Nick Bogardus

This is the fifth and final post in my series on cover songs.

The introduction and first post, featuring Obadiah Parker’s cover of “Hey Ya!” is here. The second post, featuring Ryan Adams’ cover of “Wonderwall” is here. The third post featuring a beautiful choral cover of “With or Without You” by Scala & Kolacny Brothers is here, and the fourth post featuring Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” and Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” is here.

Where was I going with this? If I just wanted to turn you on to some new music, I would’ve made you a mix tape. Did I simply want to do a blog series with a theme of discussing cover songs? That seems thin and something I could leave to people who like those “I <3 The 80’s” or “I <3 The 90’s” shows on VH1. No, I’m using the analogy of a cover song to illustrate something much more impacting and to address something more timely and urgent.

Contextualization and the church.

Contextualization is something that the Church has been discussing in depth for the past decade or so, and it’s a discussion that has much to do with the coming of the Emerging Church. The fundamental question to this dialogue is, “How do we articulate the Gospel to our unique time and place?”. That question is also implicitly tied to another question, “What does it mean and look like to be a Christian in our modern setting?” Many good questions have been asked and many good answers discovered, but sadly there have also been many bad questions and conclusions. There are many good websites, books, pastors, and scholars who’ve analyzed the situation; my hope is to toss my analogy into the mix.

I don’t think that the church should be approaching contextualization from a deconstructionist or reductionist point of view, thinking that we need to tear everything down and start all over. I don’t think we should be approaching articulating the Gospel with the metaphor of “repainting” or “reimagining” because those two approaches seem to be too subjective and unanchored from the truth that’s in the Gospel.

I suggest we approach contextualization as though we were doing a cover song; and here is why.

In the Gospel, like a cover song, we are talking about contexts. To properly communicate the message in both, you have to understand the context in which the original was written and the context that you’re bringing it into. You can’t just tear a piece of the Bible out and slap it into 2008 expecting the meaning to translate. You have to get to know the audience, writer, and the writer’s intent to really convey the meaning of the song. Similarly, you need to understand how to connect that meaning to your contemporary audience.

Ryan Adams’ audience likes alt-country, so he did a version of “Wonderwall” that pulled it out of its original context and presented it to his fans. Maybe they knew the song already, and if so, maybe they heard the song in a whole new way.

In the Gospel, like a cover song, we’re not asked to write a new song or be the stars. The star is the song itself and we are to be true to the general musical framework of the song. Now, stick with me as I toss out some lame musical jargon. Perhaps we can “remix” it, emphasizing the simplest parts of it for broader commercial appeal - I’d say the seeker-sensitive churches do this - but we’re not to make a ‘mash-up’ with it - because that would be taking another song (truth) and saying that it’s equally as valid and making a new song of out of it; that would be syncretism. And, we’re certainly not able to ‘sample’ it like a hip-hop artist, jarring the piece we like from its original context to make it part of our song, our story, with us as the star. No, it’s not like that. The Gospel provides the structure, melody, and lyrics we’re to be true to; and God, not us, is the star or hero of the story.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this; but the reason I think Christian contextualization needs to be more like a cover song than anything else is because we’re dealing with truth. The Gospel is truth. It is a true story, set it in real human history. It is a set of beliefs and doctrine that have come from this story. We have been given the song to play in the Bible. We have been given the words, the melody, the core of the song. To veer from those things would be to make a whole new song. The only question we have to explore is how are we going to play it?

This is why repainting and reimagining fall short in my opinion. They’re rooted in the subjective; they’re completely up to the artist to revise. They seem to disregard that we are given an objective set of truth with which to work.

My concern for my generation is that we learn the Gospel - that we learn it like our favorite song that we hum over and over, that we play on repeat in the car and sing at the top of our lungs. My concern is that we learn the truths like lyrics and melodies so that when someone says, “How does that story go?” we can sing it off the top of our heads. My concern is that we practice and learn our instruments so that we’re first bringing the truths about God, sin, Jesus, the cross, the resurrection, and their implications to bear on our own hearts constantly - like a guitar player callouses his hands practicing - to be able bring the truths to bear in new ways, to new contexts, to new people.

It’s hard to add anything to the discussion about “With or Without You” because it’s a song that already has connections to so many people. But, if a teenage Belgian girls choir is bold enough to try…

[This is the second part of a short series I’m doing about cover songs. The introduction and the first song are here.

Remember, these are in no particular order and I hope you’ll stick with me…

Everyone will give a cover song a chance. You could be in Nordstroms and the piano player that was simply background music will suddenly draw you in like a fly to a high-wattage lamp when you start…

There is a lot you can learn from working at a record store.

Now, granted, I know that a lot of it is pretty useless information that is applicable to quiz shows on VH1 or cross country car games - I could probably smoke you in any (or the only) competition based around naming bands alphabetically - but seeing as how those games are hard to come by and people aren’t too interested in playing them more than once, I usually end up playing by myself.

All, The Afghan Whigs, Aerosmith, Abhinanda, American Football, Alkaline Trio, the Album Leaf, Al Green (if you allow sorting by first names; which I usually dont)…..

