Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Make your own Messiah: Exorcising the sex abuse scandal

Watch the video, speakers as blaring as you can get them,


The heart of the song is an appeal,

Say it. Say it. Say you'll be my messiah. It's drilled into out heads, and it feels good there. This song, like all of Prides'  songs so far combine all the synth-catchiness of Chromeo or FrankMusik with the type of stadium filling anthemic chants that no doubt has their big label backers reading good things in the tea leaves. The sound is right in the zeitgeist pocket with equal parts slick production and indie cred that I can't help but think of the career arc of Foster the People.

But what has me intrigued is the pairing of the song with its provocative video. The song itself is a plea, and like all pop music the easiest interpretation is a romantic one. The singer lays his hopes open for the audience. His desire to feel, to throw himself into his life is clearly missing something and the chorus gives us the answer. The messiah he wants is not supposed to save him, but deliver him to the future he wants. So the singer and the messiah leave the old life behind without even locking the door. They have a new life in a new place where he is the life of the party and they can build a life together.

That makes for a tight little love song. One where a boy full of potential needs a muse. He promises to drop everything because with her he can give her more, be more, than they could ever have on their own.

The video makes little sense in this context, and that is fairly par for the course for music videos today. There is a "concept"  which is supposed to memorable  because of its  humorous novelty and/or crass sexuality and/or aesthetic transgression (that's it, everyone go become music video directors now). If that was that was happening here the concept is an aesthetic bait and switch. "Oh wow, look at those cool hipster pries.....Oh my God they're murderers?!?...fin"

But if we read the video as media res then things get interesting.

First off, I love these guys. I want to play air-synth while groin thrusting in a convertible on the Isle of Skye and take adult catechism class just to hang out with them. And that surely is the point. We think "If priests were this cool I would be lining up to pop hosts every week!"

But the quick flashes work perfectly to make us know there is something under the surface while alsp perfectly not revealing what it is. The ominous  baseball bat seemingly is made friendly by the sad attempt of a European person to wield anything unrelated to cricket. But the feeling creeps. The pissing in the river just doesn't seem right, and they smoke too much.

Then the body comes out and I felt like I had been punched in the gut with a rusty knife. I had loved these men, loved their uncouth joie de vivre. And they were murderers. It was when the radio came out and was placed on the bag that the final connection is made though. The song is the story of the body.

This is what it looks like to put the hope of deliverance in the priests, in the church. By now the song has devolved into a chant, there is no hope or plan for a life built or of mutual provision. Just the plea to be my Messiah, but look what they deliver you unto. This is why the word choice is so important, why it is not just a romantic muse that the singer wants but something deeper with more overt religious feeling, a messiah. He was seduced by everything the priests offered, aren't they exactly the type of guys that would make you say "Hey he's coming too!" And with the reveal at the end all the positive feelings generated at the beginning are not just erased, they are inverted and magnified. How cruel, how evil they must be to be that happy, that flippant on their way to toss a corpse in a river with a Bible and a rosary sitting in front of them.

Macklemore's "Same Love" was credited with making a more persuasive artistic statement in favour of same-sex marriage than volumes of rights-based polemic. As an artistic outworking of the hope placed in and then betrayed by the Church I think this video makes the same type of statement. While none of the imagery involves children the very nature of a pop song makes us think first and foremost of the romantic reading. (Not that sexual exploitation is romantic, but as a perversion of the erotic it can be identified by its opposite) In the end there is no hope, no moral, only the sick feeling of wondering how we could ever have liked these characters, ever have seen any good in them.

The task of any Christian artistic response is not to say anything more about that sick feeling, but instead to show where the true hope for a Messiah is.



TL;DR Our idols, our false messiahs, will kill us. Even though we love them. Especially if we love them.