perfidy

Last week I wrote briefly about the importance of epiphany to music lovers. Careful readers of this weblog will know already that I'm a principled agnostic; principled in that I've given it a lot of thought, contemplated deeply both my navel and the nature of existence, and come to the conclusion that this whole God thing isn't my bag, though if at some future date something happens that undermines my deep skepticism (e.g. rapture, Cleveland Indians winning the World Series on the strength of their pitching) I am perfectly willing to reconsider my stance.

Even so, I do spend a fair amount of time thinking about religion and how people use the faith that they have. For a number of reasons both personal and intellectual, religion is a favorite object of my contemplation. It's also bit of a habit. Even though I'm not a particulary godly dude, thanks to vestiges of my upbringing I still go in for some aspects of Inner Light Protestantism and its reliance on ecstasy, abandon, and the ability of a person to be moved. After all, I'm from Ohio, where all that stuff was started. A good Southern Baptist sermon complete with choir and congregational participation gets me all worked up. Gospel music (viz. The Staples Singers, not that whitebread pop shit that passes these days) rings my bell but good. The ecstatic aspect of religion exercises a profound draw on me. The god part... not so much. But the transcendence of self? Yeah.

So, being not the godly type, I seek out ecstasy elsewhere - especially through music. It's only natural; I'm a music geek and spend the portion of my time not devoted to thinking about food, sex, politics, or the nature of other people's devotion on mental kabbalah like putting together the all-time greatest backing band ever (which would include John Lord of Deep Purple on the keyboards and Clyde Stubblefield of the JBs on drums, incidentally).

It occurred to me the other day that I have a fairly extensive collection of amateur-sounding rock and blues music that I like precisely because of the abandon involved in its creation. Somehow records that come across as incompetent and/or unhinged can appear under the right circumstances to be more right, more truthful than any display of great skill. On one level this sentiment is a shiney'd up version of the inadvertently horrible things that well-meaning liberals used to say about race records in the '50s ('Honeyboy Edwards is so good because he's so real! No intellect in the way of his emotions at all!'). And while the central thesis of such bigotry falls down as soon as you abandon race-based notions of intellectual capacity, in a larger sense there's something there.

Central to (nearly) any religious experience is the act of surrender; the faithful are asked to surrender their will, their ego, their trust, to a higher power who is in charge of making things work out okay in the long run. The same goes for music, if you're willing to seek it out. Some music lovers love to lose themselves in, say, a particularly excellent reading of Scriabin or Mozart. Some can check out entirely for the entire duration of an Anita O'Day album or a Coltrane solo. Through their dogged simplicity, the Ramones aimed to make pop music that was pure and true, and that was, broadly speaking, the defining mission of punk. On a different note, it's no longer even worth arguing over whether there's an ecstatic/devotional aspect to rock concerts (or whether they are more like Nuremberg rallies or church services) - what do you think all that screaming was about at Beatles concerts?

I personally can lose myself all kinds of ways, whether it be Beethoven, Mingus, the Cramps, or a Flaming Lips show, and indeed ecstatic transport through music is the closest I come to worship of any kind. I often prefer to take a shortcut and make the path to ecstacy easier by cheating. Some of my favorite music is downright dumbass dumb, and through being dumb achieves both greatness and enormous potential for ecstatic transport.

In fact the very song that sparked this entire meandering rant was a very dumb song indeed. It was The Contours' early '60s hit, "Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance)?" On the surface, that's a decided long shot for being a source of anything serious. First of all, it's a Motown recording. Even though it's early Motown, made before Berry Gordy had quite decided that smoothness was his guiding principle, the song still bears the mark of the Guiding Hand of Gordy. Second, it's a song about some dumb fad dances; the mashed potato, the twist, etc. Third, it's definitely a minor achievement when compared to apexes of Motown's art such as "Tracks of My Tears," "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?" and "Mercy, Mercy Me." Fourth, it's just plain dumb.

But wait. What's really going on here? Why does this song inspire in me near-religous feelings of ecstatic release every time I hear it? I swear, it's precisely in being so stupid that it achieves greatness.

Listen. Some nerdy guy in too-short pants and a bad haircut is panting after a stylish girl who will never appreciate him regardless of what he does. She breaks his geeky heart right there in public. Uncowed, he goes off and learns some of the new hot dances of the day in hopes of winning her heart. At the next school dance, he corners her and begins showing her what he can do. "Watch me now!" he commands! He shakes it up! He shakes it down! He does the mashed potato! He does the twist! The whole time his face is frozen in a rictus-grin as his newly pomaded hairdo shakes out and out and falls in his face, as he sweats and sweats and sweats, as his hair sticks to his forehead and dark saddlebags form under his arms, as his freshly ironed white shirt comes untucked from his best wool slacks, as his new shoes leave black streaks all over the gymnasium floor. Ooh! He's hot! He's in the moment! Oww! He's slick! He's hep! He's in love with his own moves! Yeah! Yeah! And the whole time, he asks the girl over and over and over again, "Do you love me? Do you LOVE ME? DO YOU LIKE IT LIKE THIS?!? DO YOU LOVE MAH?!?!?"

Like Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles trying desperately to wow Molly Ringwald, yet shot through with some of the uncomfortably-awful-yet-strangely-excellent aura of the dance scene from Napoleon Dynamite, this kid - whoever he is - is trying far too hard at something he's probably pretty good at. But no matter what, this kid has definitely let go. He has transcended fear. He has transcended ego. He has transcended that which ties him to his sense of self and has dissolved himself in the purity of the moment, taking a leap of faith into the unknown for the sake of young sweaty love. Yea verily, our young hero possesses a singularity of motive and will to surrender that your most hardened jihadi would witness and envy.

On so many levels - the incongruity of the premise and the performance, the infectiously danceable beat, the enthusiastically off-key backup vocals, the various shouts, hiccups, and squeals that erupt as the singer begs to be noticed, "Do You Love Me" is as close as a song about the mashed potato could possibly come to speaking in tongues. I can identify completely with this scenario. As I recently documented at painful length, I grew up a dork, and the utter dorkiness of this song speaks straight to my soul. This, combined with the uplifting parable of our hero's Quixotic quest, push "Do You Love Me" into territory heretofore unexplored by Jesuit and Sufi alike. So, even though "Do You Love Me?" is in fact a dumb song about some dumb dances, it truly and honestly ends up feeling like touching the face of whatever god hears the prayers of the terminally unhip.