33 rebellions per minute
"Heaven will be near me when I think of you"
1998
Michelle Tumes, LISTEN
I own an album called THE ULTRA-VIOLENCE, by a thrash-metal band called Death Angel. Its lyrics, gargled vehemently at horrific BPM counts, are about mass murder, dismemberment, torching of bodies, and other such pleasures. It's not my favorite album in the world, or even one I play more than once a year, but I've never felt the need to apologize for it. Michelle Tumes, whose debut LISTEN is what I'd hoped my Mom's Enya CD's would sound like, has a song called "Christ Of Hope", and a song called "Heaven Will Be Near Me" which is indeed a love song to God, and a song called "He's Watching Over You" which is meant to be reassuring. Tumes's words, somehow, for all her obvious good nature, unnerve me.
But not, to be fair, very much. LISTEN, building "Orinoco Flow" into an elegant soft-rock (as opposed to Enya's New-Agey) style, is an extraordinarily pretty record. Keyboard lines are glossy and warm and layered into enveloping cushions of sound; string sections are used without embarrassment, as are occasional woodwinds; Michelle's own Enya-like voice is comforting, especially when it's double-tracked and triple-tracked, i.e., almost always. Beats are quiet, mechanical, and steady. The catchiest choruses (the ballad-y "My Constant One" and the keening, echoey "Feel") are repeated over and over, which normally bugs me to no end, but there's a certain level of rhythmic implacability where the repetition honestly works for me, and Tumes finds it.
I find it hard not to wonder: is there any message that music this optimistic and viscerally lovely could _not_ get away with? I mean, the number of lyrics is limited by the need to stretch out the vowel sounds langourously, but campaign commercials crowd their fast-talking selves into 15 seconds each. If she was singing something that actively repelled me--- a fire'n'brimstone version of fundamentalism, say, or a platform in favor of eliminating welfare and the capital gains tax while approving mergers of banks with insurance companies (and wouldn't it be fun, just for the hell of it, to see someone writing major-label, slickly produced pop songs about those topics, preferably from a subtly outside-the-box position requiring carefully researched explanation?)--- would I listen anyway? If so, would my mind be poisoned? I hope the respective answers are "yes" and "no, not one bit", but just in case, Richard Mellon Scaife should research this in time for the next campaign-ad-dollar brainswashing season.
Since I acquired this album courtesy of my e-friend Andy, a non-Christian, I'll at least acknowledge his defense of Christian music: he claims that Christians are the last group in America which one can freely make fun of, viciously stereotype, or mildly persecute. With all due respect for movies like "the Shawshank Redemption" and cartoon strips like "Kudzu", I don't buy this. It is, after all, possible in many (even most) most circumstances to mock: Branch Davidians, Hare Krishnas, Iraqis, fat people, ugly people, old people, kids these days, transsexuals, transvestites, gay men, lesbians, heterosexual men, and heterosexual women. What Chrisitianity has going for it is its size and implied respectablility. Much of the best fiction being written these days is about Christianity: Mary Doria Russell's the Sparrow, Neil Gaiman's Good Omens, Jeremy Leven's Satan: His Psychotherapy And Cure, Parke Godwin's Waiting For The Galactic Bus, Donald Westlake's Humans, and somebody-or-other's Carmichael's Dog all come to my mind with no special effort, and I'm sure there's more. Okay, these books are not devout, are mostly sacriligious and pretty damned (apt word choice) funny; it takes a lot of inherent respect to spend months of your life writing something doubtful about a set of tenets that, in logical terms, score well below zero. Meanwhile, books that _are_ devout sell in the millions to Christian bookstores while my faves hope for, and rarely receive, a few hundred thousand sold. Meanwhile, you know how many Orthodox Jewish propaganda pieces have made their way into my music collection? How many Buddhist ones (Nirvana doesn't count)? Zero! But here, Michelle Tumes tells me to LISTEN, and I do. Worse, I'm encouraging the rest of you.
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