Time for a lighter post. When I look at my musical preferences, much of it seems a bit eclectic, but I've never been accused of being musically sophisticated or drawn to technical proficiency. I often find myself gravitating to soulful, majestic melodies and off-beat song structures that move me viscerally. I'm also guilty of a romanticized, wistful nostalgia that can verge on sentimentalism on my worst days. The blue-eyed soul/synthpop sounds of the UK also fell into a romanticized nostalgia for the 1960's R&B soul music that originated in the states and before making its way over the pond. In the 1980's, this movement was located primarily in Northern England, and eventually made its way to other parts of the UK while taking on other influences from jazz, funk, reggae, and punk. This refashioned post-punk soul sound in the UK had less divide between black/white music/musicians than the US at the time. Certainly many of the blue-eyed musicians took on front and center, but there were always more diverse musical lineups supporting these acts. I just want to highlight a few gems that come to mind... The king of the mod revival in 80's (a subculture movement unto itself that had more emphasis around jazz, scooters, and 60's fashion) was Paul Weller. Certainly his work with The Jam and his solo stuff continues to inspires generations, but it was his diversion to the more soul-ridden The Style Council that caught my attention. You take a song like “Shout to the Top,” and you'll find an urgent rhythm filled with gorgeous melodies and high-caliber craftsmanship. I never tire of this song, and it's always a highlight at his live performances:
I actually first heard about Orange Juice after reading Simon Reynold's Rip it Up and Start Again since they did not have much exposure in the US. Reynolds says, “Orange Juice talked and acted in ways that broke with rock's rebel swagger and postpunk's militant solemnity. They were literate, playful, witty, camp.” As I explored their music, I found myself loving Edwyn Collin's infectious voice, and the jaunty jangle guitars and choppy rhythms. Their debut single “Falling and Laughing” draws you with its unabashed romance and Collin's shy and sensitive vocals. It's so pure in its sacred confession for love:
More recently, I watched this short film about Dexy's Midnight Runners that explored all the incarnations of Kevin Rowland's band and various projects. I've always enjoyed their music in the early 80's, more specifically their first major hit “Geno” and the album “The Celtic Soul Brothers” that contained the mega-hit “Come On Eileen.” But I was less familiar with their follow-up commercial failure, 1985's “Don't Stand Me Down.” In this project, Rowland got away from his Irish vagabond look from the prior album, and decided to take on an investment banker like appearance. In the following delicious 12 minute song, “This is What She's Like” there are these interesting comical dialogues that take on subjects like the ruling class, while at the same time trying to cheekily be a part of it. The song maintains this epic quality of high-energy folksy violins & mandolins and soulful vocals that has been a staple in much of his work. This is probably a forgotten classic:
Crisis brings out the best and worst in us, so why should this pandemic be any different. What is different these days is our relationship to trust. Because if you can't trust in God, then you certainly can't trust yourself. And then forget trusting all the other authority figures out there. And that's not the say some authority figures, like public health experts, can't be wrong. In fact, they're often wrong! But to see it through the lens of deception, paranoia, and deluded hubris says more about the viewer than the viewed.
This article (‘Conspirituality’ — the overlap between the New Age and conspiracy beliefs) by Jules Evans hits on some high points on this topic. We see the makers of 5G, along with Bill Gates, are part of a global eugenics plot by the Illuminati puppet masters. And forget about the forthcoming vaccine that may mitigate measures, as that is part of the plan to inject nano-surveillance devices in all of us. I do have give kudos for such far reaching imaginations, albeit distorted ones at that. And here comes the nub of the issue: we have undermined the sober metaphysics of traditionalism for the intoxicated magical-thinking of paganism. Whether it's the pollyannaish view that we are the chosen ones to usher in a new global consciousness, or a pessimistic view that we are the clever few who are on to the Establishment's plot to take humanity down, it all comes down to a lack of trust in a unifying God—where good and evil is seen within ourselves rather than between ourselves. It's not that New Agers don't believe in God, they've just reduced Him into a silent partner. Mix in some ‘benign schizotypy’ that is validated through internet culture, and you've got a religion of disorder. Thomas Merton was on to this back in his day before all of this craziness, when he said:
“The notion of dogma terrifies men who do not understand the Church. They cannot conceive that a religious doctrine may be clothed in a clear, definite and authoritative statement without at once becoming static, rigid, and inert and losing all its vitality. In their frantic anxiety to escape from any such conception they take refuge in a system of beliefs that is vague and fluid, a system in which truths pass like mists and waver and vary like shadows. They make their own personal selection of ghosts, in this pale, indefinite twilight of the mind.”
