sides: the record companies and performers may come to regard the faceless masses as manipulable sheep to fleece, while the audience despise the clergy as venal, hypocritical, soulless hacks.  This much is hardly news; it's the collegiate-rock-critic snottiness which animates Scott's column.  But the music-business hierarchy isn't nearly as smart as it and its gnostic critics would like you to believe: if they could really manipulate and control consumers, the major labels wouldn't lose money on 90% of their releases.  And a lot of rock catholics believe in what they're doing, like a humble parish priest who really tries to serve his congregation, and some manage to keep their integrity as they rise in the hierarchy. They believe that the forms of commercial music are a viable a medium for serious work as the avant-garde, and they want to address a mass audience, giving them accessible music with honest content.  

It's surely a purely dogmatic question whether this is a valid position; I happen to share it.  The Beatles are of course the prime example of a band who managed to be enormously popular without selling out, though there are others. (Is it a coincidence, do you think, that Beatlemania, Vatican II, and the Kennedy myth of Camelot were roughly contemporaneous?  Now, there's a conspiracy theory for someone -- not Oliver Stone, please! -- to develop.)  Other examples, lesser perhaps, include Motown, the Rolling Stones, Mellencamp, Springsteen, and Peter Gabriel (a gnostic art-rocker who became a Liberation-theology catholic rocker); it's almost redundant to mention Madonna.  Of the Beatles, Paul MaCartney was the most purely catholic.  Major-label metal is of course catholic, despite its pretensions, and "Satanism" in music as in religion is basically just catholicism turned upside down.

I don't see rock protestantism anywhere.  The remaining trend I see in pop and rock is paganism.  Paganism is grass-roots music, with as little distance between performer and audience as possible: amateurish, sloppy, often anti-intellectual, ecstatic.  Though sometimes it only seems so: Elvis Presley's Sun sessions are pagan, though Presley later became catholic.  The Beatles began as a skiffle band, a pagan English form.  Garage bands are pagan.  The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" is pagan.  Ringo Starr is the pagan Beatle.  The Grateful Dead are pagan, partly because of their intimacy with the grassroots movement of Deadheads and partly because of their ability to sound sloppy despite their technical ability.  But paganism isn't all sweetness and sunshine; Sid Vicious represents the downside of Paganism, mindlessly self-destructive.  Punk -- British punk, anyway -- was largely a pagan movement, despite its tendency to slide into gnosticism.  Jello Biafra is a catholic (or maybe a gnostic) pretending to be pagan, with some success.  Bob Dylan is a sort of pagan gnostic.  At their best the Butthole Surfers are pagan, at their worst they're gnostic.  Sometimes it's hard to tell whether you have a gnostic or a pagan on your hands: paganism can be as inaccessible as gnosticism, vide early Meat Puppets.

Please note that there are no bad guys or good guys in my scheme of things: I enjoy music from all three categories, each on its own terms and for its own virtues.  When gnosticism earns its elitism, when catholicism earnestly seeks to serve and entertain, when paganism achieves true ecstatic union among the performer, the audience, and the cosmos, they are at their best.   On the other hand, the puritan snob in me enjoys gnosticism's shock tactics, the tacky Hoosier in me enjoys Madonna, and the five-year-old in me enjoys making doo-doo mudpies with the Butthole Surfers.  Nor are the three tendencies mutually exclusive, as I've suggested already.  The Beatles probably came as close as anyone has to embodying all three.  It may be that there's no way to keep the devotees of each sect from sneering at the others, unfortunately.

A Celestial Orgy?

I'll give NPR this much: last week for the twentieth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, they actually talked to some Iraqis.  The results, no doubt carefully managed, were mild-mannered to the point of absurdity, but at least some of our victims were allowed to talk about their trauma on a major news program.  I noticed that Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep slipped in a segment on Ukraine and called it "this war in Iraq."  Someone's conscience tripping him up?

But that was then, and this is now.  Morning Edition is back to its usual antics this week.  And in keeping with tradition, they're covering another astronomical non-event, a five-planet alignment involving "Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, and Mars [that] will dazzle us earthlings this week."  Really?  Uranus is barely visible to the naked human eye at best, as the story admits toward the end.

