Blessed and Broken: Lady Gaga and Lucinda Williams (Reflections on Grammy Nominees, Part 3)

February 10, 2012 By

We asked Christian Scharen, author of Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God, to write a few blog entries reflecting on the Grammy nominations.

This is the third of three posts.

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In this last post anticipating this weekend’s 54th Grammy Awards, I am pulling together an unlikely combination. Lady Gaga, the 26-year-old flamboyant pop juggernaut, set side by side with Lucinda Williams, the 59-year-old gritty Americana icon. What do they have in common? I’ve met the Gospel in their work, for starters. Blessed and broken, you might catch, has Eucharistic echoes. A loaf, taken, blessed, broken, given, as the very body of God, for you. Before you write me off by spraining your eyes from rolling them too high in their sockets, give me a chance to say more.

These two women have, of course, received Grammy nominations. Gaga, already a two-time winner with her first album, has received nods for “Album of the Year” and “Best Pop Vocal Album” (2011‘s Born This Way), as well as “Best Solo Pop Performance” for the song, “Yoü And I”. Williams, also a previous Grammy award winner, has been nominated for “Best Americana Album” for her 10th studio release, Blessed. Neither are, to my knowledge, performing on the Grammy Awards broadcast Sunday evening, but you can see Gaga perform her nominated song, “Yoü and I” with hit country duo Sugarland on the Grammy Award Nomination Concert.

My argument in my book Broken Hallelujahs, in part, is against what I call “checklist Christianity” which holds up a checklist to pop culture with a skeptical eye and rejects anything that contains an offending item (profanity, for example, or references to drugs or sex). I argue, with C.S. Lewis, for a richer Christian imagination informing our engagement with culture. If we begin at the cross of Christ, who was rejected by the religious leaders and crucified “outside the gate” with criminals on his left and right, we know something about the shocking and surprising ways God is at work in the mist of human life for the sake of bringing new life. So I’m not that interested in saying if Gaga or Williams are “Christian” enough or even “safe” enough to be important for Christians or anyone else to pay attention to. I want people to learn and listen so that they can see with a pop song, seeing what can be seen from there.

In a way, “Yoü and I” is song about brokenness and blessing, as is the whole album Born This Way. The song is about love and loss, and the desire for commitment. It is about losing a boy from Nebraska, and then reconnecting with the hope of having it stick. “This time, I’m not leaving without you.” But it is also about deeper claims of allegiance, and how few things really deserve our devotion. Gaga sings, “There’s only three men that I’mma serve my whole life; that’s my daddy, Nebraska, and Jesus Christ.” The song has echoes of Gaga’s namesake band, Queen (It is their song, “Radio Gaga,” that gave her the stage name). The song begins with an echo of the marching drumbeat of Queen’s famous song, “We will Rock You,” and featuring Queen guitarist Brian May. Former Brazos editor, Rodney Clapp, has written a lovely piece arguing something similar to what I’ve said here but in relation to the song, “Born this Way.” One reason for her enormous popularity, I think, is her ability to work the territory between brokenness and blessing, something that drives her huge fan base to find meaning in her performance.

In Lucinda Williams’ new album, Blessed, one finds a remarkably different sonic palate but some resonant themes of blessing in the mist of brokenness. Williams is a Texas country blues singer at heart, and she’s never strayed far from those roots. This album shines in the title song, a poem almost chanted instead of sung. Its gritty couplets echo the paradox at the heart of Christianity, that God should redeem the world by rejection, suffering and death. Some of the incredible lines in the song, starting with the first that steps on my own toes:

“We were blessed by the preacher, who practiced what he preached.”
“We were blessed by the blind man, who could see for miles and miles.”
“We were blessed by the warror, who didn’t need to win.”
“We were blessed by the neglected child, who knew how to forgive.”

The couplets don’t all work for me with the same power, but the overall beauty of the song is that in brokenness, blessing is possible, redemption is possible, life can come from death. Importantly, the refrain is not that the individual receives healing and is personally blessed, but that by living in particular ways within their circumstances, “we were blessed.” The song is a sketch of how we live together, beyond the limits of our pain and sorrow, but without being at all Pollyanna about it. In a moving, but subtle turn, at the heart of the lyric, she turns to the deepest place of this paradoxical logic of blessing:

“We were blessed by the mystic, who turned water into wine.”
“We were blessed by the watchmaker, who gave up his time.”

