Getting What We Deserve

Snapshot One: A few years ago, I attended a concert by Johnny Lang and Buddy Guy. While Lang’s performance left me in awe, a different memory has lingered just as strongly. When Buddy Guy finished his first song, he said something along the lines of, “Where’s the f****** crowd?”  Within minutes, audience members were shouting the f-word back at him. When Guy left the stage and began to work the audience, his speech, songs, and actions were full of innuendo – and once again, the audience responded in kind. It was all part of the stage show – Guy knows how to work a room – but I’ve never forgotten how the entire mood changed when Guy gave the audience permission to interact with him in a certain way by establishing what was appropriate. He didn’t have to tell them they could; they rightly inferred it from what he demonstrated. [1]

Snapshot Two: I once attended a soccer game in Costa Rica between two teams with a long and intense rivalry. My friend who took me, thinking himself funny, bought me the jersey of the visiting team to wear.  “Oh,” he noted, “don’t be surprised if people walking past you say insulting things.” Indeed, that’s exactly what happened. I wore a visiting rival’s shirt to a rivalry game; what else should I expect?

Snapshot Three: I saw a documentary that included some scenes from a music festival a few years back. A band introduced a song by saying, “There’s only one rule tonight: there are no f****** rules!” Shockingly, fans swarmed the stage, and the band had to stop while security enforced that particular rule. Limp Bizkit (“Break Stuff”) and Rage Against The Machine (“Killing In The Name”) have seen similar incidents at their concerts when fans went ahead and acted out what the band sang.

Snapshot Four: Last week, one of Mac Miller’s fans came up to him and said about Miller’s girlfriend, Ariana Grande, what Miller says all the time about women – specifically, how great it must be to “hit that.” If you are wondering why that fan thought it was appropriate to say that, just check out some of Mac Miller’s lyrics. Or not. The message matters.[2]

The 'Hit' That Ariana Didn't Want - Or Deserve

Last week, a young fan said to Ariana Grande’s boyfriend, Mac Miller, “Ariana is sexy as hell, man. I see you, I see you hitting that!!!" Ariana’s response was rightly indignant: "Hitting that? The f***?? This may not seem like a big deal to some of you but I felt sick and objectified. I was also sitting right there when he said it."

Can we all agree that the fan was totally out of line, not just for saying that in front of her but for saying that at all? It’s a cold objectification of a human being whose value is reduced to her' tappability'.  Ariana desires to be seen as a strong, independent woman whose value comes from an inherent dignity, not her sexual desirability. I don’t blame her for wanting this.  All women deserve to be treated with value, worth and dignity because they are human beings.

Can we also all agree there is some sad irony here? Ariana makes her living in an industry that has normalized the use of ‘hit’ or ‘tap’ to refer to sex – and in so doing, our cultural troubadours have made it acceptable to refer to women as objects whose value is found in how eagerly men wish to ‘tap’ them. Here’s just a small sample easily found with a google lyric search – and I will let her boyfriend, Mac Miller, lead the way. I apologize for the language, but...it is what it is.

Guard Your Heart: Usher, Nicki Minaj and Honey Nut Cheerios

According to Multivu.com, "Eight–time Grammy Award–winning megastar Usher and Buzz the Bee, the iconic Honey Nut Cheerios™character, are using dance to spread the word that being healthy can be fun and delicious. Starting today, the two new friends are asking people to celebrate and share healthy and happy moments, like dancing to Usher’s new single 'She Came to Give it to You' and enjoying a heart–healthy breakfast with Honey Nut Cheerios. With health issues like heart disease on the rise, Buzz wants to get people buzzing about the importance of physical activity and healthy food choices as part of a healthy lifestyle."

Sounds great, doesn't it? After seeing the commercial, and I couldn't help but wonder how Usher's song helped to get people buzzing about healthy lifestyle choices. Maybe the "she" in the title was coming to give me heart-healthy cereal?

Life in the Lyrics: “Follow Your Arrow”

"If you save yourself for marriage you're a bore,
if you don't save yourself for marriage you're a whore-able person. 
If you won't have a drink then you're a prude, 
but they'll call you a drunk as soon as you down the first one. 

If you can't lose the weight then you're just fat, 

but if you lose too much then you're on crack. 

You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, 

so you might as well just do whatever you want, so…

Make lots of noise, kiss lots of boys 

or kiss lots of girls if that's something you're into. 

