God, According to Emo
Hear my prayer, O LORD! And let my cry for help come to You. Do not hide Your face from me in the day of my distress; Incline Your ear to me; In the day when I call answer me quickly.
There used to be a punk clique at my church. Oh how I miss them. Although I have been “vurching” (props to Gavin Knox for the term) for a minute thanks to the jerk they call COVID, I still miss the men and women in black; the black skinny jeans, the black leather jackets, the black Misfits emblem on their clothes. Next to the standard preppy hipster fare of an average congregant, it was nice to sport a 2Pac or Biggie t-shirt next to a guy with a Iron Maiden t-shirt. Cut from a different genre but still from the same cloth.
I love grungey people. Yes, that could mean grunge in the way many know; a la Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, etc. But by grungey I mean a little snarky. A little non-conformist. A little feisty which causes wealthy & conservative church donors to be nervous or mad or causes them to leave the building because they are too “tattooed.”
The one thing the Christian faith isn’t is safe. If you’re feeling comfortable in your “walk,” you’re either walking too slow or (probably) too fast.
During this COVID craziness, I’ve experienced a gamut of internal epiphanies, strife, joys, and all things in between. The place I could turn to (which I don’t do enough and which you can totally guilt me for) is the Psalms.
David and Co are a bunch of cry babies. Always, they are griping and complaining and moaning and wailing. Even if their cause to do so is legitimate, even if they are on the verge of civil war, even if they’ve been running from getting murdered or betrayed or assaulted, bare minimum, they air grievances pretty dang well. Undramatic is a thing they are not.
Shakespeare has got nothing on King David:
“How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?”
Job, too, probably shopped at Hot Topic as a teenager:
“May the day of my birth perish,
and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived!’
That day—may it turn to darkness;
may God above not care about it;
may no light shine on it.
May gloom and utter darkness claim it once more;
may a cloud settle over it;
may blackness overwhelm it.
Geez, Job just get over it my guy. Man up, pull yourself by your bootstraps, and get back in there. Stop taking things so personally.
Oh wait… here’s Jesus after listening to too much My Chemical Romance:
“When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake. Then a teacher of the law came to him and said, ‘Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.’
Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’”
What’s with these guys? Didn’t they get the memo? Suppress, my guys, suppress and bury and compartmentalize and just pray about it. God’s with you, and He’s all about that tough love, pushing you forward to lead with strength and not with weakness. Don’t be a… you know.
Oh wait. Dammit Paul.
But (Jesus) said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
(I didn’t even mention Elijah’s manic episode. Here’s a good phone number for him though, 1-800-273-8255)
I’m being fiercely facetious, tearing down a role, a caricature, a manliness I’m honestly fed up with trying to A) measure up to or B) fight against so damn hard.
To me it seems, however, that Christian art, or, at least, music, is written by 2s and 7s or extremely integrated 4s on the Enneagram. If I need hype up worship music, I got my playlist entitled Holy Jams. Equal parts U2 inspired; U2 esque Hillsong, U2 esque Bethel, U2… U2, British worship songs they play at my church that are, you guessed it, U2 esque.
Now I’m not getting down on this music. I need these tunes. I need to be reminded of the goodness of God, the love of God, the power and transformation and rich understanding of His all-consuming grace.
But sometimes I’m just pissed. Sometimes I’m just melancholy. Sometimes I’m just sad, and I can’t always figure out why, and sometimes even when I figure out why I pray and I worship and I call brothers or sisters and I walk away still in the “blue zone,” as I would tell my little guys.
Yet the world, the pre Corona culture, just needed people to hurry up and get past this stuff. Yeah, vulnerability is viral and cool and all, but we need to get back to the “green zone” of being ok and/or happy so that we can hustle again. Get to that grad school, get those profit margins, get that ideal relationship, update that gram to get your life’s highlight reel to that amount of followers.
But we have all stopped now. The world continues to spin around the sun but now we’ve all stopped spinning our plates around our finger (or we are spinning different plates we never used to before on a different finger). Protecting the physically vulnerable has made us emotionally vulnerable.
