I'm tired of life being a journey-and-not-a-destination. I wanna get there and be there. I'm tired of sunset images with superimposed italicised aphorisms, tired of serene part-time models people doing yoga on piers, tired of photos of brand new universes reminding me I'm small.
I'm tired of being told to stay calm and carry on. This is not England, this is not World War II and the Nazis are not bombing us by night. We are fine. We don't need to calm down, we need to wake up before we really fall asleep. And I'm tired of Robin Williams' sad eyes staring back at me, always just to the right of the article I'm reading, as if he's waiting for my attention so he can tell me to seize the day and that none of this is my fault. I'm tired of sticky-carpeted bars with a set list at my feet and I'm tired of shiny-floored talent shows. I'm tired of people asking me when my next gig is, as if they're talking about the weather. This stuff isn't small talk for me. This is not a hobby, nor is it a career. I don't sing songs for fun. I sing them because I must, because I have to and because I need to or else the little spark of madness sets my chest on fire and fills my head with smoke for days and bloody days and makes me tired . Use of the word peaked in the middle of the 19th century but it's been on the rise since the 1950s.
Outrage. We love being outraged. We sometimes even seem to seek out reasons to be outraged. In my tiny town, the local paper has a weekly religious column. Some people read it simply so they can be outraged by its subject matter. Then we talk and type and tweet about how outrageous it was and how we are nothing like the columnist. Then all our friends all like and agree with us, sharing our outrage. We love to be outraged by exotic, foreign injustice and by the politics of those on the other side of the fence and find ourselves casting stones all over the place. This is not to say these things aren't wrong, so don't be chucking rocks at me. I just think the time has come for inrage. I wouldn't be the first to use the word, but it still sits atop a little squiggly red line on my screen. Why not add that little sucker to your dictionary? Inrage. If rage means both "a vehement desire or passion" and, at least in the country I'm from, "to go out and enjoy oneself socially", then I'm going to define inrage as "the action of contemplating that the current extent to which one is outraged by the world is a reflection of one's own disappointment at one's incapacity to do what it is one was born to do and most loves doing". Now is the time. Inrage. Stop chucking rocks and sort yourself out, then go make a slingshot. And, if you must, point it at me. Once upon a time in a very hot land there was a house on fire.
Nearby, in an air-conditioned office there was a cool white, middle-class, vegan, gay atheist man in an ironic t-shirt and a cold white, middle-class, omnivorous, heterosexual, religious man in a suit. One day the man in the suit left the office and walked out into the sunburn of the main street. It was a very hot day. There, he met the man in the t-shirt and they began to speak at each other: "I am right," huffed one man. "You are wrong." "You believe you are right because you are wrong," the other one puffed. "I am right because I am surrounded by people who think like me," said the first, red-faced. "You are wrong for the same reason." "I am right because my thoughts are my own," said the other, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "You are wrong for the same reason." "I am in the majority," said one. "A million people can't be wrong. Remember Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement?" "I am in the minority," retorted the other. "A million people can't be right. Remember the KKK?" "I am right because my thoughts are very old," said one, his shiny chin raised. "You are wrong for the same reason." "I am right because my thoughts are very new," snarled the other, furrowing his sweaty brow. "You are wrong for the same reason." "Your thoughts will unstitch the fabric of the universe!" screeched one man, fists clenched. "You are bad." "Your thoughts will turn back the hands of time to a dark age of backward, miserable living!" shouted the other. "You are bad." Suddenly each man remembered he had a mortgage to pay. Side by side they walked back to their shared air-conditioned office. Meanwhile the house just kept on burning. The truth is, I don't really like coffee. But that's not the whole truth.
It tastes nice enough, compared to most other brown water, but I don't like how it gives me that double-time drummer in my chest, that twitching under my skin or the sensation that everything is taking too long. I don't like my sense of dependence. I don't like needing it, even if it's normal to do so. I like the preparation, though. I like heating the water, cleaning out the pot, opening the jar, waiting for it to be ready. I'm fairly certain this feeling also applies to religious people and druggies: we like the ritual. And, like most modern Westerners, I don't really have many rituals. The word 'ritual' derives from the word 'rite' - "the prescribed or customary form for conducting a religious or other solemn ceremony." More than a century ago, Nietzsche let slip that Gott ist tot and that we had killed him. That's fine, but just because nobody's religious any more doesn't mean our customary forms for conducting ceremonies aren't as weird as ever. No more baptism, blood-drinking or somesuch. We drink coffee, prostrating five times a day, facing that sacred, steaming cup. As Nietzshe's madman put it: "God is dead... What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What sacred games shall we have to invent?" What water is there? Well, obviously it's water with coffee in it. What sacred games have we invented? Making coffee in ever more interesting ways, drinking it in newer, hipper locations. We use the stuff to chemically accelerate our collective heartbeat until our collective body is convinced we're running all the time so we can work harder, faster, better, more. So, I don't really like coffee. It makes me twitch, when what I really I want is to be still. It speeds me up when I really need to slow down. It makes me dependent on things, when I am mostly inspired by non-things. But I suppose I'm really not talking about Gott or kaffee, am I? I just feel a profound need for ritual for me and us and I don't really know what to do about it. And that's the truth. Do not be afraid.
Sometimes the heavens feel heavy. Or infinitely empty. Sometimes the stars are bright enough to burn your forearms. Or give you freckles. Sometimes an unwritten song is loud enough to steal your sleep. Or give you deep-sea dreams. Sometimes a semitrailer delivers you one solid piece of marble. And leaves it on your doormat. Sometimes the snarling dog behind you snaps at your heels. Or she licks your gravel-flecked knees. Sometimes it's all too much. Usually it is not enough. Sometimes they will speak of your demons. Do not be afraid. You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. I feel as if I am a character on 90s sitcom Friends, trapped inside a TV, looking out at all the open-mouthed ordinary people, waiting for a laugh. And yet my sitcommy life goes on. And I'm having a great time, half an hour at a time.
