If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On

Preface: I had no idea how hard it would be to write this post. After several false starts, I re-watched a lecture called “Three Chords and the Desire for Truth: Rock ‘n’ Roll as Search for the Infinite” given by the Irish journalist John Waters, in which he says that the way we feel about music is something we shouldn't talk about. Ah… right. No wonder I’ve read dozens of articles and watched just as many performances on YouTube and I still haven't been able to type a word. I’ve scrawled all over napkins and loose leaf as ideas have come to me; but why am I so reluctant to put these thoughts out there? I suppose because it is so very personal and subjective. I'll just say this: if I achieve nothing in this post except getting you to click the above link and watch Waters talk for an hour and a half, then I will have done a great service to God and the whole world. (It is that good). I’ll be referring to it throughout this post, but you needn’t watch it in order to follow along.

Inscribed on the back of my iPod are the words, “If music be the food of love, play on.” It is a line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and it is exactly how I feel about the effect that music can have on the soul. It’s clear that plenty of chant and symphonies and movie soundtracks (heh) can be the “food of love”; but I submit what every other fan already knows – that rock ‘n’ roll can be, as well.

For me, two bands stand out for all of the times that have set my soul on fire with joy and pain and life: Arcade Fire and Mumford & Sons. I know that some people who are reading this are already annoyed that those two band names are touching in a sentence with nothing but the word “and” keeping one from tainting the other. From what I can tell, they both are a major part of hipster fandom but seem to be fixed on opposite sides of the gamut. I’ve discovered that I’m something of an anomaly for loving both bands at the same time – but I hope it’s not quite like when one of my classmates in a college course on Tolkien and Lewis said that her two favorite series were The Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials. I then suffered a suppressed freak-out, since I knew that Phillip Pullman crafted his stories to convey a message exactly opposite to that of Lewis’s. The difference here, I think, is that both bands do have the same message, even if it is expressed in different ways and irrespective of how conscious it may be in the intentions of the band members. The message is that we desire so much more than what seems available in this life. 

I happened to be watching Saturday Night Live when Arcade Fire made their first appearance to most of America. They performed “Intervention.” My first thought was that the lead singer (Win Butler) looked sort of hungry and sad. Then as the music began to swell, my heart rose with it: “What? What is this?” I thought – just as John Waters describes. It wasn’t the voices that grabbed me, but what was in the voices – under and surrounding them: a longing, an intensity, a rawness of emotion, an exquisite talent. There’s something here. Then, some the lyrics began to surface:

Wow. Rough stuff. Over the last seven years of listening to Arcade Fire very faithfully, I find that there is usually a disconnect between my head and my heart. There's a wrestling within me as I ponder the world of Win Butler and friends, yet I always go back for more of their music. Since I have every episode of Seinfeld on file in my brain, I think the best way to capture this struggle is to recall "The Kramer", in which a painting of Kramer himself elicits this interchange between two onlooking art enthusiasts:

I wouldn’t be quite as hard on this band as this husband is on the painting, but I would echo the wife’s comments exactly. Situated squarely in the midst of the postmodern condition, Arcade Fire is constantly preoccupied with themes of childhood, innocence, wonder, freedom, roots, and dreams, usually lamenting the loss of these precious things. Now, as a mother watching that video clip of “Intervention,” the sight of Win Butler’s anemic-looking face and droopy eyes triggered my maternal impulse. At the end of the song, several of his guitar strings have broken and, out of disappointment, he smashes it on the stage. He looks just like my son when he has made a tower out of blocks but then obliterates it when he sees that it’s not as good as the one in his head or perhaps even in his heart – his interior castle in smooth wooden stones. Looking at Butler’s gaunt face and hearing the bottomless desire in his voice and the voices of the instruments, I find deeper meaning in the phrase “starving artist.” He is starving for Truth; and he is sad because he thinks reality doesn’t meet desire. Christianity offers the belief that reality does meet desire, since reality includes the higher Truth of which Butler seems to have despaired.

