Goddamned, or is it?

Before you start reading my first blog, I would like to turn your attention to this website to listen to a song entitled Goddamned, by Jay Brannan. When you get to this site click on the songs tab right below the word music and in the playlist you will see the song, click on the small play button next to the song to start playing. If you would like a set of lyrics to look at while you listen, you can click here. If you do not want to this, that is ok, but I feel this post will not have the full impact I want if you do not listen to the song. I feel that the music is powerful, and will reach you at a deeper level than any words could.

Did you listen? What did you feel? What were you reactions? What did you like? What did you not like? Were you angry? Did you agree? Whatever it was, feel free to comment.

I bought Jay Brannan’s album on iTunes on February 16, 2010. I had stumbled upon him while I was doing one of my many searches for singer/songwriters on youtube. I find nothing sounds better to me than a man and his guitar. Something about the simplicity of it just strums my heart strings the right way. Notes. Chords. Words. Ideas. Vocals. Music. This music then penetrates not only the listener’s ear, but their soul, to create emotion. It is this emotion which then creates more ideas, which is why I love music, because it is, in a sense, an act of creation. One of my favorite theater professors in college always said the purpose of the arts was to evoke an emotional response. Not to be confused with invoke, which is very similar. Evoking emotion actually has the power to produce it. Invoking emotion is more of a call, a plea, begging it to come. Funny enough, I find Jay not only evoking, but invoking as well.

I can’t tell you how many times I have changed my thoughts and feelings about this particular song. I have gone back and forth on it ever since that day in 2010. My first instinct was one of excitement. Good music creates excitement in me. I find the haunting melody line, paired with the gorgeous yet equally spooky harmonies of the violin, stir up a plethora of memories and emotion.

That feeling of excitement faded when I found myself one day in my car singing and improvising the ending chorus of “No one’s coming to save you.” I then took a moment to realize what I saying. Listing to the lyrics once more my first reaction was, “Hey! I don’t agree with this guy at all!” Then that turned into, “Well, he makes a good point.”  Because there was a point in time when people actually believed that there were God’s (yes, that is plural) who lived in a castle in the sky. They controlled every aspect of their lives, and played with them like puppets. But those all turned into very fascinating stories we now teach to our children. We know this as mythology. So, what is to say that what we all believe in won’t be a story told to our children as fiction in a few thousand years?

I now look at this song in a completely different light. Instead of just getting angry at what he is saying, I ask myself, “What is he saying?”

Jay obviously feels very strongly about the views expressed in this song because not only is “Goddamned” the title of this song, but it is the title of the entire album. This is an idea he wants us to take hold of, to act on. As a Christian, I am glad to.

WHOA!!!!!!!!

That might be a reaction I might get from some of you. But before you go asking, “What kind of Christian would want to do what this guy says,” ask yourself, “Why is Joe, a Christian, glad to do this?”

Well, what is it that Jay is asking us to do? It is not to give up on our faith. It is not to discount God as a piece of mythology. That would be a common misconception, and I think an act of trying too hard to find a deeper meaning. Let’s look at the song as it was written. Simply. Jay simply tells us what he wants us to do. “Rip your bigot roots up from the earth and salt the goddamned ground.” Two words stand out to me in this sentence, bigot and salt. I am going to do my best Quentin Tarantino impression and work with the last word and work my way back to the first.

Salt.

Jay asks us to Salt the ground. For those of you who don’t know, salting the earth was an old ritual where people would spread salt on the grounds of a conquered city as a sign of a curse on its re-inhabitation. They did not want anyone rebuilding that land. In a sense, they are preserving its present state, so that what it used to be, can’t rebuilt. So Jay is asking us to rip our bigot roots up from the earth and salt it, to put a curse on bigotry so that it may never be built up in our lives again. And this is where I am glad to do what Jay asks me to do. You see Jay does not differ from Christians at all. In fact, he is working toward the same goal, and using the same language, for Jesus tells us that we are the SALT of the earth. We are the ones that have to put a stop to all the evils in this world. Not God, but us. WE ARE the salt. Think about that. Jesus isn’t asking us to be, or telling us we should be, he is saying that we are, whether we like it or not. Now I could go into a whole other post about what Jesus meant by saying “you are the salt of the earth,” but I think you get the picture. We are precious. We are the ones who must flavor this world, penetrate it, and preserve it.

But that is not the only thing he is saying is it? He decides to place another lens in front of us to guide our sight. It is this lens I decide not to look through. This lens is one where he openly states his opinions about religion. He compares it to mythology, and a theme park. He notices that people gather around a cross to eat pieces of someone’s body, and drink someone’s blood. Sounds weird right?  He sees people all over the world starting war over religion. He notices that there are people who dedicate their lives to make the lives of others worse in the name of religion. I want to point out that Jay does not directly attack Christianity, but every religion, when he says, “Mary and Mohammed are screaming through the clouds.”

Some people might look at Jay and think that he has a lack of faith, but I do not see it this way. Rather, I think this is something that has been taken from him, by no fault of his own. Why do I think that? Well that brings me to that first word that caught my attention in Jay’s lyric, bigot. Out of all of the things that are wrong with this world, the root that Jay asks up to dig up is bigotry.

Why that one?

It must be pretty important to him for us to get rid of this thing. Maybe he has been a victim. You see, based on all of the other songs on his album, like “Housewife” where Jay sings about how he just wants to be a housewife for the man in his life, I am going to assume, that Jay is gay. I would imagine that he has caught a lot of hell from a lot of different people of religious nature, probably many Christians, about his sexual preference.

This, as a Christian, saddens me. It pains me to think that this person has lost faith, not because of something God has done, but because of something we, as humans, as Christians have done. And I would like to point that out to Jay, and to you. This is something that I think Jay touches on in his song where he says, “There’s a holy spirit maybe, but she would never rent a room with walls built by mankind.” Jay is on to something here, that these walls, these barriers (bigotry, racism, hate, violence, etc..) are built by man, not by God. People do things in the name of God. God is not doing these things. People are speaking for God, instead of letting him speak.  The ground is not Goddamned as he states in his song. It is not God doing the damning, it is us. Religion is only flawed because man is flawed.

As this song saddens me, it also equally excites me! It excites me because it is a challenge. This song challenges me to behave better, understand better, practice patience better, love better, and be a Christian better. I want to be better so that this kind of thing does not happen because of me. I do not want people stealing things from people that are not theirs to steal. Faith, love, life. I just walked this last weekend in a suicide prevention walk where I heard too many stories of people who got those things stolen from them. This song makes me want to move my faith out of that tiny little living space, and move it on up into a “deluxe apartment in the sky!” Hopefully making that move, will evoke others, to do so also.