Merton then goes on to say that: “They take good care never to bring these abstractions out into the full brightness of the sun for fear of a full view of their unsubstainability.” That may have been true in his time, but certainly not now. Today, their lack of modesty is taken over by an overzealous pride—albeit sometimes couched in the anonymity of debased social media chatter. Such hubris by conspiracy types is used to overcompensate for their fragile relationship to Truth. Without a vertical authority, they have no leg to stand on since there is no Source of intelligibility holding them up. As such, these views are often fragments of a disordered mind that can not rest in a Father's trusting embrace.
David Walsh says, “Men generally know what they should do; they simply refuse to do it.” It's like we are condemned to Truth and to distort it at the same time. It's probably like the song says: if loving you is wrong, [then] I don't want to be right. And I've chosen the wrong on more occasions I want to admit outside the sacrament of reconciliation. Often the deep answers to life are not complicated, but rather simple. That doesn't mean they are easy. We have many competing interests and motivations, sometimes conscious and sometimes not, taking on our deeper conscious. We'd often rather fight or flight than fall in line in Truth. And there is no good reason for it. Walsh notes, “The deliberate choice of darkness and self-destruction, in the face of the appeal toward light and self-actualization, knowing full well the futility of the choice as incapable of changing the outcome, is a radical unintelligibility.” Yes, I think that's a fancy a way of reiterating Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. And yet, sinners gonna sin.
Moreover, this “discloses the precarious character of our exercise of freedom.” From the get go, our freedom in never really autonomous. We are always responding to something beyond our control—such as a pandemic or a crazy girlfriend or a nasty tweet. Sometimes these forces can even be supernatural, making the need for grace to be every more present. Yet, man has a funny way of picking himself by his bootstraps to attain a haughty self-sufficiency. Grace be damned, he thinks. Thomas Merton says, “We get tired of this “faith” that does not do anything to change reality. It does not take away our anxieties, our conflicts, it leaves us a prey to uncertainty. It does not lift all responsibilities off our shoulders. Its magic is not so effective after all. It does not thoroughly convince us that God is satisfied with us, or even that we are satisfied with ourselves (though in this, it is true, some people's faith is often quite effective).” Which just goes to show you, that our freedom is “a drama enacted between the poles of certainty and uncertainty” (Walsh). So we'd rather be an island unto ourselves—where we can be certain of our insanity rather than be uncertain of a God who is with us. The first choice always has to be taken alone. Walsh insightfully expounds,
“The mystery between our freedom and and the knowledge that structures and directs it is that the latter emerges only to the extent that it is actualized. The more we respond to the glimmerings that first attract us faintly, the more they become beacons of light irradiating the path before us with unanticipated intensity. A reality that had previously seemed to offer us unlimited choice now works to constrain us within its imperious demands. Not that we ever lose the capacity to turn our backs on the higher life that calls us. But the more we respond in fidelity to its appeal, the less attractive the option of closure appears to us. We have been “captured” by the strength of that higher reality. The option of turning aside is always there, but why would we want to exercise it when it means the loss of the only reality that counts? A human soul grows to the point that it begins to measure itself and all that it does in light of the truth of that higher reality. Rejection can still occur, but what can pull us back to a life of falsehood and meanness? The attraction of virtue and the emptiness of vice have become unmistakably clear, to the point that we might even say we have no choice.”
The first choice becomes the no choice, indeed. Our free will becomes Thy will.