Tight Fittin’ Jeans

I woke up with this song in my head this morning.

She tried to hide it by the faded denim clothes she wore
But I knew she’d never been inside a bar before
And I felt like a peasant who just had met a queen
And she knew I saw right through those tight fittin’ jeans

I asked her, “What’s a woman like you, doin’ here?
I see you’re used to champagne but I’ll buy you a beer”
She said, “You’ve got me figured out but I’m not what I seem
And for a dance I’ll tell you ’bout these tight fittin’ jeans”

She said, “I married money, I’m used to wearin’ pearls
But I’ve always dreamed of bein’ just a good old boy’s girl
So tonight I left those crystal candle lights to live a dream
And pardner, there’s a tiger in these tight fittin’ jeans”

We danced every dance and, Lord, the beer that we went through
I’m satisfied I did my best to make her dream come true
As she played out her fantasy before my eyes it seemed
A cowgirl came alive inside those tight fittin’ jeans

In my mind she’s still a lady, that’s all I’m gonna say
I knew that I’d been broken by the time we parted ways
And I know I held more woman than most eyes have ever seen
That night I knew a lady wearin’ tight fittin’ jeans

Well now she’s back in her world and I’m still stuck in mine
But I know she’ll always remember the time
A cowboy once had a millionaire’s dream
And Lord, I loved that lady wearin’ tight fittin’ jeans

You know what I hate about that song? Not a damn thing. I love it.

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Contra Nick Rynerson on Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist”

I posted a critical comment on Nick Rynerson’s post about the new and controversial Brad Paisley/LL Cool J song “Accidental Racist” on the Christ and Pop Culture blog at Patheos and it apparently got yanked for moderation. I’m not happy about that at all, so I’m re-posting it here, verbatim:

What a ridiculous hit piece. You should seriously be ashamed of yourself, not just as a Christian but as a decent person.

Yes, the song is clumsy. No, musically, it’s not the best song ever. But you know what? The sentiment comes from a genuine place. The intentions were good.

Consider Brad Paisley’s audience and ask yourself which is better, clumsy dialogue or no dialogue? Do you realize that by jumping on the bandwagon and blasting this song, you are contributing to an environment where racial dialogue is basically impossible? The reactions to this song across the internet send a clear message: “Talking about race is an impossible minefield. Don’t bother trying, because you’re going to do it wrong and people will turn on you like a pack of rabid dogs.” If you are going to mock, ridicule or castigate everyone who makes a good-faith attempt at talking about race because they don’t meet some ill-defined standard for cultural studies, you are essentially silencing the conversation. Is that really what you want?

And yes, we know you sneer at and look down on mainstream country. To be honest, I strongly suspect that’s what’s actually the big motivator for this blog post, as opposed to a real honest to God bone to pick about race in America.

Obviously the song is not perfect. Obviously even the sentiment has flaws: you don’t have to be cloistered in an Ivory Tower to realize race in America is more complicated than Paisley makes it out to be. Fine. The song is a first step and an honest one. How does responding to it with nastiness and sarcasm help things? How does jumping on the derision bandwagon correct the course? How does using sarcasm and scorn to chill good-faith efforts–even boneheaded ones–to talk about race improve race relations and foster real, productive dialogue?

And to Christians I ask, is Rynerson’s pieced a grace-filled respose? Is it filled with love? Rynerson thinks humility is a part of the solution? He’s sure not displaying any with this post.

I maintain that a significant part of the motivation–not just on Rynerson’s part, but all over the internet and news media–for the nastiness and scorn heaped on this song is really just nastiness and scorn for mainstream country. The level of vitriol would be nowhere this bad if Paisley were not a Nashville musician.

Edit to add: Thomas L. McDonald at God and the Machine, another Patheos blog but on the Catholic channel, says it all very well.

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Planet Earth Is Blue And There’s Nothing I Can Do

That’s me and my classmates graduating from Bob Goins’s Guitar 3rep class at the Old Town School of Folk Music last night. Given that we were absolute beginners eleven months ago, I feel like we’ve come pretty far. My guitar is covered up by the music stand, but it’s my 12-string that I love so much.

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When The Children Cry

When I hear this song, I think about my beautiful kids, and I get choked up. I hope they know how much I love them.

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I Tell You This

No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.

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Twelve Strangs

My 12-string guitar came i the mail yesterday, an Epiphone DR-212 that looks like this:

And I love it.