Out there, things looks so very different to my three-walled imitation of life. People starve and die out there. Or get blown up because they happen to be in the wrong place - such as a school - at the wrong time. In here, I get to hang out with Jennifer Aniston, crack regular jokes for which someone offscreen has prepared me, and disappear from the spotlight after thirty minutes of scrutiny. My life is well lit, uninterrupted by the silent extras behind me, and generally lovely. Full of friends. Sometimes the coffee is cold, though. It looks better on film, but it's very unpleasant. Nothing worse. So much of pop music, just like so much of pop culture, is white folks in blackface. It started out with actual white people doing actual blackface, but matured into Elvis and rock n' roll, disco and hip hop. There is even a pop singing accent ("bah" instead of "by", "mah" instead of "my") which is so normal we hardly hear it but, for me at least, it belongs to someone somewhere else. So, it should come as no surprise that freedom is such a popular subject matter. We used to be slaves, remember? We've been downtrodden and oppressed for centuries, you know. Remember Martin Luther King? Che Guevara? Malcolm X? Gandhi? Patron saints of the ordinary freedom-yearnin' man... Yup... I don't know what freedom is any more than a fish knows about water. Sure, my great-great-great grandfather was a convict, but he was buried in an unmarked grave by his son. And us Townsends have been free ever since. The chances are you're free right now. Flick on the TV and see what free people do. We cry over food and houses. So, with the greatest respect to Nina Simone, I've rewritten I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free: I wish I knew how it would feel to be free I wish I could pay off all the chains holding me I wish I could buy all the things that I could buy Buy them now, buy them cheap, and then I would be free I wish I could sell all the love that's in my heart Renovate all the bars that keep us apart I wish I could own every film that's being shown Then you'd see and agree that entertainment should be free I wish I could fly like a bird in the sky How sweet it would be if I found I could fly Oh, I'd soar to a branch at the top of a tree Then I'd feather my nest, decorate all the rest Of the twigs in my view, paint the trunk to look new Sell the place for a gain, then go do it again In a much better tree with a birdbath and seed With a view of the sea: What it means to be free Whoever coined the phrase “I'm spiritual but not religious” must feel pretty self-satisfied by now. There’s even a recognised acronym: SBNR. It’s on the interet and everything.
Heaps of people tell me they’re spiritual, but they never tell me what they mean by the word. To seek more information seems to be to disrespectfully pull the wings off the butterfly. I'm just supposed to nod serenely, aren't I? Be accepting? Well, bugger the butterfly. I’m curious. What the hell does that person mean when she tells me she’s spiritual? I guess there are a few options. She could be interested in spirits, as in angels and devils and such. This also probably means she wears purple, collects magic rocks and has a stalactital arrangement of wind chimes in her semi-rural home. Or it could be that she is interested in caring for her spirit. This probably means that she does yoga to feel less stressed, eats local and posts Zen proverbs on Facebook. It could also mean she just drinks heaps of spirits. Does “I’m spiritual but not religious” simply translate as “I am uninspired by this superficial world and am hungry for a bit of mystery and transcendence but I don’t trust anybody else to tell me how to do it so I’ll work it out myself based on Googling and whatever makes me feel calmer and more comfortable with the way I do my life”? Seriously?! Is that it?! I think I need to go burn some incense. Or I could just ask you what you mean when you tell me you're spiritual. Sorry for throwing words at you. It's a question I'm often asked. It shouldn't surprise me, given I've created an album filled with Judases, Josephs and Jesuses, but it always strikes me as a weird conversation. What are they actually asking, those post-performance punters?
It seems to me that, more often than not, they are asking if I think like them. Fair enough. Who the hell makes an album about a Bible character anyway? These conversations, at their most extreme, soon sound as if these punters have erected a fence through the pastures of humanity - like most people do - with Us on one side and Them on the other and they are asking if I'm on their side. They are attempting to categorise me as either in or out, here or there, on this or that side of the fence. They are trying to work out how to relate with me. More often than not, if it seems to them that we think similarly, the conversation continues and it is as if I am being welcomed into something. There's no secret handshake or anything, but it starts to sound like only we have the truth and those on the other side of the fence do not. We are in, they are out. We are right, they are wrong. Quaintly enough, these folk are typically adamant about their non- or anti-religiosity. Nevertheless, the conversation always feels to me like one which opens the door to a secret society - or a religion - then slams it shut behind me. Singer-songwriters (why don't we have a proper name for those people?) tend to trace their vocational lineage to Woody Guthrie, who wrote and sang of his own life experiences at a time when nobody else was doing so. The world was a very different place then too with the Dustbowl and The Depression and all. In many ways he gave voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless, just by doing The Sing Thing.
Today not only are singer-songwriters following Woody's self-expressive lead, billions of not-singer-songwriters are voicing their thoughts and feelings as if they were the first to have ever experienced them. Today's world is all atwitter with self-disclosure, confession and photographs of lunch. I, me, mine. This is not to denigrate Woody Guthrie - everything is beautiful in its time - but surely the times are calling for a different kind of song. How long must we go on broadcasting our lunch menu and our diary entries, convinced of our own snowflakey uniqueness? Surely the times call for a rediscovery of the way most people for most of history have lived their lives, indeed how most people live today. Our songs need to help us get there and to give us voice when we arrive. Many of these songs have already been written. |
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