Harry Potter and the Personal Confession
The song "Guerrilla Radio" by Rage Against the Machine ends with Zack de la Rocha's ever-angry whisper:
It has to start somewhere.
It has to start sometime.
What better place than here?
What better time than now?
He then proceeds to shout All Hell can't stop us now. six times before the song ends.
Whenever I hear this song, I always find myself fighting the urge to punch my fist into the air and/or kick something. It's an absolutely wonderful, angry, rebellious song, and it gets me every time. It has 5-stars in my iTunes library.
As for the content of the song, I know very little of Rage's intended meaning. My best guess is that the song is one of anger and rebellion towards some exploitative authority, with the last 30 seconds comprising the call to battle. Huh. Go figure. A band with the name "Rage Against the Machine" is angry with corrupt authority figures. How insightful of me. Thanks Captain Obvious.
Anyway, the song always brings up two interesting thoughts (to me, at least):
(1) Wouldn't the battle cry "All Hell can't stop us now" dovetail nicely into a Christian context? (C.f., Mt. 16:18, most of Revelation, etc.)
(2) Why do I have such an affinity for angry rock music?
As for (1), I don't know how I feel about this. We're back to the notion of borrowing artistic expression authored and intended for one purpose, and using it for another. And Rage Against the Machine? These guys drop enough F-bombs to make Quentin Tarantino blush. Is this a good source from which to borrow art? If not, why? Should the character or intent of the originator(s) matter? Has it mattered in the past to our Christian founders?
As for (2), I can say that I have a soft-spot for angry music. Maybe that's just because I'm a Gen-X-er. I'll leave it at that rather than psychologize myself on the web, revealing to everybody that I have unresolved anger issues because my dog ate my favorite teddy bear when I was three. That aside, I will say that my experience, from very early on, with popular music, especially rock, has been on the rebellious, angry, side of the scale. From a young age until roughly nine years ago, rock music, on average, was redolent of aggression, anger, rebelliousness, and irreverence. Now, had my exposure been different, perhaps it'd be much easier for me to swallow contemporary worship music.
I think that's one of the reasons why I'm always blogging about this stuff. Something just doesn't seem right to me. In my experience, rock/pop is a style of music that has close ties with themes that don't jive all that well with worshipping God. Had I been raised Christian, where my first exposure to a rock song was "King of Majesty" instead of "Cum on Feel the Noize," perhaps I'd be less critical of contemporary Christian music. Perhaps...but let's not get crazy.
It has to start somewhere.
It has to start sometime.
What better place than here?
What better time than now?
He then proceeds to shout All Hell can't stop us now. six times before the song ends.
Whenever I hear this song, I always find myself fighting the urge to punch my fist into the air and/or kick something. It's an absolutely wonderful, angry, rebellious song, and it gets me every time. It has 5-stars in my iTunes library.
As for the content of the song, I know very little of Rage's intended meaning. My best guess is that the song is one of anger and rebellion towards some exploitative authority, with the last 30 seconds comprising the call to battle. Huh. Go figure. A band with the name "Rage Against the Machine" is angry with corrupt authority figures. How insightful of me. Thanks Captain Obvious.
Anyway, the song always brings up two interesting thoughts (to me, at least):
(1) Wouldn't the battle cry "All Hell can't stop us now" dovetail nicely into a Christian context? (C.f., Mt. 16:18, most of Revelation, etc.)
(2) Why do I have such an affinity for angry rock music?
As for (1), I don't know how I feel about this. We're back to the notion of borrowing artistic expression authored and intended for one purpose, and using it for another. And Rage Against the Machine? These guys drop enough F-bombs to make Quentin Tarantino blush. Is this a good source from which to borrow art? If not, why? Should the character or intent of the originator(s) matter? Has it mattered in the past to our Christian founders?
As for (2), I can say that I have a soft-spot for angry music. Maybe that's just because I'm a Gen-X-er. I'll leave it at that rather than psychologize myself on the web, revealing to everybody that I have unresolved anger issues because my dog ate my favorite teddy bear when I was three. That aside, I will say that my experience, from very early on, with popular music, especially rock, has been on the rebellious, angry, side of the scale. From a young age until roughly nine years ago, rock music, on average, was redolent of aggression, anger, rebelliousness, and irreverence. Now, had my exposure been different, perhaps it'd be much easier for me to swallow contemporary worship music.
I think that's one of the reasons why I'm always blogging about this stuff. Something just doesn't seem right to me. In my experience, rock/pop is a style of music that has close ties with themes that don't jive all that well with worshipping God. Had I been raised Christian, where my first exposure to a rock song was "King of Majesty" instead of "Cum on Feel the Noize," perhaps I'd be less critical of contemporary Christian music. Perhaps...but let's not get crazy.
posted by bmarchio at 2:52 PM
1 Comments:
To your final point, here's a quote from Jesus Made in America by Stephen Nichols p141-142).
"When adolescents hear Christian songs treat love the same way as the secular songs do, they will more than likely transfer the romantic notions they have of love, derived from the conditioning of those secular songs, to their love of Christ."
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