These, and the following lyrics through the end of the song, seem to be entirely about Jesus. (The famous watchmaker analogy for God, distant and logical, is at play in the second couplet.) The lyric continues with “the wayfaring stranger who knew our names” and “the innocent baby who taught us the truth.” We could have a more powerful pop song about the theology of the cross but I’d be hard pressed to name it. Here’s Williams singing the song in concert.

Another stand-out song on the album, “Seeing Black,” is a lament for Vic Chesnutt, the powerful Athens Georgia singer-songwriter who took his own life in 2009. The song is full of unanswered questions, “was it too much weight riding on your back? When did you start seeing black?” Yet, in keeping with her broken blessing mode, her last verse asks, “When did you start seeing white, tell me what was it like, was it when you received your last rites, when did you start seeing white?” Williams surely knew that Chesnutt was an atheist. And she pronounces her blessing upon him even so.　

Thanks for reading the series, and enjoy the show!

-Christian Scharen

Find out more about Broken Hallelujahs in these videos with Christian Scharen:

http://youtu.be/V25aM_7O3TQ

http://youtu.be/dQfZP8CUYII

http://youtu.be/unZ81EubvRw

http://youtu.be/2Vp60D_zsT8

 

Filed Under: Behind the Book Tagged With: , ,

Penitential Hymns: Kanye West at the Grammy Awards (Reflections on Grammy Nominees, Part 2)

February 5, 2012 By

We asked Christian Scharen, author of Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God, to write a few blog entries reflecting on the Grammy nominations.

This is the second of three posts.

———————————————————————————

I love Kanye West. There. I’ve said it. You should know that up front as I begin this second of a three-part series of posts anticipating the 2012 Grammy Awards this coming Sunday. Kanye West is something of a Grammy award magnet, collecting 14 awards in a career that only began in earnest a decade ago. West’s seven Grammy nominations are the most received for any artist this year. Despite this success, West is a polarizing figure, not least because of his own controversial behavior. During a live telecast after Hurricane Katrina, he famously went off-script to say: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”. His public outbursts at awards shows have also hurt him, including most troubling when a drunken West upstaged Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Swift had just won her first award, and in the midst of her acceptance speech, West charged on stage, took the mic, and said, “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.” West was removed and reaction was loud and negative. Many apologies followed, including a person letter and phone call to Swift, but the damage was done. West retreated from the public eye for nearly a year. I’ll come back to this and connect it to his Grammy-nominated song, “All of the Lights,” below but first a brief gesture to the reasons I have for loving West despite his obvious flaws. (I use West as a case study in my new book Broken Hallelujahs, if you’d like to see more of how I engage with his work.)

As a musician and artist, he has great vision and depth. He is—critics regularly admit—an amazingly talented guy. And I would add to that, his vision and depth regularly include moral and spiritual depth. An example: West made the most moving and powerful pop song rooted in Christian faith in the last decade—“Jesus Walks,” from 2004’s The College Dropout. The videos West made for “Jesus Walks” increase my admiration for what he is capable of musically, artistically and spiritually. Of the three, I think the version directed by Chris Milk is most complex and compelling, offering a video parable of baptismal dying and rebirth. (Warning: this video is hosted on West’s VEVO channel on YouTube and opens with a 30-second advertisement which when I checked was a very violent promo for a new Denzel Washington film)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYF7H_fpc-g

This year, West gained Grammy nominations both for his fifth studio album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, as well as a single from that album, “All of the Lights,” and for a duo album with fellow Roc-a-Fella recording star Jay-Z titled, Watch the Throne, as well as a single from that album, “Otis.” While this is too much here to discuss in a short blog post, “All of the Lights” provides another example, alongside “Jesus Walks,” to show what is so compelling about West. While I think highly of this song, that doesn’t mean I think highly of all the songs on the album, some of which are much more troubling, but that has been true on all his albums.