That viral article is calling what we are all going through “grief.” It’s being felt by all of us, but the way it’s felt is so vast and complicated and varied between us. Hence why, as another viral meme so aptly said, we are all turning to the artists to make sense of these big things surging inside of us we call feelings.
Artists are reporters recording the truth instead of the news. Some news agencies and outlets are big on labeling other networks or stories as fake news, but calling things fake news is just a predatory manner of exploiting feelings of frightened people. It’s petty, cowardly, and foolishly narrow-minded. It’s definitely a dramatic performance, but it adds nothing but pain and polarization to an already painful and polarizing world so it gets a huge thumbs down from this Roger Ebert.
Singers though, writers, painters, photographers, fill in the blank creative outlet I’ve omitted but salute all the same, aren’t interested in repeating an agenda of some power that be. This will bring pushback I know, but the good ones, the honest ones, the real ones, report back their experiences as they are felt exactly as they are felt. Whether or not they are understood or grasped well, the anguish they plummet, the ecstasy they ascend, the empty and blankness they peer at both with and without fear… this is the truth of human experience. There’s no need to make an agenda on a feeling if the feeling is true.
And it’s why when I need to lament, I need to moan and wallow and use colorful language to God because I’m mad as Hell or have laid my bed in Sheol, I can’t turn to worship even though those songs are targeted to God.
I listen to emo.
Sufjan Stevens is probably my favorite emo artist. The Cure is not too far behind him. Brand New fits in there too, but the lead singer is a creep so that sucks.
Only one of these three is “officially” emo, however. The purists out there are livid, perhaps, that I’d lump Sufjan and The Cure, critically proven “good” artists, into a heavily marketed and monetized genre of music that is targeted for sad and mopey kids like yours truly, and the millions of other former (or present) Hot Topic affectionatos.
When I say emo, I mean an artist who expresses the gamut I was describing before. They are the ones who play a song or take a photo or write a blog or direct a movie because they have to. They have no clue whether it will stick with an audience, they might even have a good hook or a good scene of dialogue or a decent writing voice, but it’s coming through them and so they aren’t sure if it can make any money for them or, more importantly, if it will connect meaningfully to an audience. It communicates something universal but in a distinct way that might not reflect the experience of others, or it might reflect exactly the experience of others that they didn’t know how to express themselves until the artist gave voice to it.
And they can go all the way down in the same way that they can go all the way up. It’s not just the sadness they describe so richly and powerfully; they provide tears of joy as much as anguish.
Even hip-hop can fit into this in some ways. And I have an entire blog all about that.
The reason, too, that I come back to these whiney odes to what it means to be human is that these whiney odds resonate powerfully. Sometimes, in the very act of striving too much to be too unique, too distinct, too special, some more obscure, maybe even more “talented” artists, don’t click with me. It’s almost as if in a genuine effort to stand out amongst the crowd I feel as if they stopped being genuine in favor of standing out.
Said differently, I hunger for what’s real. Thoreau was right; rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I almost think I need to add, too, rather than distinction, rather than acclaim, rather than followers, give me the way. Give me the genuine life.
I thought for so long that I couldn’t be an appropriate Christian because I wasn’t joyful enough or joyful most of the time. It’s not even that I’m always melancholy or down either; it’s more that when I’m feeling low sometimes I can’t be pulled up high by a powerful sermon or a great verse or an encouraging word from a brother or sister. The “get feeling good” formula of cultural Christianity just didn’t take, and I thought that was because of some moral deficiency or some lack in essential makeup.
But in these silly emo songs, both from good artists and bad artists alike, I hear a resounding “me too.” I am in high school again even though I graduated all those years ago. I understand how the same challenges I felt as a little guy will be the same challenges I feel as a big guy.
And I grasp that it’s all ok. I can be a victorious Christian in the morning and a drunken sinner in the evening. I can so powerfully hear the voice of the Beloved one day and so distinctly hear the voice of the enemy the next.
It is not an issue of moral integrity or better mastery. It is not that I don’t take God seriously or that other people are further ahead. After all, the first will be last and the last first. The least are the greatest. And so on.