This makes three guitars in the house, all Epiphones (in addition to the new 12-strang, I have a cherry sunburst Les Paul Special II and my wife has an acoustic, but I can’t remember the model).

It came with shitty strings that won’t hold a tune for long, so I’ll have to replace those of course. But when it is tuned up and I play it, it sounds like delicious, musical rain. I took it to my guitar class at the Old Town School of Folk Music last night, and had a ton of fun passing it around the class to give everyone a chance to strum on it.

12-String guitars have sets of strings in courses, like a mandolin. The higher sets are both tuned to the same note, and the lower sets are tuned an octave apart from each other, so it has this full, chorus sound. A lot of amazing songs have 12-string guitars in them, but here’s one where the instrument is prominent, so you can tell what it sounds like:

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This Time, This Time

So, quick caveat: this song has nothing to do with my tenth wedding anniversary yesterday. Just putting that out there.

It has everything to do with me having a shitty day at work and feeling tense and taut like a wire. My first year here at the Firm was pretty rough: I was absolutely miserable and stressed constantly, to the point where I was sick all the time. Things have gotten better, but sometimes a day is nothing but a series of minor disasters and it feels like my first year again.

A lot of things got me through that first year when it was rough every day. My amazing wife. My wicked cool kids. Counting down the days until I could quit my job and not owe money to the Firm. Stuff like that. One of those things was Waylon Jennings.

I discovered Ol’ Hoss last summer when I got in a mood to throw more country music into the mix instead of just all metal all the time. I was starting to read western novels, and I was starting to get homesick for the South, and both of those deserve a country soundtrack. But I don’t really like suburban pop-country (I’m talking to you, Keith Urban), so I set about discovering all the old outlaw country legends, and Waylon Jennings jumped out at me like few things ever have.

You know how sometimes you hear a song and immediately, right from the first listen, you know it just knocked about three other songs from your top ten to just make room for it? That’s how it was with “This Time.” I first heard it on the bus on the way to work in the middle of one of the worst times of last year–I had an absolutely disastrous year-end review that I had been mortally dreading for months, and I was insanely busy right around a holiday when I had made plans to spend time with family. But this song came on my headphones and it changed my life.

So here it is, because today’s the kind of day when I need this kind of song.

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Roy Orbison: You Got It

Gods damn this is such a good song.

I’ve been listening to a lot of early rock and rockabilly for the last couple of days. Learning to play the guitar has made subtle shifts in the music I am interested in. Also, I got a new haircut, grew my sideburns back out, and started using pomade. I’m not going to lie; it looks sharp. Also, my beautiful and sexy wife bought me a beautiful and sexy electric guitar this weekend: an Epiphone Les Paul Special II in classic cherry sunburst. It sounds amazing and I think I love it more than I love anything but my wife and kids (sorry brother).

My point is, I remembered this song last night and went and looked it up and gods damn this is such a good song. There is nothing about it that I do not love. There is no reason to not listen to it over and over again.

Rest in peace, Roy.

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Townes In My Head

We’ve been playing some Townes Van Zandt songs in my Thursday night guitar class at the Old Town School of Folk Music: first “No Place To Fall,” which is just a gorgeous song in 3/4 time and fun to play with the ol’ capo on the second fret. Listen to it here (played by Townes, not played by me; I’m not nearly good enough to impose myself on you yet):

My guitar teacher also brought in “Pancho and Lefty” for us to play, which made my day. I have previously expressed my massive appreciation for that song.

So anyway, I have those two songs in my head now. And I’ve been practicing them. Seriously, if you have never listened hard to Townes Van Zandt, you are missing out like you have no idea.

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Shout at The Devil: Satan, Heavy Metal, and the Great God Pan

He’s the wolf screaming lonely in the night;
He’s the blood stain on the stage.
He’s the tear in your eye being tempted by his lies,
He’s the knife in your back; he’s rage!

You want to experience the Horned God right now? Go and grab a copy of Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil and put it on the record player. Turn it up. Listen to it. Feel it. Get into it. There he is—lurking under the surface of the music, ready to burst out at any minute with a raging hard-on and an urge to do violence. This is the music your parents were afraid you would listen to, and for good reason. This is Pan’s music, and Pan is everything they were afraid of.