(In what follows, I learned, as I usually do, from the remarkable insights of fans writing on Songmeanings.net, this time particularly from “Tsuppi” who posted about “All of the Lights” on 3-5-2011.)

“All of the Lights” (music only) on Vimeo

“All of the Lights” begins with a one-minute interlude with soft, sad violin and piano, very classical in style (in fact, the song includes trumpets, French horn, trombone, flute, viola, and cello as well, adding up to a lush and complex arrangement). The song begins with a shout of “All of the lights.” Rihanna then comes in, singing the hook, “Turn up the lights in here, baby. Extra bright, I want ya’ll to see this. Turn up the lights in here, baby. You know what I need, I want you to see everything.” This theme, to me, is confessional. It could be a pop version of Jesus in John’s gospel, chapter 3:20-21: “Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”

It is a song written, I think, in the aftermath of the Taylor Swift incident and his self-imposed exile. In order to find forgiveness and rebirth, he needs to have “all of the lights” illumining the mess he’s made of his life. The song, mostly rapped by West in the verses, is written as a parable. It is a moving lament about “all the lights” shining on the brokenness of a man whose abuse causes him to lose his wife, daughter and life. Through a stint in jail and its aftermath finds himself at the brink of despair, yet trying to reach out, to reconcile, to be a father to his daughter so she doesn’t “grow up on that ghetto university.” The production includes no less than 14 guest vocals including, of course, Rihanna, but also Kid Cudi, Fergie, Alicia Keys, Elton John, and more. It might have been a mess of hubris, but under West’s wise production, it works brilliantly. Fergie sings a final verse full of despair, after which the song nearly ends, musically echoing the lyric. But then, slowly, the flow of the song preaches new birth, salvation through living in the light. Here, Rihanna comes in again with the hook, and the song runs out from there.

West is a brilliant artist, a man of paradoxical passions that seem to both run towards and away from God. In this song, we see his remarkable gifts working towards God. It seems like the kind of pop song Leonard Cohen calls, on his recent album “Old Ideas,” a “penitential hymn.” In writing such a powerful and meaningful song, West’s already won respect, but I still hope he takes home a Grammy as well.  

Next up: Broken and Blessed: Lady Gaga and Lucinda Williams

-Christian Scharen

Find out more about Broken Hallelujahs in these videos with Christian Scharen:

http://youtu.be/V25aM_7O3TQ

http://youtu.be/dQfZP8CUYII

http://youtu.be/unZ81EubvRw

http://youtu.be/2Vp60D_zsT8

 

Filed Under: Behind the Book, Videos Tagged With: , ,

The Weekly Hit List: January 27, 2012

January 27, 2012 By
Peter Enns’ new Brazos book The Evolution of Adam has received a lot of attention this week. As we mentioned earlier in the week, Enns posted an article on The Huffington Post titled “Once More, With Feeling: Adam, Evolution and Evangelicals”.

At the “Jesus Creed” blog, RJS posted on Enns’ book and HuffPo article.

Be sure to also check out Peter Enns’ blog where he has been posting about The Evolution of Adam.

 
John Polkinghorne’s Testing Scripture: A Scientist Explores the Bible continues to generate some excellent discussion by RJS at the “Jesus Creed” blog. The most recent post is titled “Why Would a Scientist Believe the Virgin Birth?”

Previous posts by RJS:
Testing Scripture 1 (RJS)
Testing Scripture 2 (RJS)
Testing Scripture on Creation and Fall (RJS)
Is There Ambiguity in the Bible? (RJS)

Testing Scripture was also blogged about over at “The Internet Monk”: “The Bible, through a Scientist’s Eyes”
Psalms for All Seasons: A Complete Psalter for Worship debuted this week at the Calvin Symposium on Worship.

It was featured in an article in the Grand Rapids Press.

Check out the website for the psalter.

 
 

 

The Englewood Review of Books recently featured reviews of two Brazos titles:

Broken Hallelujahs by Christian Scharen

Be Not Afraid by Samuel Wells

The Vampire Defanged Ebook $2.99!

