dla których warto pokochać Johna Jeremiaha Sullivana:
1 — Umiejętność powstrzymania się od taniej szydery, nawet wtedy, gdy przychodzi mu pisać o imprezie która aż się o szyderę prosi — Największym na Świecie Festiwalu Chrześcijańskiego Rocka. W nagrodę powstaje mistrzowski tekst o tym dlaczego religia i rock to absolutne no-no.
For their encore, Jars of Clay did a cover of U2’s “All I Want Is You.” It was bluesy.
That’s the last thing I’ll be saying about the bands.
Or, no, wait, there’s this: The fact that I didn’t think I heard a single interesting bar of music from the forty or so acts I caught or overheard at Creation shouldn’t be read as a knock on the acts themselves, much less as contempt for the underlying notion of Christians playing rock. These were not Christian bands, you see; these were Christian-rock bands. The key to digging this scene lies in that one-syllable distinction. Christian rock is a genre that exists to edify and make money off of evangelical Christians. It’s message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what’s more, it operates under a perceived responsibility—one the artists embrace—to “reach people.” As such, it rewards both obviousness and maximum palatability (the artists would say clarity), which in turn means parasitism. Remember those perfume dispensers they used to have in pharmacies—“If you like Drakkar Noir, you’ll love Sexy Musk”? Well, Christian rock works like that. Every successful crappy secular group has its Christian off-brand, and that’s proper, because culturally speaking, it’s supposed to serve as a stand-in for, not an alternative to or an improvement on, those very groups. In this it succeeds wonderfully. If you think it profoundly sucks, that’s because your priorities are not its priorities; you want to hear something cool and new, it needs to play something proven to please…while praising Jesus Christ. That’s Christian rock. A Christian band, on the other hand, is just a band that has more than one Christian in it. U2 is the exemplar, held aloft by believers and nonbelievers alike, but there have been others through the years, bands about which people would say, “Did you know those guys were Christians? I know—it’s freaky. They’re still fuckin’ good, though.” The Call was like that; Lone Justice was like that. These days you hear it about indie acts like Pedro the Lion and Damien Jurado (or P.O.D. and Evanescence—de gustibus). In most cases, bands like these make a very, very careful effort not to be seen as playing “Christian rock.” It’s largely a matter of phrasing: Don’t tell the interviewer you’re born-again; say faith is a very important part of your life. And here, if I can drop the open-minded pretense real quick, is where the stickier problem of actually being any good comes in, because a question that must be asked is whether a hard-core Christian who turns 19 and finds he or she can write first-rate songs (someone like Damien Jurado) would ever have anything whatsoever to do with Christian rock. Talent tends to come hand in hand with a certain base level of subtlety. And believe it or not, the Christian-rock establishment sometimes expresses a kind of resigned approval of the way groups like U2 or Switchfoot (who played Creation while I was there and had a monster secular–radio hit at the time with “Meant to Live” but whose management wouldn’t allow them to be photographed onstage) take quiet pains to distance themselves from any unambiguous Jesus-loving, recognizing that this is the surest way to connect with the world (you know that’s how they refer to us, right? We’re “of the world”). So it’s possible—and indeed seems likely—that Christian rock is a musical genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellence-proofed itself.
Moar
2 — Umiejętność przyznania się do własnych uprzedzeń wobec bohatera tekstu, nawet wtedy, jeśli te uprzedzenia może podzielać gros modelowych odbiorców. Dzięki czemu powstaje literacki profil Michaela Jacksona o którym można powiedzieć tylko tyle, że jest genialny od pierwszej do ostatniej linijki.
Begin not with the miniseries childhood of father Joseph’s endless practice sessions but with the later and, it seems, just as formative Motown childhood, from, say, 11 to 14—years spent, when not on the road, most often alone, behind security walls, with private tutors and secret sketchbooks. A dreamy child, he collects exotic animals. He likes rainbows and reading. He starts collecting exotic animals now.
His eldest brothers were at one time children who dreamed of child stardom. Michael never knows this sensation. By the time he achieves something like self-awareness, he is a child star. The child star dreams of being an artist.
(…)
Michael has always made melodies in his head, little riffs and beats, but that isn’t the same. The way Motown deals with the Jackson 5, finished songs are delivered to the group, from songwriting teams in various cities. The brothers are brought in to sing and add accents.
Michael wants access to the “anatomy” of the music. That’s the word he uses repeatedly. Anatomy. What’s inside its structure that makes it move?
When he’s 17, he asks Stevie Wonder to let him spy while Songs in the Key of Life gets made. There’s Michael, self-consciously shy and deferential, flattening himself mothlike against the Motown studio wall. Somehow Stevie’s blindness becomes moving in this context. No doubt he is for long stretches unaware of Michael’s presence. Never asks him to play a shaker or anything. Never mentions Michael. But Michael hears him.
Moar
3 — Umiejętność obudzenia w sobie nastoletniego fana, dziecka, które kiedyś zakochało się w pewnej płycie i nadal silnie w nią wierzy, mimo, że jej twórca osunął się w totalną Otchłań. Z czego powstaje tak piękny reportaż, że aż poczułem gigantyczną potrzebę wybrania się na lipcowy koncert (pseudo)Guns’n’Roses i napisania czegoś lepszego.
I’d been shuffling around a surprisingly pretty, sunny, newly renovated downtown Lafayette for a couple of days, scraping at whatever I could find. I saw the house where he grew up. I looked at his old yearbook pictures in the public library. Everyone had his or her Axl story. He stole a TV from that house there. Here’s where he tried to ride his skateboard on the back of a car and fell and got road rash all up his arm. He came out of this motel with a half-naked woman and some older guys were looking at her and one of ‘em threw down a cigarette, not meaning anything by it, but Axl freaked out and flipped ‘em off and they beat the crap out of him. Hard to document any of this stuff. Still, enough Wanted On Warrant reports exist for Axl’s Indiana years to lend credence to the claim that the city cops and county troopers pretty much felt justified, and technically speaking were justified, in picking him up and hassling him whenever they spotted him out. One doubts he left the house much that they didn’t spot him, what with the long, fine, flowing red hair. Must have been sweet to be Axl.
Moar
Teksty z kilkuletnim opóźnieniem pojawiły się wreszcie w jego drugim zbiorze reportaży — Pulphead
i to w sumie lektura obowiązkowa jest dla każdego, kto jeszcze wierzy w istnienie dobrego dziennikarstwa. Można go też po prostu wrzucić w google i znaleźć wszystko, co jest w tej książce (nie tylko teksty o muzyce).
8 osób uznało, że da się to czytać.
