I’ve been writing a series of blogs on the songs that make up my most recent release, a covers project entitled “Through Songs I Was First Undone.” The moments I’ve had with the artists whose music makes up this album have been sacred moments. These artists and their songs have been central to the necessary undoing of the expectations and limitations I habitually place on God and humanity.
Here is part of why The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” is on the album:
Yup.. I was that kid, at least for a season; I wore as much black as I could put on and kept my hair over my eyes to peer at you through while mumbling about my superiority as an intellectual. That kid. Maybe it was falling out of favor with the popular crowd that did it. Or maybe it was because I was almost suddenly too small to play on the football team any more.. But something set me off on a journey towards the valley of “The Tweakers.”
I was in touch with my emotions.. and yours.
I read Poe, Ginsberg and Kerouac.. and understood.
I went to the Rocky Horror Picture Show… and knew every word
I also listened to the Smiths… The jangle-y, sparkling guitar tones of Johnny Marr set the backdrop for modern music’s most dramatic lyricists: Morrissey. Lyrics such as
“If a 10-ton truck kills the both of us
To die by your side is such a wonderful way to die.” (from There Is A Light That Never Goes Out)
Were set to music that might just as well have supported something more like
“I bought a dog to day, a yellow lab he is
He’s just a puppy, and he’s cuddly and so cute”
But it was (and is) exactly that juxtaposition of happy and sad that resonated deeply with me as an adolescent. Then again, maybe it’s less of a juxtaposition and more of a mix.. Happy with sad. The music the Smiths made celebrated a collision of these two emotions that was… well, true. Seldom had I experienced a sadness (especially up to that point) that was all shadow, through and through. Something about the experience of sadness always had a the buzz of energy to it… of life… the thrill that I was feeling something.
Only later and at a sufficient distance from my adolescence did I start to grasp what all that was about; That, in a culture addicted to pleasure; a culture that spends billions in the attempt to avoid pain and maintain it’s high, feeling something low, something negative was redemptive.. In the experience of sadness, I became more acquainted with the fullness of my own humanity.
Makoto Fujimura writes about sadness as a more acceptable aspect to Japanese culture, saying…
“…the Japanese traditional culture affirms vulnerability and loss. Japanese poems and paintings… are full of sorrow and sadness, and their poetic tradition of “mono-no-aware” can be literally translated “beauty in the pathos of things.” They already recognize that, on this side of eternity, we must see the beauty in an empty cup.”
The music of The Smiths captured this for me. I saw the beauty of my empty cup through the lens of songs like “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want This Time.” Here’s my cover of it:
You can pick up my rendition of the song at iTunes
or my Online Store
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I’m pretty sure if your record were taken away and there was only one song on it that I could get back… I would choose this one. It is the most – to borrow a term from CS Lewis (via Douglas Wilson) – northern.
Northerness is the idea of that sadness you (I think) are describing in this post. It’s not just sad because something bad happened… it’s more broad… it’s an acknowledgement of the chronic sadness we all suffer (as opposed to the acute bouts of pain/sadness). And it stems, I believe, from recognition that things are not as they are supposed to be. Something is missing. Something is sideways. As Miss Clavel would say, “something is not right”. And we long for that rightness… for a time when things will be as they were supposed to be, before the breaking came.
Songs that give me that feeling are always my favorites. I have a playlist on my iPod of ‘Northern Songs’, and your recording of “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” is a perfect addition.
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