Let’s begin, briefly, with beauty. It is obvious, isn’t it, why this should be our starting point: beauty, in some measure, is why we’re speaking of this to begin with. It may lie in the tune, the harmonies, the rhythm, or the rhymes; even when the message of the song is misguided, something, however tiny, of beauty remains in it! If there isn’t any beauty to speak of, or if there isn’t anything right with the song, there wouldn’t be any pull, any temptation, or any audience, and no one would bother. Take beauty away, and the spell is broken.
Allow me to digress a bit, pushing the point to the extreme, to say something about evil in general. Even if I was the devil himself, the fact that I must make use of beauty to render my music palatable for my human listeners already says a lot: evil cannot and will not succeed without stealing from the good and it can’t ensnare anyone unless it reaches beyond itself. Why else would it disguise itself and why else must it, as it were, whitewash itself? And yet many still maintain the misguided notion that good and evil are equal but opposite powers…
C.S. Lewis put it like this:
"…even to be bad [the evil one] must borrow or steal from his opponent. And do you now begin to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That is not a mere story for children. It is a real recognition of the fact that evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers which enable evil to carry on are powers given it by goodness." 1
Some musicians may well be, for all we know, cursing God, but they’ll at least try to sugarcoat the stench underneath with some good and sweet background music. And if you’re not a demon to be attracted to raw and undisguised evil, you’ll definitely need this little sweetness layered on top to be able to listen. Previously, I spoke precisely in these terms, as I evaluated the song “Imagine” by John Lennon who admitted in an interview that “anti-conventional” messages, if made for public consumption, must be put “across with a little honey”. This is the (unspoken) rule for general acceptance.
Why then, you’d wonder, don’t we look beyond the sugarcoating and inspect the whole thing instead? Are we that shallow? Well, not quite. Apart from the obvious reason that we’re sometimes blind to the evil in these songs, there could be a host of other reasons. The first I can speak about is as stated above: the beauty used to package these songs is real! The message behind the songs could be about a real ache, a real longing, or the song may be asking genuine questions, or else it could help express what you can’t on your own. Certainly, the feelings expressed may be “disordered”, but they still contain a kernel of truth, the same way a child may come crying, his words incoherent and his demands unreasonable; but it doesn’t mean that their pain is not real. Likewise, you cannot say, upon seeing a desperate man trying to drink salty sea water, that their thirst is not genuine. Even distorted messages are able to convey truth, just as a signal, though degraded by noise, can still carry meaningful content.
Leonard Bernstein said this about Beethoven’s music:
Beethoven…turned out pieces of breath-taking rightness. Rightness – that’s the word!… Our boy has the real goods, the stuff from Heaven, the power to make you feel at finish: something is right with the world. There is something that checks throughout, that follows its own law consistently: something we can trust, that will never let us down. 2
There’s deep insight into what Bernstein says here. Having tasted beauty through Beethoven’s music, he treated it all as a signpost to something even greater: “Something is right with the world!” He realized that the universe could not have been pointless or accidental. Whereas the rest of us, perhaps even Beethoven himself, would admire the craft of the music and stop there, Bernstein sees beyond it; he perceives where beauty leads.
This is what we fail to see and it is our main problem: the fact that we often treat beauty as the destination. This is like reading the first page of a novel and claiming to know the story, or like settling for crumbs when a feast is offered. We want to dwell on the “rightness” and the song’s ability to evoke these feelings and longings (however distorted), without seeing – or even wanting to see – towards which direction it is all pointing us. It seems that our issue is not intellectual after all; but visceral. What do I mean?
What I mean is, just because, for instance, sexual desire is legitimate (in the context of committed love), it doesn’t mean that lust – its counterfeit, and a theme not surprisingly prominent in secular music – will satisfy. But, if one dares to look beyond the lust in its distortion and in its toxicity (as acknowledged in so many secular songs), someone might see that there was a “beautiful design” behind the legitimate desire all along. The aforementioned desperate man would probably not listen if you tell him that he ought to surrender the toxic water, turn around and spend more energy in search of clean and pure water. He’d settle for what he can see, thank you very much. Letting go, having a faith greater than the longing, and start on another (difficult) quest, is what most of us are not willing to do, even though it is what we truly need.
Perhaps, we’re unwilling to go on what could be a fool’s errand in search for what is possibly beyond, because we’d rather grab what’s unmistakably in front of our eyes. Faith is what’s lacking. If we had faith, we’d believe. We’d direct our yearning to the realm of abiding pleasures, and refuse the fleeting. Remember Abraham’s longing and how it was never dismissed; in fact God promised him what seemed even more absurd. But, looking toward heaven, he believed in a pay-off that would surpass the number of stars in the sky. And coming back to the theme of love, the Apostle Paul doesn’t vilify it; he says that the love between man and woman is as a “profound mystery”, one referring to, believe it or not, Christ and his bride (Ephesians 5:32). Outlandish though it may sound, if we could only believe and let go of what we’ve known, and see for ourselves that there really is something, or rather a “Someone”, beyond the gift – the Giver of it! “Taste and see!” (Psalm 34:8)
For those who’ve been “enlightened” in the sense of having seen and tasted the only water that can quench our thirst, why would we go back to the poisoned well? Why would anyone forsake the fountain of living waters and hew out broken cisterns that can hold none? (Jeremiah 2:13) Why settle for a counterfeit, knowing the soon coming disappointment? Why sing about the light from a candle when the sun stands shining outside? Why dance for the shadow, when you know the substance? Why praise the beauty of a dying flower, when you stand within reach of a lush and verdant garden? If your eyes once beheld true glory and true beauty, why still feed on what is but a thin veneer concealing corruption? And having arrived at the destination, why still sing about the signpost?
And for those who’ve never seen anything beyond their longings, and indeed who do not agree that there’s more to their burning thirst, I’d only tell you one thing: Have faith! I’d also leave you with this quote I’ve shared many times:
…it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.3
