the Lennon/McCartney thing

  I grew up in a home which had never heard of contemporary Christian music artists (because modern music was wrong, too "jazzy," not okay for Christians, an irreverent medium to use to talk about spiritual things). We had heard of The Beatles alright, and admitted they were good, but didn't think it was okay to listen to them either (not Christian, rumours of drugs and the like).

  When I was a troubled teenager, I didn't have any troubled music to make me feel understood and part of the human race, despite the troubleness.  I had my parents' music, which was kind of the Lawrence Welk, Statler Brothers kind of thing.  Didn't suit the 80s one bit. And then I started trying out "worldly" music. Make no mistake, for most Christian kids, the experimenting with modern music went hand in hand with experimenting with smoking and alcohol, sex and drugs. It was widely viewed as a "gateway" activity.  I didn't experiment with the rest, but by the time I'd headed off to university, I'd been messing around, dabbling in modern(ish) music.
  I started in easy, with one toe in.  Any loud guitar, passion, aggression, swearing or talking about partying or having a good time was strictly verboten, and I'd been very successfully trained to turn my nose up at all of that.  So, stuff that was melodic and pretty and sappy, church music style, first.  But with a slightly more "jazzy" beat maybe.  John Denver.  Neil Diamond. Abba.  The Beatles.

  But then bands with a (slightly) more full-throated nod toward the primal scream, with perhaps more expression of stuff that wasn't just pretty, started to grab me.  Predictably, for someone with a church background, I readily grabbed hold of U2, who had an earnest, "Let's Fix The World" thing going on.  Also, The Police.  And oddly, Neil Young and The Northern Pikes.

  The Northern Pikes were a Canadian band known for a novelty hit called "She Ain't Pretty," which is more of a comedy song, but the group had three song-writers and frequently wrote about death and depression and substance abuse, often with kind of a sneer.  There was a real blackness to most of their stuff, behind what sounded at first listen like typical radio pop.

  But it was the late 80s, and I'd not really gotten into any loud guitar.  I mean, I could turn up CCR really loud, but they weren't actually very loud.  Fogerty's yowl is a soft, melodic one.  And I got into very angry, turmoil-filled moods sometimes, and that needed exorcised. 
  Pete, a (nonChristian) friend at University liked metal of all kinds, especially dark stuff, and that was too loud and too angry for me (RATT, Wasp, Mercyful Fate), but he kept playing me the hair ballad songs.  "Don't Fear The Reaper" by Blue Oyster (gasp!) Cult, "Don't Know What You've Got Until It's Gone" by Cinderella.  The Bon Jovi saccharine 80s hair metal ballad stuff.  And I loved it.
  And at a Christian camp around that time, two too wholesome Christian girls with puffy waterfall bangs and jean skirts put on their striped sweaters and went up and sang "Honestly" by a Christian metal band called Stryper. The combination of the wholesome, safe, Christian camp setting, with pouffy-haired girls, the 80s keyboard-heavy saccharine, vocal melody and harmony thing (and those BIG building-into-the-chorus drums and distorted-all-to-crap guitar pick scrapes and ringing power chords) emboldened me to check the band out.  Stryper were effetely noisy, but they weren't "just noise" as my parents thought.  I really grew to like them for a while, especially their biggest hit, "To Hell With The Devil."  Anthemic was a thing.  The writing of songs designed to make an entire stadium sing along with them like they were singing a national anthem.

  And if I ever expressed any liking for any music, in droves Christian people started handing me tapes of contemporary Christian artists.  Pete could listen to the chorus of the hit song from any one of these albums, and tell me EXACTLY who they were ripping off.  And they were ripping it all off.  Look, feel, style, sound.  And the lyrics were all about "us, we, we're all together, and we get along and love each other and it's so wonderful to be us that we need to always remember to never forget."  That high school pep rally stuff that just reminded me that I was really WASN'T one of  "us."
  Then there was the time I went to youth group and the married youth pastor who was having an affair with my married aunt (and we all knew it) showed me a chart which offered Christian substitutes for "worldly" bands.  "You like Pink Floyd?  Here's a Christian band who is trying their darnedest to sound like Pink Floyd, but without any yucky stuff."  I wanted to see what the yucky stuff was.  I wanted something original and real.  Not a copy.  I kept returning to songs that talked about dark stuff, about doubt, about death, about sadness.

And then Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath hit me hard.  My taste for "sweetness" in music started to really take a turn for the tart and tangy instead. I bought Ozzy Osbourne's Randy Rhoads Tribute album for the guitar, bracing myself to hear the satanism I'd been warned against.  It just wasn't there.  If God was mentioned in Ozzy or Sabbath songs, he was in charge, and to be pleased.  If Satan or Lucifer was mentioned, he was to be feared and dreaded.  "How is that satanist?" I wondered, outraged that the entire Christian community would shamelessly lie about Ozzy et al. like that.  It was just window dressing, for the most part.  They didn't warn against atheism.  AC/DC troubled them by Angus Young wearing horns, yet they didn't know to worry about a teenager asking "You know what?  Who DID make who?!"