When the straight and narrow gets a little too straight 

roll up the joint, or don't. 

Just follow your arrow wherever it points, 

yeah, follow your arrow wherever it points.

If you don't go to church you'll go to hell, 

if you're the first one on the front row you're a self-righteous son of a - 

 Can't win for losing; you just disappoint 'em; 

just 'cause you can't beat 'em don't mean you should join 'em.

Say what you feel, love who you love, 

'cause you just get so many trips 'round the sun, 

yeah, you only live once."

- Kasey Musgraves

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The talented Kasey Musgraves first caught my ear with “Blowin’ Smoke,” a clever and poignant song about people who rarely follow through on any of the noble plans they have for their lives. The overriding metaphor has to do with smoking – people say they are going to quit someday, but they’re just blowin’ smoke.  It’s a great tune.

According to her popular single “Follow Your Arrow,” this desire to embrace a purposeful life of health is something you should definitely do. Or not. It doesn't really matter. “Follow Your Arrow” highlights sexual lifestyles, the use of addictive substances, religious beliefs, and choices about whom we should love as areas in which we ought to do whatever we want, because, you know, YOLO.

The Day Miley Couldn't Stop

As always, significant cultural events reveal significant things about our culture. MTV's recent Video Music Awards were no exception.  In the midst of MTV’s glittery ode to itself, Miley Cyrus hijacked twitter for a while, and for good reason: her performance was incredibly inappropriate. In an industry that prides itself on pushing the envelope, she managed to shock almost everyone. 

When I saw the footage the next day, I felt embarrassed for Miley. The desperation and emptiness in her performance was heart-breaking.  On the one hand, I am encouraged that so many people were bothered by what she did. On the other hand, I am puzzled by the duplicity of the uproar, specifically from those in the entertainment industry. After all, she just did what her song said she wanted to do. 

Here is what the VMA’s celebrated and Miley brought to life in "We Can't Stop":

Frontiers and Tumbleweeds

There's always gonna be another mountain

I'm always gonna wanna make it move

Always gonna be a uphill battle

Sometimes I'm gonna have to lose

Ain't about how fast I get there

Ain't about what's waiting on the other side

It's the climb. 

- Miley Cyrus, "The Climb"

When I played this song to my class at school, all the kids knew it. Half of them hated it, but they could still sing the lyrics with a catchy sarcasm.  No matter their opinion of Miley, there is something about finding every moment of life meaningful that captures the imagination. I suspect that in a world of broken homes and damaged lives, the idea that even the most daunting climb matters resonates as well.
 
As compelling as the message may sound, there is a better and deeper perspective. Every journey has a destination; that much is true.  We will all arrive somewhere, and unless we want to be terribly disappointed we should probably know where we want to end up.  The journey is important, but the destination matters too.

"Something of this longing for what is not here, this joy of the pilgrimage, has set deep roots in the soul of Western man.  But it has become detached from an end to the pilgrimage. We thus lose a sense of home, both the eternal and the temporal. So we seek new frontiers to discover and to master, but without any point beyond the assertion of mastery.  We praise ourselves for our mobility, meaning that we can move, without noticing that without any sense of ultimate meaning, without any Person to whom we grant ultimate allegiance even in the smallest acts of our everyday lives, me must move.  We are under compulsion of perpetual mobility precisely because, without God, to settle means to acknowledge defeat, and to rest means to die within...

We change towns, we change schools, we change houses, we change husbands and wives, we change churches, we change faiths.  We go off into the distance, and we set at at a distance those nearby things we still pretend to cherish, as, for instance, our children.  We look down upon women who 'stay home,' thinking of them rather as creatures who are stuck in mud.  We almost treat as pious heroes those who are determined to leave their homes and never return, yet who still claim some tenuous and sentimental attachment to what they have abandoned.

It is doubtful whether, without steadfastness, without devotion to this place, this work, this spouse, this land, we can enjoy even a decent human life.  A tumbleweed is not only rootless.  It is directionless.  It is blown about by the chance of the wind, quitting here, divorcing there, forgetting here, abandoning there.  In following our own purposes, regardless of the claims of steadfastness upon us, we lose our purpose, and turn with every turn of the fickle heart."

 - Anthony Esolen, "God's Place & Ours," in Touchstone