Emo isn’t limited to music either. Let’s look at other media. I’ve mentioned it before but Donnie Darko is an emo movie. Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, all Nolan movies in fact. Us. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Books? Little Women and Pride & Prejudice (which I’ve never read… just watched the movie of. Whoops). The Opposite of Loneliness. Fahrenheit 451. Shows? Atlanta. Firefly. Heck, even sitcoms like Community.
I suppose I want to strip this label of it’s unfair ascribing. Yesterday I talked with good friends all about labels. Specifically around gender.
This is why I started this piece so snarky. I’m not sure whether it’s the culture at large or the mean voice in my head called Chad, but one of the two starts their assault by whispering plots to the other one and then they come back with all sorts of allegations that I’m not manly enough on two fronts and then I’m stuck fighting a war between two enemies. And I’m sure it happens to women too. In fact, I know it does.
You’re not girly enough. Not pretty enough. Not soft enough. Not “whatever” enough. One word with all sorts of weight and context and cultural bias and unfair assumptions. Whether it’s pretty or tough or smart or funny, maybe even “good,” these words haunt us while the world watches completely misunderstanding the plight of what it means to be us.
But in emo music, emo films, emo books, emo shows, these labels are killed in the alleyway. That other guy has tasted unrequited love. That other lady has been emotionally abused. That group of people has been suppressed and enslaved and beaten down and discarded. I might not understand the experience, but I understand that the experience was felt and that it was real.
I believe people when they tell their stories. I don’t care about the facts, I don’t care about the details, I don’t care about the implications. I care about how it affected them, wounded or blessed their soul, and how it continues to hound them or encourage them.
I don’t look to fix or to dismiss or to have them rush past what has happened to them. People aren’t machines who with a tweak here or a bolt there can be functional and therefore valuable. Even dysfunctional people keep breathing, keep living, keep loving, keep hurting.
And true art, entirely emo with all abandon and full sincerity, connects so powerfully and more than “facts” ever could. This is why Jesus told stories more than preached sermons. It’s not that he didn’t teach with bullet points but he understood that not everyone could be reached through a checklist. Most couldn’t, in fact. And most can’t now.
They were hurting with sores on their bodies or on their hearts, poor in money or poor in spirit, unable to walk on the sidewalk or to walk with God. They didn’t have time to communicate that they so desperately needed a God who understood, and so He understood that to give them understanding He would tell stories that they could listen to and think about without giving them yet another list of dos and don’ts.
Good artists “get it.” They know that sometimes, words just can’t do justice to what’s going on underneath. In fact, I think people’s voices, whether speaking or singing or writing or in whatever capacity, always communicates more about who they are than their actual words.
In the classroom, teachers coach their kids to read with fluency. To not read like a robot or a machine. To speak with gumption and with chutzpah. Carpe freaking diem!
Why can’t we live life like that? Why can’t we be glad with gumption and be sad with chutzpah? Why do we mute the volume on the sad or heavy parts of life and turn the volume on too loud for the good stuff?
Maybe this is why so many can’t hear the cry of the poor of the world. Turning up the knob about all the supposedly good circumstances in their life or that they wish they had, the voices of the oppressed and marginalized are drowned because they distract from the pursuit of happiness.
As for me and my life, my pursuit of happiness is to pursue happiness but not at the cost of all other emotions. Like I tell the little ones, there’s four emotional zones; red, yellow, green and blue. I can’t be green all the time and neither can they. We can be ok and happy a lot, but sometimes we are angry and red or we get giggly and silly and turn yellow. And my struggle, not even a struggle actually, just a fact, is I am well accustomed to the blue zone.
It’s not that scary to admit that I get sad sometimes. Why do I even have to write that? Colors are only marvelous when displayed in front of others, otherwise we wouldn’t even see them as a color. Why then are we so obsessed with green and yellow? Why can men be red but not blue and why can women be blue but not red?
I’m emo as Hell and so are you. Because we are human. God made us emotional beings. And it’s beautiful. Even when it’s haunting, and down, and low, and emo. Even, too, when it’s thrilling, and exhilarating, and sensational, and existentially euphoric. Even and especially when it’s both.
Thomas Merton said it best:
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.