  

  Someone on the Internet, perhaps because I have longish hair and sing songs and am a Christian (at least as far as Christ is concerned, though some would argue), compared me to dead Christian contemporary artist Larry Norman.  So I checked him out.  First the old Wikipedia.  This told me that Norman had that seemingly universal pall hanging over him.  The one with infidelity, children out of wedlock, financial misdeeds, fake showy crap, feigned health conditions and all the rest of it.  Like any televangelist.  And then I downloaded a recent documentary of the "let's see the bad side, now that the bastard's dead" variety. The Outlaw Larry Norman.  And I watched it this afternoon.

  It mainly featured Randy Stonehill, who is kind of a Christian James Taylor, musically.  Saccharine.  Very talented.  Just doesn't stop pouring the sugar on.  Ever.  There can't be too much in the way of backing strings, keyboard patches and harmony "woo"s.  The subject of the documentary, Larry Norman, was a blonde, blue-eyed, pretty boy frontman, like Robert Plant.  But he was very much a song-writer, and he could play guitar and sing like a trouper.  And his stuff was grating and edgy, quite often, at least for any exploration of Christianity, which is sort of supposed to be all feelgood and never mention things like murder and LSD.  I mean, it often presented the usual Christian "Have a question? Jesus is the answer!  Hoorah!" message, but it seemed to be more in touch with the darker side of life. It could be political.  Did mention sex and drugs, by name, like he knew about them.  Challenging.  Snarky.  Sarcastic. Dark.  Kind of like John Lennon, a contemporary of Norman's.

  And in the beginning, there was Randy Stonehill, working with him, making much sweeter, inoffensive stuff.  Not a pretty boy.  But a nice guy.  Turning out guaranteed, hummable, pretty, affirming crowdpleasers.  So Norman would be making people feel pressured to be better, to find answers, to change, and Stonehill would be celebrating the warmth, the togetherness, the "blessedness" of the Christian experience.

  But nobody shot Larry Norman in the 80s, once he'd reached the pinnacle of his artistic output and recognition.  So we got to see where his life went after that, and if he managed to live a life that showed some understanding of said questions, and offered some answers.

  Larry Norman died a couple of years ago.  And what you see is that the comparatively complacent, sugary Stonehill has had a happier, nicer, more "successful" life.  People like him.  He's not made enemies. He probably hasn't made anyone question much of anything, but he helps out in Africa and stuff.  He's still doing music.  He told the truth about Larry Norman, and he insisted on saying a lot of very nice things and trying to be fair and balanced, even though Norman ripped him off financially from the beginning.

  By contrast, Larry Norman eventually alienated everyone who ever worked with him, slept with Stonehill's wife, lied about being the first person to put out Christian pop music and to steal/parody the "One Way" Christian music symbol, faked health issues, made a career out of fundraising to collect money for said health issues (rather than going to Africa and helping children, where he'd once done photo shoots of himself with orphans, coming on like Jim Morrisson, posing, posing, posing), and lost his ability to create any good material after those initial few decades.

  Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison and John Lennon died before they really had a chance to fully screw their lives up, alienate their fan base and lose all artistic credibility.  And each of those gentlemen had the potential to have possibly done that in a way that would have made even Michael Jackson blush and giggle.
  But what seems to have happened is that Larry Norman's message: Insightful, Difficult Question?  Jesus is the Answer! didn't actually take him too far.  He got that message out there alright.  Others went perhaps further with it.  Maybe yes, Jesus is the answer.  But how much did the answer help Larry Norman?  How much was he able to use it and live a life that worked?  Once he found the answer, then what?

  And Randy Stonehill probably wasn't haunted by the questions, the darkness, the wrongness of human life on earth nearly as much.  Kept busy.  Was nice to people.  Went to Africa.  Thought the best of people.  Looked on the bright side.  And had a nice life.  But could you have taken Larry Norman aside and said "Hey, you need to be a lot more like Randy"?  Not any more than you could have taken John Lennon aside and said "Hey, you need to be a lot more like Paul."

  But we like those broken artists.  We like their hard questions.  We like that they understand that things aren't simple or easy, despite what we're being told.  But what happens when they have more money than they know what to do with, a world filled with women who'd have sex with them, and people clamouring for them to sign something, or sing a song or whatever?  What happens when they are confused to find that:

a) they can't write those inexplicably universally appealing, morbidly unhappy songs anymore.  People don't get them and they don't get people anymore.
b) they are profoundly unhappy still.  In a whole new way.
c) no one thinks they have "the right" to be unhappy.  Because of fame and their "success."  And no one wants them to write any new songs about still not being happy.
d) no one wants them to write songs about being happier either.  Hell, no.

So what happens to them then?

  We like the troubled, broken people.  We prefer their art.  We think the questions they ask so eloquently are ones we want to nod at, and be impressed by.  We like to quote them and delight in the fact that we, by contrast, need their art to point us at these questions, rather than being, as they are, haunted by them, and making art so they aren't alone in being haunted by them.

  I've just used "we" to put myself in kinda the wrong group there.  Fact is, I'm much more of a Lennon than a McCartney, and in many ways, more of a Norman than a Stonehill.  I don't think my life is full of narcissistic fakery, and screwing people over, but the combative, troubled, dark, searching, quarrelsome spikiness rings true.  And I don't know how much we get to choose who we are.