Why there's no Christian Freddy Mercury

An essay on artists and repression

Dear H,

Listening to Adele’s Hello reminds me of the perennial question: why there isn’t any Christian music as fun as Highway to Hell. So far as I’m aware the question's been around as long as the 70’s, when Larry Norman had the balls to actually sing about it. He wrote Why Should the Devil Have All the Best Music? and proved his point. It’s one of his most popular songs and one of the worst tunes in Christendom — God rest his soul.

The Devil also has the best album covers

Christians don’t lag behind with all music, however — just the majority of songs that make you feel like sulking, fighting, dancing and bonking. In the realm of crossing yourself or crying and saying thank you we have a considerable number of gems like Hillsong’s Oceans and Kari Jobe’s The Blessing; but I think this may be why we don’t have an I’m Still Standing or a Moves Like Jagger: the sheer pigeonholing of Christians into “Christian music” makes us afraid to pen anything too un-Christlike. And I remind you that the whole point of Christ is that He’s much different from the rest of us. Thus half the possible attitudes make us feel like maybe we’re not holding our end of the bargain, and at worst they make us feel the Holy Spirit isn't holding up His.

This isn’t an extraneous failure: when a man “puts on Christ” he's attempting to do something beyond his ability — to derange the natural impulses of his inner self far beyond what’s actually possible, saddling himself with feelings he can’t really feel, and trying to squelch feelings he isn’t supposed to have. Thus he tries to work up tears the 500th time the pastor talks about the crucifixion. He wants to take to the streets and beat up a race rioter, but he has to pretend calmness, mercy — even pity. He wants to laugh at a fool, but he wonders whether he should shake his head and cry instead. (This last idea, when not thrown off wholeheartedly, is responsible for killing Christian comedy).

Even the Jews, despite the first commandment to Love the Lord your God with all your mind, heart, soul, and strength got a hard-on in the Song of Solomon and put curses in their Psalms. They were given zero room for anything but one Being and they still fit the whole messy spectrum of feelings comfortably into their religion. This is probably why their descendants rule Hollywood and comedy and produce guys like Jay-Z. Solomon said there was a time for everything under heaven. Christians try to elbow most of it out — and the result is we don’t have our own Bohemian Rhapsody.

In our defense, every man has to try to be somebody he isn’t currently. This is how you grow, and it’s proof, many times, that you’re better than you look. It might even be proof that you’re saved. But aiming too high (and especially for impossible things) always takes a toll; and the more you find yourself saying no to yourself, the less able you are to give yourself a good yes. You already spent your energy, your brainpower, your passion on trying to cage the monster. You're more well behaved, certainly, and probably even happier (I certainly am). But you’re not likely to be Freddy Mercury.

Yours,

-J

P.S. The great difference between Christian musicians and secular musicians is that I can make fun of Larry Norman’s music but I’m not worthy to kiss his feet, and I can love Taylor Swift’s Midnights but make fun of her whole life. And believe me when I say I’d rather be the humblest saint with the worst music than the best musician with no savior. So if any Christ-like musicians are offended by this essay, take heart. Maybe you’ll never write Stairway to Heaven. Who cares? You get to climb it — and if you're God's own art in the making, in a sense you get to be it.

Plus there’s a counterpoint to this whole essay, and it’s that what we mistakenly pigeonhole as culture, the Steven Spielbergs and Freddie Mercuries, are rare phenomena even in the secular industries of film and music. And furthermore, they stand on top of a mountain of obscure and totally forgettable degenerates, nincompoops, talentless hipsters, and neer-do-well’s — a whole horde of “artists” not only sub-par even for Christian culture, but totally devoid of any class, basic moral fibre, and happiness in general. You could even say that outside of music and movies they lack culture. Thus having free and filthy “artists” is a huge trade-off: one which leaves a carrot on a stick in front of every ass, while only one in ten million ever turns into a prize horse. Everybody wants to be the next Freddy Mercury, and the closest most of them ever get is AIDS.

And then there’s another question, maybe more important: if the artists are good at evoking feelings, how many of these feelings do you want them to evoke? And when?

Consider these meatheads who blast Master of Puppets right before work: are we going there to fight? When you put on a song you’re swallowing a soul. You don’t put on the war drums when you’re trying to kiss a girl*. You don’t blast The Sex Pistols while you’re trying to nurse your kid.

Tolstoy says of music in his must-read novella The Kreutzer Sonata (Pevear translation),

What is music? What does it do? And why does it do what it does? […] How shall I put it? Music makes me forget myself, my true situation; it transports me to some other situation not my own; under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what, in fact, I do not feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. I explain it by the fact that music works like yawning, like laughter; I’m not sleepy, but I yawn looking at a yawning man, I have no reason to laugh, but I laugh hearing someone else laugh.

I asked above why Christians don’t make a lot of music — but there’s a great case for why Christians shouldn’t even listen to a lot of it. They say that Saul was haunted by demons and the only way he could get rid of them was by having David play the harp. What was happening here is obvious. Saul himself was kind of a devil and he wanted to be infused with the soul of an angel. Christians today do almost the opposite. They pray to God to give them a good day, and then, on the way to work, imbibe the zeitgeist of a few demons.

*What music do you play for a girl you want to kiss? Poppy music is too up for the moment — you can start off a date with it, but you eventually want something slow and sad, which captures perfectly the mood of romance. Thus you’ve got to find that line where beauty crosses into sadness and hold it there until you can make your move. Iron and Wine’s Cinder and Smoke, or Elliott Smith’s Between the Bars, will do here.

If you actually listen to the lyrics of Cinder and Smoke it has nothing to do with romance at all — a family’s farmhouse burning down and a kid watching his parents, one of them drunk (and probably responsible for the fire), trying to save a few of their belongings. The music matches the lyrics, and the pain in the chest is close to what you feel when that moment happens between you and a lover and you want it to go on forever and you know it can’t. A bittersweetness which makes you hold on to it harder.

***Despite the essay above, Christians don’t even hold the heavyweight title on repression. That belongs to the party of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, where membership requires the belief that virtues are oppression and oppression of the virtuous is virtue, that ugliness is beauty and beauty is just a social construct, that victims are aggressors and aggressors are victims, that anti-racism is racism and racism is anti-racism, that woman can be men and men can be women, that the untalented should be promoted and the talented are not needed, that two plus two doesn't necessarily equal four — a slew of upside-down stances that bury not even reason, but the physical senses and feelings reason is based on.

And as they have the arrogance to buck nature, they have the audacity to derange culture — to see masterpieces that are already completed, buy the copyrights, and try to remake them in their own image. Thus the fall of Disney, Marvel, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and every other series they first admired, then disdained, and finally ruined. Christians have a tendency to erase things from movies. The Social Justice Warrior tends to put things in — and the end result is a new take so bad that it poisons a whole brand.