Still, they've toned it down a little compared to the recent Venus-Jupiter conjunction, the "little nighttime kiss," the "celestial dance" that had astronomers and science journalists drooling.  This time it's a "planetary parade."  Not a planetary daisy chain?  Not an orgy?  These guys aren't trying hard enough.  The story quotes an astrophysicist, one Jackie Faherty, who gushes:

I want people to want to go outside and look up. I want people to be excited about looking up at the stars and planets. Right now what's happening is something that you might not realize does happen quite a bit, which is the planets are up a lot. This is not a particularly rare event, but it is an event that you should celebrate and you should want to go outside and look at.

Not much to excite the rabble there.  You've gotta sex it up some more, y'know?  An astronomical menage a cinq, maybe.  Surely the professionals of NPR can do better.  It's Pledge Week, so earn your money!

Celestial Soft Porn

NPR evidently ran this story last night on "All Things Considered," which I almost never listen to; but it tracked me down anyway on my tablet.  A planetary conjunction involving Venus and Jupiter is happening, and in the great tradition of cheesy, cringey science journalism, NPR packaged it thusly:

"They've been coming in closer and closer for a little nighttime kiss," says Jackie Faherty, who's an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History.

Of course in space the planets aren't really going to smooch. "They are actually 400 million miles apart," Faherty says. That's more than four times the distance than we are from the sun.

And since the Earth's orbit is actually between those of Jupiter and Venus, we are in the position of Lucky Pierre, is that cool or what?  The writer, Michaeleen Doucleff, didn't have to come up with the "kiss" metaphor on her own: an actual astronomer provided it.  Doucleff got creative herself, noting that tonight, Thursday, "The two planets will still seem quite close, continuing their celestial dance. But soon, they'll go back to arms length."  Awww, can't this marriage be saved?  It seems tragic that they're going to break up.  Relationships just don't get the same commitment nowadays that they used to.  Think of the children!  Isn't it bad enough that the moon is going to leave the Earth in six hundred million years?

This sort of hyperbole is evidently irresistible, not only to science journalists ("celestial date") but to scientists themselves.  Another recent conjunction was described by an astronomer as "like teenagers at a high school dance: They’re getting closer and closer together.  It’s been a year of watching this, of them getting closer, and now they’re going to have a close slow dance."  I suppose it's better than the religious language that physicists keep falling into (the "God Particle," for instance), but for me it's a turnoff, and I always wonder if the disappointment other laymen feel when the stars fail to perform as promised prevents any interest -- let alone enthusiasm -- for science and nature that they might otherwise have acquired.

P.S. This story from USA Today washed up on the Internet after I thought I'd finished this post, and it's much better than the stories I linked before.  It manages to cover the Jupiter-Venus conjunction by providing factual information without tarting it up.  Ironic, isn't it, given USA Today's reputation as a lowbrow rag, while the more prestigious NPR and its astronomer sources evidently felt that the rubes wouldn't be interested if the event weren't cast as a romance?  It's even more ironic, since NPR's audience probably see themselves as devout believers in Science, Evidence, and Reason. 

Sauce for the Goose

NPR, contrary to its custom, put a smile on my face this morning with this story.  The Southern Baptist Convention has expelled five Baptist churches for having female pastors, and Morning Edition's Leila Fadel spoke to Linda Barnes Popham, one of the deposed pastors.  Barnes Popham was indignant:

Why us? We've been - we consider ourselves very Southern Baptist. We would be more Southern Baptist than many of the other churches - like I said, conservative, evangelistic, mission-minded. Now, of course, there are many other emotions that the congregants share with each other. Yeah, we are not happy about their decision.

I would love to ask Barnes Popham just how "conservative," how "very Southern Baptist" she and her congregation really are.  The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 in a break with other US Baptists in support of slavery, a little detail this story not-so-strangely neglects to mention, and continued to uphold white supremacy until the 1990s.  Does she still support slavery, the Lost Cause, and Jim Crow?  If not, how can she call herself a conservative Southern Baptist?  Or is she really just another stealth woke [sarcasm alert] liberal working against the SBC from within?

Fadel was very sympathetic, though.

BARNES POPHAM: That Southern Baptists no longer adhere to the priesthood of the believers and no longer believe in the autonomy of the local church and that those in power in SBC life do not value churches who are truly doing the work of the gospel.