The kind of pop culture knowledge that’s heaped up in your head like a cluttered dorm room - be it about music, movies, sports, or all of the above - generally only comes in use only when there is an alcoholic beverage of some kind.  Maybe in an animated conversation around a backyard fire pit with some friends over the best live bands - the drenched chaos of At the Drive-In in a tiny punk rock club, or the Mecca-like experience of Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl.  Maybe with a stranger in a New York bar about if the world is more at a loss for losing Kurt Cobain and gaining Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters, or if we could’ve done without The Colour and The Shape in gaining one or two more Nirvana albums.

Most of it is really pretty inconsequential.

But, if you work there for a length of time and can step back enough, you begin to see how a record store can serve as a microcosm of American culture.

One thing you see is how trends come and go.  The great thing about working at an independent record store that was probably about 700 square feet is that you get to know your customers.  Even if you don’t get to know their names and stories, you know what they bought last time they came in, what they’re listening to, and what you can recommend to them.  Over time, you see get a front row seat to the awkward and, more often than not, regrettable cultural and fashionable evolution that is a mark of being in your teens and early 20’s.  The only other party who had as an objective perspective of the patched and dyed transformation of our customers were their parents.  (I know this because my parents have at their house what we call “the wall of shame”; a wall where they have all of my school pictures from pre-school to high school graduation displayed for the amusement of every house guest.)

For example, a kid - and I say “kid” even though they were, and are, my peers - would, to our horror, come in wearing a Limp Bizcuit shirt and leave having bought a Blink-182 record.  A few months later the same guy would come through the door minus the giant neck chain, baggy shorts, and nu-metal shirt.  Instead he was wearing converse, mismatched socks, cargo shorts, and pop-punk shirt.  Fast-forward again and that outfit would be ditched for ear-plugs, black hair dye, and he’d be buying a Throwdown record and doing spin-kicks in the middle of a circle pit on the weekends.  The same transformational observations could be made of nearly everyone who came through the doors at the store.

By the late 90’s and early 2000’s, when I worked at Greene Records, we couldn’t see it yet but trends were doing two very important things; their impact was more abrupt and their duration shorter; and secondly, they were less sweeping in scope.

I was born in 1979, as American music and culture was transitioning from disco to punk rock and New Wave.  The next change came about six years later when, in response to both the mall-culture of the pop at the time and the jagged, minimalist tone of punk rock, rock bands started emerging with big choruses and bigger hair, and voila, we had hair metal.  Then, after six or seven years of tighter pants and bigger hair, what had become glam rock met the cruel, unforgiving wall of a shifting American taste and a record whose cover featured a naked baby swimming after a dollar bill on a hook.

Nevermind ushered in six years of flannels, self-loathing and, since bad weather and depression always yields great art, great music.  Eventually though, as the Nirvanas, Pearl Jams, Smashing Pumpkins, and Soundgardens gave way to the Candleboxes and Lives, the end was inevitable.  What started as a reaction to, and statement against, the consumerism - and the accompanying pop & glam rock - of the 80’s slowly collapsed as the alternative became the mainstream.

The next distinguishable trends were pop-punk and ska, which were like prozac to the ears of youth who spent six years aurally pummeled with their own hopelessness and minor chords.  Then came the one music we can all agree to hate, Nu-Metal; I guess because the ska-prozac wore off too quickly and left American youth with a need for the expression of their illiteracy and luxurious despair.  It was a regrettable period for everyone involved.

Here’s my point, we often forget that every cultural trend is a reaction or response to what came before it.  More so, when our American market-savviness gets a hold of something it thinks can be a trend, we’re never sold just one; we are inundated (how many reality shows can a person take?).  

Trends can only happen in a culture that is consumer driven - can you say Cabbage Patch Kids, Tickle Me Elmos, The Prayer of Jabez, Cross Colors (oh yes I did), or even iPhones?  Trends happen with products and consumers.

How does this apply to the Church?  In David Wells’ The Courage to Be Protestant, he talks about all the talk in Christianity of “doing church”.  He points out that in much of the church we are selling a “form” of church to a consumer who is interested in that form.  When the church is driven by numbers, the world’s definition of success, and the marketing-savvy of corporate America, Christianity becomes a product because the consumer, not the Word of God, is sovereign.

The Jesus Movement of the 70’s spiritually birthed the Baby Boomer Generation; which, being raised on the materialism and opulence of the 80’s, gave birth to the seeker-sensitive mega-churches, and mega-church methods, of the last two decades.  

Wells says, “The former [seeker-sensitives] have looked to corporate America and its proven business strategies for market penetration in doing their church business.  The cost, though, is that the large, booming success that results is often quite depersonalized and invariably emptied of serious thought…Rather than large, empty church structures filled with the rhythms of the marketing world, emergents have gone to small, connected groups, to networking, to being deinstitutionalized if that’s what it takes, to relationships.”

We need to see this in all of the variations of church and belief that are popping up right now, especially the Emergent Church.  We need to see it for what it is; an understandable reaction that has morphed into a trend and a product.  Many of the questions and discussions going on out there right now are good, and are coming from sincere believers seeking God.  My concern is that these younger churches step back far enough to see that much of what is happening is a counteraction to a counteraction to a counteraction.  Seeing their church’s thought process in the scope of history is the only way to not get bogged down with the wrong questions and to not lose the war for the sake of this battle.  Many current “forms” of church (since they are primarily a form and a product) will pass and seem as out of place as flannels or checkered suspenders would be today.  In the mean time let’s worry less about being cool, more about being faithful to God; and let’s be a little more cautious before sounding the battle cry that everything must change.