Excerpt from a post in Mockingbird this past week: That’s all well and good, but why write about this on Mockingbird? I’m glad you asked. The answer, like many others, has to do with the movie High Fidelity. That beloved film opens with the protagonist, Rob (John Cusack) asking the audience, “Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable? Or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?” Rob doesn’t understand why people worry so much about the effects of violent video games but not the potential damage of song after song on the radio about heartbreak and pain. It’s a profound question, and a far cry from the one I was asked most often during my years of youth ministry–earnest kids would always seek my input on what they should listen to. What should be embraced and what should be avoided? What’s “commendable” and what’s not? In pop culture, where is the line between appropriate and inappropriate? Such curiosity is by and large a good thing. Most (youth) ministers have plenty of wisdom to share on the subject, and even if they don’t, it’s a good conversation starter. But it also belies a sad truth about how many religious people perceive culture. Culture, especially of the popular variety, has all too often been an area of life shrouded in words like “should” and “ought”, a place of guilt (and law) and therefore hiddenness—there’s what we are supposed to consume, what we may even say we consume, and then there’s what we actually consume. This is more than a “guilty pleasure” phenomenon; when we cast pop culture as forbidden fruit, we do ourselves and our children a disservice. The coming-of-age stories are well-worn: “I’ll never forget the day my parents found my stash of Metallica CDs.” “We were only ever allowed to listen to Christian music, so when my cousin’s friend played me that Eminem track in his car, I started counting the days until I could get my own place and blast hip-hop.” kbnThe real issue, however, is not that we make a questionable movie or band that much more attractive with our restrictions, it’s that we miss out on an opportunity to ask a deeper and ultimately more biblical question–what is it inside of us that makes us want to consume what we actually want to consume? After all, the Bible is fairly unclear on the subject of appropriate television. We may be able to cobble together an answer, it may even make good sense, but it will inevitably differ from that of our neighbor. Fortunately, Jesus more or less directly addresses the High Fidelity quandary. He is recorded in Mark as saying that, “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.” (Mark 14b-15). Sin flows inside-out rather than outside-in. It is inherited, not achieved, as the St. Paul writes in Romans 5. In other words, for a piece of culture to gain emotional or spiritual traction in the viewer or consumer, it has to find an internal foothold first. Which is another way of saying that we listen to pop music because we are miserable, not the other way around. The enemy is not out there. Indeed, when we blame or scapegoat media for our problems with anger, or lust, or anxiety, we are inevitably ignoring the logs in our own eyes. This doesn’t mean that cultural artifacts are innocuous or have no power in and of themselves–thank God they do! But that power may look different than we often presume it does. This brings me back to Nirvana. In the midst of a difficult and frustrating time, I gravitated toward music that resonated with and maybe even indulged my agitation. I don’t mean to imply that their work was emotionally monochrome; there’s a lot going on in it, especially on In Utero. But to my fourteen year-old ears, it was the disaffection that mattered most. It captured and expressed what was going on inside of me. When those feelings subsided, it was no coincidence that certain records began to gather dust. In fact, the very next year I checked the Good Vibrations boxed set out of my school library, and the rest is history. Not that I never felt aggression or frustration ever again, simply that my taste shifted significantly, and it wasn’t a conscious act of will. I give my parents a lot of credit. I can only imagine how alienated they must have felt when they would come into my room on Heinlenstrasse and hear Rage Against the Machine blaring from the speakers. They were wise enough to know, or foolish enough to believe, that if they had forced the issue and made me throw out those abrasive CDs, the feelings wouldn’t have disappeared. In fact, they would have likely festered and grown—the forbiddance would have simply been another thing to be angry about! And what’s more, the real question might have been circumvented or suppressed. I needed to feel that anger and isolation, I needed to get to know it, let it run its course (in a fashion), if for no other reason than that’s the place where any message of hope and assurance would ultimately make sense. I suppose you could say that teenage angst paid off well.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 02:29:45 +0000
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