FADEL: Wow. Pastor Linda Barnes Popham of the Fern Creek Baptist Church, thank you so much for your time.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for these pastors, and it's a pleasure to see them hoist on their own petard.  I'm reminded of the late antigay crusader Anita Bryant (Cthulhu, I'm old) who wanted to become vice-president of the SBC in 1978. She was rejected, of course, on Biblical grounds, and she promptly griped about "Bible-beating literalists" who wouldn't let her do what she wanted to do.  This contemporary New York Times article doesn't mention the gender issue, but says that Bryant's lack of experience in church administration was also a factor.  But details, details: Who needs experience? The Holy Spirit would surely have guided her at the helm of the world's largest Baptist denomination. Conservatism for thee but not for me!

Put Me In, Coach Al, Please!

National Public Radio continues to fulfill its God-given function of rousing me from my slothful bed each morning: it's a rare day when Morning Edition doesn't annoy me with smug centrism, tone-deaf commentary, or its hosts' obnoxious perkiness.

This past weekend, protestors disappointed NPR and the rest of the corporate media by not rioting in response to the release of the video of the police murder of Tyre Nichols. It was probably their worst frustration since the failure of a Republican Red Wave to materialize last November.  Nichols' funeral was scheduled for today, so perhaps in revenge, host A Martinez and reporter Lucas Finton discussed the funeral as if it were an upcoming sport event.  (NPR prefers predictions to actual reporting most of the time.)  I don't know how well the framing will come across in text, so here's a link to the audio.

MARTÍNEZ: Lucas Finton has been following the Nichols case. He's a reporter for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. Lucas, I can pretty much guarantee it's going to be an emotional day. What do you expect to see at the funeral today?

LUCAS FINTON: I expect that we're going to see a range of emotions from joy to humor to that really profound sadness that we've seen over the last few weeks in Memphis. I think that that'll probably be seen throughout the chapel with family members, high-ranking officials and also friends and activists and community leaders as well.

MARTÍNEZ: Now, we just heard from Al Sharpton a minute ago. You spoke with the Rev. Sharpton about his eulogy. What did he tell you?

FINTON: He really focused on the power of someone who's unfamiliar with an individual eulogizing that person and how that can really give the speaker power to really figure out what that person's death can mean for the future not just for the family, but also for police reform at a state, local and national level. And he focused on how there really needs to be some strong national reforms in order for police reform to stick.

And so on.  Later in the program Martinez got to move to a more comfortable topic, Tom Brady's latest retirement, but by then I was out of bed, listening to music on another station, and ready to face the day. Thank you for your service, NPR!

We Thought They'd Never End

Okay, it's time to kickstart this old popstand again.  Or something.

Lately I've been watching too many old "What's My Line?" shows on YouTube . It was a favorite of mine when I was young, and it's fascinating to see how it looks 60 and even 70 years later. Bennett Cerf just asked mystery guest Jack Jones if he sang "any of this rock 'n' roll, 'Downtown' sort of music" and then, to make clear what he meant, sort of hummed a bit of the tune. This was in 1965. 

Now, to me, "Downtown" doesn't qualify as rock 'n' roll: it's an old-fashioned pop song, recorded with a swing orchestra, and Petula Clark was no more a rock'n'roll singer than Rosemary Clooney. I know it's hard to adjust to "new" entertainment styles, but Cerf's reactionary take was pretty funny even so.

In the same vein, sometime last year I came across some establishment writer saying in the late 1960s said that Cher represented something new in music and entertainment.  This was in the days when she was still performing with Sonny Bono, doing a Bob-Hope style hippie impersonation.  I like Cher well enough, but she was always show-biz all the way, as shown by the TV variety show she later did -- first with Sonny, then by herself.  It's as old-school as Carol Burnett's (also available on YouTube).  Check out, for example, Cher shaking her booty with the Jackson Five; offering up a tribute to the Beatles with Tina Turner and the ahead-of-her-time punk rocker Kate Smith; and TRIGGER WARNING: dancing with the equally show-biz David Bowie. (That final clip still gives me nightmares sometimes.)

Watching these old clips gives me a historical perspective on the entertainment industry I grew up on.  Also on changes in social attitudes.  It still gives me a turn to see performers smoking cigarettes and cigars on the shows. The blatant sexism is interesting too: not only Bennett Cerf but another male panelist from the earliest days of "What's My Line?" (his name escapes me) who aggressively baited female contestants.  And then there are stars whom we now know were gay, like the very queeny (but toning it down for the public) Dr. Tom Dooley.  This segment is from 1959, and gives a glimpse of US propaganda about Vietnam at a time when our involvement was still low-key.