rock and roll musings by Tim Byrnes

 All You Need Is Hate: Love Rears Up It’s Ugly Head

    What a difference a week makes. This time last week I was waxing rhapsodically about the Holy Grandeur of the Polyphonic Spree and convincing myself that I had, indeed,  found God at last amidst the wall of joyful noise produced by their rapturous flutes and theremins. Now, their music is truly a huge and wonderful thing and may yet be a hiding place for God, at least for some people but not so yr faithful reporter. Y’see I went public with my assumed conversion on that Christian Message Board I mentioned (and in an aside to Queen Woggy: I apologize for referring to Daniel Amos as a CCM band, as a lay person, hell as a heathen, I’m not hip to the finer distinctions of genre. Kinda like death core vs. grind core. What’s the bloody difference? I don’t know but I’m sure there’s 1,000’s of potheads named Trent or Jason only too ready to tell me.) and upon closer inspection of my thoughts and feelings regarding certain Christian dogma (OK, Gay Rights) I realized that I had jumped the gun in the interest of connection and that I had no more right to call myself a Christian than I did to change my name to Alice and start having babies.
    So I go to the board, essentially to resign my self appointed commission and am met with well meaning souls who lovingly informed me that I had indeed been touched by God and couldn’t take it back and that all my protestations (no pun intended) were either the work of the Devil, who was pissed that I had let God enter my life in the 1st place, or simply my all-too human brain attempting to disavow the Word of God in some humanistic junta doomed for failure because God knows better than I do. This is, of course, a one-sided (mine) oversimplification of the response I met, but I’m an overly simple person.
    My rationalization was this: If I’m unwilling to buy EVERY precept of something as definitive as faith; ie: that homosexuality is “..an abomination before the Lord“ (an archaic and I still believe anti-human and unloving response to a natural state of being FAR REMOVED FROM PEDOPHELIA OR MURDER!) than I could not be a Christian. Something of a Fundamentalist rejection of Fundamentalism, I guess, but I figure in for a penny in for a pound and, upon post-revelation, clear  headed inspection of my thoughts and feelings (which I was informed, in no uncertain terms, that God does not  CARE about!) that I wasn’t even in for the penny. No, I don’t know who created us, I don’t know what’s gonna happen when we die, but I’ll be damned (no pun or irony intended) if I’m gonna put my hard earned faith in a magical genie that’s gonna explain everything and make this dismal, dark and dying world OK.
    Here’s my take on Jesus (Part 2,936): Jesus was an enlightened human being, probably 1 or 2 evolutionary jumps ahead of everybody else, who sought to encourage an oppressed populace through a policy of non-violence. But telling whipped souls to ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘blessed be the meek’ etc., all that ‘things’ll be better AFTER YOU DIE’ stuff only goes so far when yr children are being killed. Jesus was turned into the state by Judas Iscariot who felt betrayed by Jesus who, as a social revolutionary failed to live up to his (Judas’) ideals. Due to the fact that Jesus refused to use his high profile and influence to lead the Jews in a violent uprising against the Roman oppressor, Judas turned his ass in. So 2,000 years ago a good man was crucified by the State for spreading poised ideas amongst the rabble, much like a Martin Luther King or, arguably, a John F. Kennedy. Rome cut Jesus off at the pass before he or Judas could organize his followers to violence, which as we all know, is the only thing that ever REALLY solves anything.
    Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m as depressed by that revelation as anyone, but facts are facts. You can march and march and wave signs and sign petitions yr ass off, but regime change only comes after dropping bombs. It’s made humanity (and America) what we are today: vile, venal and the top of the food chain.
    What does this have to do with rock and roll? Not much, I grant you. Although when I visit different rock and roll message boards all I find are little wars. So my beloved noise remains a sign of the times, if nothing else. “My punk rock can beat up yr punk rock”. “So and so isn’t TRUE metal so why don’t you die or move back to the middle east you dumb fucker?’ etc. etc. I have very little faith in us as a species anymore, when even rock and roll, what I once thought our last, best hope for community, if not peace, turns into just another battlefield. Morrissey’s forgiven Jesus, but he’s done it from the cold, high tower of isolation he’s built on the adoration of teenage outcasts and nostalgic old folks like me who remember the lie that liking the same 3 chords constituted a brotherhood.  Bull, I say, and shit! Religion, Nationalism, rock and roll and any ‘extended family’ we might care to invent or invest with what we laughingly call a higher purpose is defined by that which we are not. That which we hate.
    To the true Christian  I and my ilk are lost souls in need of Jesus and salvation. What they really mean is I’m not (yet) a member of their club and, as such, doomed to eternal death and it’s all my fault BECAUSE I WON’T DO WHAT THEY’VE DONE and accepted Christ as my personal savior. The metalhead hates the emokid hates the country singer hates the punk rocker hates the jazz guy hates the blues shouter hates the hip hopper hates the opera singer and everybody hates the French.
    Praise God, my Aunt Fanny. I’m all for Nuclear War ‘cause, goddamnit, we got it coming!
(OK, rant over, for now, I promise the next bit will be about rock and roll without all the psycho-socialist bushwah.)

Posted by: timbyrnes at 18:24 | link | comments

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