Rock Band Dilemmas

It's interesting to ponder the different moral dilemmas that arise depending upon the present group you're hanging out with. In academia, for example, which of these two options would be more morally reprehensible: to make your graduate students go to an 8:00 a.m. meeting and give them no coffee, or to make your graduate students go to an 8:00 a.m. meeting and give them Starbuck's from the student union? The latter choice is, of course, the most evil, because it would mean you are supporting big business and cultural hegemony. I don't actually mean to satirize this view; heck, even conservatives within the "cruncy conservative" movement concur that "Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract," i.e. big business often contributes to cultural impoverishment. My point is that there often are real issues at stake that can seem relatively silly when looked at from the outside or presented in an asinine way, as I have just done.

However, it has reminded me of the old dilemmas back from when I was in my first, and only, rock band, at the ages of 10-12. We began as an "air band," meaning that we thought our stage presence would be so overpowering that it wouldn't matter that we weren't playing instruments: just put on someone else's album, and away we went! At a sleepover party, I still remember fondly our "practice session," where we began shaking our heads to show we were "jamming," and our jumping crazily around the dining room in such a way that we would not accidentally bang our shins on the couch. We mouthed complex metaphysical conceits about love being like bad medicine that, paradoxically, was harmful, but also just what you needed. I was on keyboards, and I punched the keys, sometimes pretending to play the C-major scale, the only piece of music I really knew at the time.

Needless to say, we never got a gig, but a couple of years later, one of our band members got the epiphany that maybe we could actually write and play our own music. This seemed like a neat idea. I still remember over the summer, after a fellow band member and I got out of Vacation Bible School, we went over to his house and co-wrote a charming little ditty called "Chief." Based on the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the opening lines were, "The chief end of man is to glorify God/So let's praise Him under Jesse's RAAAHHHHD!!!!" (Or "Jesse's rod," depending upon whether you want the word itself, or how we pronounced it.) Yeah, we sung about the Westminster Larger Catechism, but we did it with a heavy metal ethos. Sure, secular groups had words like "rad," but we had the word "rod," which was way cooler when screamed correctly.

However, we had various "creative disagreements," as all visionary rock bands do. Even though our band was called "Knights of the Light," we planned on eschewing the petty sacred/secular dualisms of our contemporary Christian culture: we would have both Christian and secular songs. Nevertheless, how should we maintain this delicate balance between the godly and the profane? Well, quite obviously, if there were going to be ten songs on the album, we needed to figure out what the ratio of godly to godless songs were going to be. Two of us wanted a 6 to 4 ratio in favor of God (this was my position), two of us wanted a 5 to 5 song ratio in favor of a watered-down Christian witness, and one of us was on the fence. I cannot remember the number of times both parties tried to woo the fence-sitter tie-breaker. Since I was in the first party, I frequently appealed to "What Would Jesus Do?" Granted, Jesus never joined a rock and roll band, but He sure did talk about God a lot, which surely put Him into my camp. I spent hours agonizing over whether fence-walker would weaken, and if consequently the future of our band's Christian testimony be placed forever in jeopardy. For some reason, we could never find a compromise of just letting the creative juices flowing.

But perhaps the greatest dilemma of all was over ... male ear-piercing! I shall save the details of this moral quandry for my next blog entry.