It was such a privilege, and such a blessing, to have been a little boy, back when Truman and then Ike were at the helm. It was in many ways a simpler time -- in some ways a more dangerous and even a crazier time, but in ways imperceptible to little boys.
Later on, in America, things got a lot more obviously wild and interesting, and even deeper: but the Devil’s market-share had so radically expanded, that to have been a child then, was no blessing at all. As so many of our own drug-ravaged children, have learned to their cost.
Those of you who have sampled my earlier rants, may perhaps have noticed, that the subject of marriage seems to be something of a hot button with me; and that my own conception of this ancient institution, seems to have drifted in, frozen in the middle of a crytal of ice, unmelted and unmelting, into the whorehouse harbor of our divorce-ridden, unwed-mother-enabling, transgendered/transvaluation-of-all-values excuse for a wreck of a culture, -- -- unchanged and unchangeable from some earlier time.
Well, fact is, one factor in that: I grew up listening to -- not to much music, we didn’t have much exposure or much choice, in our unmusical home -- but my Dad (God rest his soul in Abraham) had made some pretty good choices in the small stack of 78’s that was his contribution to the household; and here is one of them. I would not care to argue against anyone who, not having been raised upon this particular song from infancy, finds it impossibly corny. Doubtless it is. I mean merely that, when such songs as this, or as “Little White Duck”, or “Bim Bom Bay”, or “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine”, fill the nursery, the child is nourished, with a milk that is more than mortal.
http://www.123video.nl/playvideos.asp?MovieID=213457
(Burl Ives, “Lavender Blue”)
Now, I’m not saying that it’s all just culturally relative, either. It may well be the case, that the Sacramental Conception of Marriage is as much a fact of the world visible and invisible, as the unseeable atoms, together with their shy little children the quarks, are facts of physics. All I’m saying is, that songs such as that cast flowers upon the footpath that leads upwards and on to that most holy bower; and that Gangsta Rap and “My Ding-a-Ling” do not.
Postscriptum
[I had polled some young friends before that letter was originally sent, asking for examples of songs from their own youth, that were beyond redemption.]
Thanks to all who replied to a request for song titles to complete that dainty little metaphor at the end. It cannot have been pleasant for you good people, to go back and recall some of the things to which our culture subjected you in your youth.
You will notice, though, that I wound up not actually citing any of the song titles that anyone sent. This, despite my desire, as a finicky stylist, to balance the phrase “songs such as that” with “songs such as [insert two titles here]”: the result is both metrically halting, and rhetorically vague (that lame cop-out wave towards an entire genre, to which I may thus be doing a partial injustice, and certainly infringing against T.S.Eliot’s requirement of an “objective correlative”). And this, for a reason worth musing upon.
For (apart from certain examples of actual hardcore Gangsta Rap): when I dutifully listened to the various titles that you-all sent in… I was not remotely as repulsed as I expected to be, neither melodically nor lyrically. To be sure, these songs manifest a rather… what shall we call it… “unbaptised” appreciation of the charms of venery… : but charms these are indeed, and to embrace that joyful fact is the beginning of wisdom, just as paganism prepared the way for the great Abrahamic faiths: for they do offer a sort of homage to Aphrodite, if not yet to the Theotokos. And as such -- they may very well live to be redeemed. Indeed, I firmly believe that they shall be.
Either I am more corrupted than I realized, or most of you have been singularly blessed or sheltered in your upbringing, if those were the worst you ever heard! Nothing you sent was as vile as some of the productions of the Rolling Stones, that I used to listen to back in college: “Midnight Rambler” -- a melodic and a vocal and a moral monstrosity; or, even worse in a way, “Backstreet Girl” . Worse because, on the one hand, it is almost an abstract intellectual exercise, an experimental attempt to answer the question, “What is the absolute maximum of misogyny that can possibly be packed into a minimum of strophes?” -- I mean, maybe some record company held a contest or something, and this was the winning entry --; while on the other hand, it is -- to my ears at any rate, and I have had a lifetime to listen to it and to come to feel in any way different -- simply the loveliest tune that this group ever did.
The evidence is here:
It is difficult to know what to say in such a case; but to me (and now as I write, the spirit is seeing a truth, that it saw not so clearly hitherto, and which will quickly turn this entire essay on its head) -- the spirit of the music, which utterly contradicts the overt message of the lyrics, is irrefutable. (Pause, to let this bizarre new thought sink in -- to you, and to me as well.) It is … manifestly… bursting with the love that is God’s gift to us, of man for woman and of woman for man, joined forever in faith. And as such, it must ultimately prove more powerful than the jejune sneering of the lyrics (which, indeed, may have been intended rather as satirical of Mayfair decadence, as many of their other songs more obviously are): for neither satire, nor empty intellectual exercise, has any staying power or any bite.
And as a sort of proof of this perhaps surprising thesis, consider this, a cover of that same doubtful song, by the wonderful Bobby Darin -- whose earthly notes, towards the end of his short life, began lifting towards something sublime:
It is rather as though you, the detective, had shadowed a shady-looking suspect down the streets and alleys of the bad part of town, until he ducked into a low doorway; you waited for a moment, then burst in, gun out, badge raised… only to discover him at prayer with Father Brown. (Both look up in mild surprise. And of course, Father Brown takes as his parish, that part of town most desperate to be redeemed.)
And for those of you who, perhaps unfamiliar with any but the early, trivial pop hits of this great artist, doubt that “being covered by Bobby Darin” be any very weighty evidence, may it please the court to consider this:
(his cover of Tim Hardin’s lovely “If I Were a Carpenter”).
I rest my case.
*
In short: I have managed to argue myself round to a place where, in a sense, I oppose and denounce and indignantly refute my initial propositions!
“Withdraw them, suh!” -- “I do; and am overjoyed to do so!”
For our world is not so black as all that. Each new generation must face its own unique trials: but the fundamental goodness in the hearts of those who are made in God’s image, ever and again manages to send the devilkins with their petty ruses packing, and fading, like the mists above the cornfields, in the gathering warmth of dawn.
Gratias agimus tibi, Domine. And the blessings of Saint Cecilia (herself thrice-blessed), upon all who sing, or chime, or strum!
[Update 19 Aug 2012]
At the site for that song
a listener comments -- reasonably enough:
it's well arranged, his voice is too soft._ i prefer the stones' version.
And indeed, if, as a young person, you knew not the history, but simply happened upon this version, and the Stones version, as though they were simply two different takes on the thing, then of course you would prefer the version performed by those who wrote the song in the first place, and which is among the finest in their long oeuvre. In this (limited) perspective, the Darin cover could easily appear insipid. And indeed it is nothing like as punchy, as savorsome, as memorable, as original, as -- anything, as what is fluttered out -- like bait -- from Jagger’s sinister lip-curled croon. Nay more: Without the Jagger original, Darin’s cover would be quite beside the point.
To appreciate its nevertheless considerable value, you have to approach the thing historically.
Morally, theologically, the Stones song is so vile, that all by itself it embodied the Fall of Man. The challenge to which Darin tries to rise is this: Can the grace and purity striven for over a lifetime of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, ever manage to heal a wounded world? He who sang mostly raffish songs like “Jack the Knife”, here divests himself of all that made him famous, and becomes as a choir-boy, simply singing the purest notes he knows.
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