For just a limited time, you can purchase an ebook copy of The Vampire Defanged: How the Embodiment of Evil Became a Romantic Hero by Susannah Clements for only $2.99.

It is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Christianbook.com.

The Evolution of Adam Blog Tour and Giveaway

All next week we will be hosting the Evolution of Adam blog tour.

For a list of participants, click here.

Don’t forget to enter our giveaway where you could win The Evolution of Adam and other books from Brazos Press. Enter here.

Filed Under: The Weekly Hit List Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Reflections on Grammy Nominees, Part 1: Mumford and Sons

January 18, 2012 By

We asked Christian Scharen, author of Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God, to write a few blog entries reflecting on the Grammy nominations.

This is the first of three posts.

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One reason I wrote Broken Hallelujahs was to offer a theology of culture that sees–expects!–God’s redeeming presence already at work in the world. Pop culture is not God-forsaken, despite the ‘constricted imagination’ present in some corners of Christianity which would say it is. As a case in point, I’m starting a series of posts here engaging some of the featured artists in the upcoming Grammy Awards, the recording industry’s major awards ceremony, on February 12.

First up: Mumford and Sons, the British folk-rock band that has exploded in popularity on the strength of their debut album, Sigh No More. Last year, they were present at the Grammy Awards with nominations in two categories: “Best New Artist” and “Best Rock Song” (For “Little Lion Man”). While they lost both, they did get a rousing set playing “The Cave” and then sharing the stage with The Avett Brother’s “Head Full of Doubt / Road Full of Promise” before both bands backed Bob Dylan on “Maggie’s Farm.” It is a rousing performance, worth a watch especially for “The Cave” which I’ll talk about next.

This year, Mumford and Sons are back with four nominations, all for “The Cave” and with the wave they are riding I very much expect them to win one or more. The nominations are for “Record of the Year,” “Song of the Year,” “Best Rock Performance,” and “Best Rock Song.” As an aside, I find it hilarious that a group that got its start in the London folk scene and that played “hoe-downs” in a barn in its early days would continue to get nominations as a rock group. As I’ve written elsewhere, Mumford and Sons are a spiritually deep band. Their music has its own energy, often rising to a joyous crescendo, drawing the enthusiastic audience into a kind of musical rapture, taken outside of oneself into another place.

While such energy can be bent or twisted towards unsavory and self-destructive ends in pop music, Mumford and Sons are an unusual example of a band that has lyrical depth, depth that repays listening and even study. Marcus Mumford, the lead singer and songwriter, is the son of Vineyard UK leaders John and Eleanor Mumford and the Scriptures are an obvious source of lyrics in some of the band’s songs. Others, like “The Cave,” are not as readily accessible. Yet “The Cave”, according to Mike who blogs at Laughter and Humility, seems to be at least in part a song about spiritual transformation, a story modeled on and even quoting directly from G.K.Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis. The lyrics of the song say:

“So come out of your cave walking on your hands / And see the world hanging upside down / You can understand dependence / When you know the Maker’s hand”

And in Chapter Five of Chesterton’s biography, he writes:

“Francis, at the time or somewhere about the time when he disappeared into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind [...] The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again [...] He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands [...] This state can only be represented in symbol; but the symbol of inversion is true in another way. If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasize the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hung the world upon nothing.”

Should “The Cave” win at the Grammy’s it will be icing on the cake. It is a moving and powerful thing to see a band surfing a wave of mainstream popularity that can invite spiritual seekers into much deeper things through their art.

Next up: Kanye West.

-Christian Scharen

Filed Under: Behind the Book Tagged With: ,

The Weekly Hit List: January 13, 2012

January 13, 2012 By
This past week Brazos released our newest title, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins by Peter Enns.

Dr. Enns has been posting on several issues from the book on his blog on Patheos.com.

Other bloggers have also been commenting on The Evolution of Adam:

Scot McKnight reposted a blog entry by Peter Enns – and generated some good discussion in the comments section.

Joseph Kelly blogged about the historical Adam – incorporating Enns
Christian Scharen, author of Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God, recently wrote a piece for The Cresset on musical act Mumford and Sons.