This longing for truth through rock ‘n’ roll is the theme of John Water’s splendid talk. Quoting music and culture critic Greil Marcus, Waters describes something called the yarrah, which all great musicians have in their voice. He says it has a bit of a yes in it, but the rest is the arrah, which expresses resignation, frustration, a deep sense of almost inarticulacy. Music is the attempt to surrender to the yarrah or to make it surrender to the artist, to bury it, to dig it out of the ground, a note so unfinished and so unsatisfied. He then adds that, when one considers the experience of a brilliant piece of music, the question might really be, “Is the song singing you?” Arcade Fire delivers this masterfully. Listen to the song “Wake Up” with headphones on and eyes closed. Do you feel the yarrah? Doesn’t it feel like it’s singing you?

Yes, Arcade Fire sings me. Two of the “Neighborhood” tracks (“Tunnels” and “Kettles”) from their first album, Funeral, have become part of my very being after listening to them so much. These people seem to know me – something about me that I don’t even know myself. But am I as dark as these words?! Sometimes I am. In my fallen state of darkened intellect and weakened will, there are occasions when nothing will help me out of a sad spell more than blaring “No Cars Go” into my ears on the elliptical machine. The lyrics meet me where I am, but the music lifts me out of myself. The yarrah is bifurcated between the words and the instruments: the former cries out in despair while the latter reaches up in hope.

I did feel a sense of satisfaction and even relief when John Waters said that the lyrics don't necessarily matter. I have had this intuition ever since my dad played The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” for me in the car when I was a kid, and I watched him bliss out to the words “teenage wasteland” being screamed over and over again. The whole is greater than the sums of its parts. It’s like when poets describe their work by saying they compose a poem, send it out to be read, and then finally discover what it means in the hearts of their readers. Reading a few interviews that Win Butler has given convinced me that sometimes he doesn’t really know what he is singing about. It’s a sensation tied up with memories mixed up with dreams and a few words that happen to rhyme. For example, Arcade Fire’s second album is titled Neon Bible because Win Butler wrote those two words down one day and thought they sounded cool together. Well after he came up with that title, he and his bandmates bought an abandoned church and transformed it into a studio to record that album. As they played their hearts out to the groans of a pipe organ and by the blue light of stained-glass windows, they revealed how very Christ-haunted their music is.

I had the privilege of seeing Kenneth Branagh’s new Macbeth through National Theater Live last month, and was struck by the choice to stage the play in a de-consecrated gothic church. The audience sat in pews, and most of the play’s action took place in the nave, which was filled with mud. I thought of Arcade Fire’s church-turned-recording-studio and realized that the feeling I get from their music is much like the feeling I get from Shakespeare’s tragedies. I'm dazzled by poetry at the same time that I’m wrenched by suffering. The texture of the songs is so rich and colorful that it reminds me of illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. Describing their desires in words and sounds, they hint at a sacramental world view that awakens us to the sacred, accessible right here in the midst of us. I only wish that I could tell them that all of that agony they feel – the loss, the betrayal, the hopelessness – all of it can be sanctified in the sacrifice of the Lamb; and every beautiful thing they’ve glimpsed in dreams (and have dismissed as merely that) is in truth far more real than their art will ever be able to express.

I believe the major thing holding them back from explicitly professing a belief in Truth and trusting that it is found in God is that they seem to be weighed down by a grudge. They are clinging to resentment for past wrongs committed by their loved ones, particularly their parents. In the song “Windowsills” Butler seethes, “You can’t forgive what you can’t forget.” But that’s exactly what God does – he is all-knowing and all-merciful. He sees all of our sins and weaknesses and loves us all the more for admitting them and striving against them. If we’ll only ask him for the grace to do so, we can forgive those who trespass against us. This is easy to forget, even for the well-catechized. Here is where I find music especially effective: when it contains the yarrah, it has the power to move us out of ourselves by connecting us to the communal struggle. Just knowing that others feel what we feel binds us together in friendship and can teach us to turn outward in compassion. It then becomes the food of love, the place where God makes his dwelling place in our hearts.

Play on, Arcade Fire – may your music bring you and your fans closer to God evermore.