We all used to live together in the same house. It was a lot like this. :)
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- 12 Plays
A few months ago my friend Teppei was telling me to check The Gaslight Anthem out because they toured together and he really liked them. I’m bummed I didn’t do that until today. I’m loving it. For lack of better comparisons they’re a mish-mash of Against Me/Springsteen/the Killers.
This is a song called “‘59 Sound”.
Enjoy.
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- 10 Plays
Silversun Pickups is one of those bands I like because of a few songs rather than full albums. When I get one of their albums I know most of it will be dispensible but one or two songs will be really good. This song, “Growing Old Is Getting Old”, is “the song” from their new record, Swoon.
Aside from sharing initials with their most obvious influence, The Smashing Pumpkins, Silversun Pickups shares the same fuzzed-out guitars, a penchant for atmospheric keyboards, melodic base lines, the ability to create songs with great moods, and a guy singer with a voice that is a little higher than the average male’s range. I love the Pumpkins but like their pupils they kinda fall into the too prolific category - I still hold that if Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness had been a single disc, and 12 songs trimmed down from 28, it would’ve been a real masterpiece.
Anyway, enjoy “Growing Old Is Getting Old”. It makes me think of driving at night back home; something we’ll be doing in the near future.
Even though I really wanted to play drums as a kid my parents, being put in a position of choosing between the lesser of two evils, opted to go with the honking of a saxophone. Yes, I played the saxophone. The problem is you can’t rock with a saxophone, so I would set up boxes and pans in the garage and drum along to Metallica’s self-titled “Black Album”. The problem is, again, you can’t rock with cardboard.
I came across this video of the Foo Fighters playing “Everlong” on Letterman in 1997. You’ll have to excuse the red leather jacket, weird sweater, and bleached blonde hair, but once you’re past that watch the drummer, Taylor Hawkins. It’ll make you want to play drums…even if you have to find a few boxes instead.
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- 16 Plays
In case you needed a reminder of how good Brian Wilson’s ‘teenage symphony to God” is, here’s one of the best pop songs ever recorded. It’s incredible to think about how if the Beatles hadn’t made Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds probably wouldn’t have existed; and if Pet Sounds hadn’t been made, then Sgt. Pepper’s wouldn’t have been recorded.
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- 12 Plays
The Cover Song Series #5: Conclusion & Contextualization
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.