Check it out: “A Deliberately Spiritual Thing”

Chris Keith continued his series on Broken Hallelujahs on his blog “Exploring Apprenticeship“.
RJS, on the “Jesus Creed” blog, continues to blog on John Polkinghorne’s Testing Scripture: A Scientist Explores the Bible.

The latest entry is here: Testing Scripture on Creation and Fall (RJS)

Previous Entries:

Testing Scripture 1 (RJS)

Testing Scripture 2 (RJS)

Kicking at the Darkness Giveaway

For our current promotion, we are giving away 5 copies of Brian Walsh’s Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination.

To enter, click here.

As we posted earlier this week, be sure to check out Dr. Walsh’s recent Huffington Post piece “Pacing the Cage: The Prophetic Hope of Bruce Cockburn“.

Filed Under: The Weekly Hit List Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Video: God in Pop Culture and Pop Culture in God

January 4, 2012 By

Here is the last in our series of videos with Christian Scharen. This clip addresses God in pop culture and pop culture in God, two lenses Scharen uses is his new book Broken Hallelujahs.

Filed Under: Videos Tagged With: , ,

The Weekly Hit List: December 23, 2011

December 23, 2011 By
There are several blogs that have recently engaged with Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

Here are a couple:

Soliloquium Blog

Hope Abbey Blog

 
Miroslav Volf’s A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good has also gotten some recent attention by various bloggers.

Here are a few:

CLR Forum

John Piippo Blog

Once Upon a Truth Blog

Keith Clark began a series of posts on Christian Scharen’s Broken Hallelujahs on his Exploring Apprenticeship Blog.

Tripp York wrote a brief review of Lee Camp’s Who Is My Enemy?, calling it “[p]robably one of the most important books in theology/Christian ethics published this past year.”

Check it out here.

Broken Hallelujahs Giveaway Winners

Congratulations to our winners: John Berard, Jonathan Hallewell, Dan Allison, Jennifer Lanthrope, and Nick Norelli!

They have each won a copy of Christian Scharen’s new Brazos book Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God.

Merry Christmas from all of us at The Brazos Blog!

Filed Under: The Weekly Hit List Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The Weekly Hit List: December 16, 2011

December 16, 2011 By
Tony Jones wrapped up his three-part blog series on Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible with Entry 3: The Fatal Flaw.

In the comments section of the third entry you can follow an exchange between Tony and Christian Smith.

Tony Jones’ previous entries:

Entry 1: The Ailment
Entry 2: The Cure

 
Greg Metzger wrote a piece for Books & Culture titled “Applying Volf,” in which he uses principles from Miroslav Volf’s A Public Faithas he discusses Christian leaders who become active political voices.Check out the article here.

 

Christian Century also recommended A Public Faith on a list of ‘Theology and Spirituality’ books. Check it out here.
Daniel Taylor’s Creating a Spiritual Legacy was listed among five “Great Gifts to Give: For the Spiritual Seeker” on the Spirituality & Health magazine website. 

Publishers Weekly recently posted a positive review of David Benner’s upcoming Brazos book Spirituality and the Awakening Self: The Sacred Journey of Transformation.

Broken Hallelujahs Giveaway

Don’t forget to enter our latest giveaway.

Five winners will receive a free copy of Christian Scharen’s Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God.

To enter, click here.

Winners will be announced in next week’s Hit List.

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Video: “Broken Hallelujahs” as a Theology of Culture

December 14, 2011 By

Continuing our series of videos with Christian Scharen, this clip addresses the idea of brokenness and suffering, central themes in Scharen’s new book Broken Hallelujahs. Also, be sure to enter for a chance to win a copy of this book in our current giveaway (details in the post below)!

Filed Under: Videos Tagged With: , ,

Giveaway: Broken Hallelujahs by Christian Scharen

December 13, 2011 By

We will be giving away 5 copies of Christian Scharen’s new Brazos book Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God.

To enter, simply fill out the form below.

Winners will be announced on the December 23 Hit List.

Check back here at The Brazos Blog tomorrow for another video from Christian Smith.

Click here for video 1 and video 2.

This giveaway has expired.

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