Rock music has a long tradition of flirting with the Devil, but with a few notable exceptions, these musicians don’t worship the actual Devil of Christianity. The Devil of rock and roll is not really anything like the Satan found in the Bible or in modern Christian theology. Some Christians might be bothered both by the content and the imagery of rock and metal, but not actually because they accurately represent the Christian Satan in a theological sense. The Christian Satan is a fallen angel who is miserable because he is separated from God, and as a result, he wants to make humanity as miserable as he is by tempting them to sin against God and thereby separate themselves as he is separated. That same motivation is often ascribed to the Devil of rock and roll, but it is falsely ascribed. It is a reaction, a fear-motivated impulse that rock and roll deliberately provokes because it pushes people’s boundaries and forces them to confront everything that rock and roll and its Devil stand for. But under the surface, it has nothing to do with Christianity’s Satan.

The Devil of rock and roll is a different Devil: he is instead the Devil of the occultists, the magicians, and the romantic poets. And whether the Christian Devil was in fact deliberately distorted in the Middle Ages to look and act like a pagan horned god or whether that idea is a modern conceit, the romantic occult Devil, who came much later, was most definitely and intentionally modeled on the pagan Horned God. This intoxicating devil inspired the poets and magicians who inspired the musicians of the twentieth century. It’s no accident that the first real heavy metal album, Black Sabbath’s self-titled record, is completely and totally immersed in the imagery of Satan. This Devil was a god of libido, of power, of freedom, a god of fear and lust, a god of the revel, of nature, of the night, a god of secrets and rage, a god who stands as a guardian of or even a living embodiment of the inexhaustible wellspring of the universe’s raw, primal, and sublime essence. His worship ran counter to the Church and its theology, but not because he was a part of the Church or its theology. He was a Devil, but he was not Christianity’s Devil: he was in fact Pan. Pan, the horned god of the Greek shepherds, whose music inspired fear and panic and sexual lust, Pan the god of the wild places and the lonely, magic, dangerous corners of the earth, the Great God Pan. When the romantics and occultists looked to the gods of the ancient pagans, Pan stood out from all of them because he represented a direct, divine connection to that raw stuff of the universe that the Church of the Middle Ages did its best to monopolize, control, and intermediate. Pan stood out and invited the occultists to come and feel his power directly, through ritual but most importantly through the revel. And heavy metal gives us both, in spades. Heavy metal gives us the real Devil, the Devil that human beings hunger and thirst for.

He’ll be the love in your eyes, he’ll be the blood between your thighs
And then have you cry for more!
He’ll put strength to the test, he’ll put the thrill back in bed,
Sure you’ve heard it all before.
He’ll be the risk in the kiss, might be anger on your lips,
Might run scared for the door…

People fear Pan because Pan cannot be controlled. Pan is wild; Pan is free. Pan is unpredictable and the unpredictable makes us uncomfortable. It doesn’t fit in our neat categories; it doesn’t follow our made-up rules.

By invoking his imagery and creating music that is a perfect channel for his divinity, heavy metal has served him and worshipped him more purely than perhaps any other modern human endeavor. Heavy metal stands as a dangerous and powerful testament that despite Plutarch’s report and the wishful thinking of Milton and Browning, Pan is not dead at all. Like nature itself, and like his sometime father Dionysus, Pan can never die. Pan returns and demands that we deal with him. Pan has a hold on all of us, whether we like it or not: we are all dark and dangerous, we all have the urge to create and destroy, we are all animals playing at being human. And when we hear a song like “Shout At The Devil” we can’t help but feel who we really are.

But in the seasons of wither we’ll stand and deliver—
Be strong and laugh and
Shout! Shout! Shout!
Shout at the Devil!

Feel the swagger, the sexuality, the aggression in the music. Feel it in your body, as your body answers. That is Pan. Pan’s music is rough and savage, but no less powerful and intricate than Apollo’s hymns. Apollo calms us, but Pan arouses us. Pan shows us a side of humanity that is frightening but real, and even essential. It’s not evil—it’s who we are. Modern pagans shy away from talking about the Devil because they are afraid of being misunderstood or maligned. And maybe that’s fair, but I think it’s a mistake. Pan is the Devil, and that’s a good thing. He is the Devil in the best way possible, and I say embrace that. Put the record on. Turn it up. Throw up his sign. You know how it’s done.

Listen to it! Listen, and shout at the Devil!

(Article originally published in Hoofprints in the Wildwood: A Devotional Anthology for the Horned Lord; song lyrics from Mötley Crüe’s song, “Shout at the Devil” written by Nikki Sixx)

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