IF YOU HAVEN'T HEARD THE SONG OF THE WEEK, GO TO HTTP://WWW.MYSPACE.COM/ADVENTISHERE TO LISTEN TO IT.
Where do I begin with this one? I've never focused on giving commentaries on my song lyrics, but many people have said that I need to. So, in the spirit of refining myself by the advice of others, I move to talk about the opening and title track of Advent: A Modern Bible, 'Advent.'
I B heard my first record, The Darkroom: The Abandonment of Christendom, and said that he related to how I was writing about struggling with making sense of the Christian faith (pick it up @ http://sphereofhiphop.myshopify.com/products/gilead7-the-darkroom or a shortened version on ITunes), and wanted to produce my next record. This was right after I released a conceptual battle EP entitled Death Penalty Shots (out of print, only available as a digital download on ITunes, etc.) record that I B and Collasoul Structure helped me promote. I B was like, 'So in The Darkroom you battled with God, and in Death Penalty Shots you battled others, so your next record needs to show you just being an artist creating after you've proven yourself against the opposition.' No fighting, just feeling. That's exactly what the whole record is, and the first track is just a shadow of that.
It starts with me giving an intro of what Advent is in Christian theology, a season of expectancy surrounding the birth and second coming of Jesus. Several Christian traditions perform rituals around this time that serve to cause believers to reflect upon both the birth and second coming of Christ. In the writing of this song, I saw it as a ritual of my rebirth and you could say a third coming (this being my third substantial project), and in turn my own Advent. It was the gateway into a fresh era with a renewal of how I rhyme, view the world, and contend for divine justice within it.
I wrote another version of the song (maybe it will surface some day, maybe on this blog :-), but I didn't feel like it embodied the 'Advent' experience that I was going through during the creation of this album. So, back to the drawing board. What I came up with the second time around was two verses with double meanings and coded references that related to both my first and second albums, but with the purpose of showing my progression up to Advent. The first verse is simply an exposition, conflict, and resolution of me vs. God, the heart of The Darkroom material. With lyrics such as 'stained the mic with a passion of blastin' at God then relaxing in black holes/of flower children matresses/listen to stars that can't rap kids/I rule a darkroom where I make luminous pass like laxitives/Evil laughter of Canibus/Art institute anti amateurs/Flew on walls, spied on the past, and plastered makeup on damages,' I'm describing this toiling against religious traditions, my own hedonism, and ethical dilemmas by employing the very song titles themselves ('Black Hole', 'Flower Child Neo-Hippie', 'Star', 'Evil Laughter', 'Art Institute', and 'Fly on the Wall') to do this. The verse ends with the admission that while I can put a good whipping on the shell that may house the spiritual life force of the universe at certain points in history (the church, tradition, dogmatism, etc.), I can't attack the force itself. In doing so, I 'kick against the pricks', as the book of Acts reports Paul to have done prior to his conversion. The verse ends, 'I fought God in her own system, recording the war as wav files/And thought because I dissed her being that I was brave child/She healed my fragmentation as I strove to erode her/And hung my negatives crucified on 16 exposures.' In a nutshell, the Darkroom project is a 'record' (pun intended) of how I came to the consciousness that Goddess is and was never my enemy, but my co conspirator in the fight to 'hang my negatives' on these '16 exposures' (the number of tracks on The Darkroom album), and reflect on them to build another tomorrow.
In the 2nd verse, I began with two lines that I felt embodied the Death Penalty Shots album concept, which was to run over all opposition mercilessly. These two lines were 'Bring life into the beat/Mic fight up in the street/Let me cremate your MC career when I compete' At the recording of this album, I'd pretty much had it with the Chicago hip-hop scene, holier than thou Christian rappers and media who had distanced themselves from me because of things I had said, and MCs in general who had clout but were plain garbage. Those two lines demonstrate my rage toward all of that, and I took out a gun of hip-hop pride on that record to fill anyone or anything that stepped in my way with endless holes. But after I did the album (which Okayplayer gave a 3 out of 4), I realized that in putting too much emphasis on my own honor and saving face (I'm reminded of the end of Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian), I'd forgot that a universe needs me and you to fight for its survival more than I need to fight for my own vanity. So, I said, 'But no, I slight myself when I cause a rapper some pain/When a sphere is global warming death by tsunamis and rain.' In light of ecological and social catastrophes I grasped the revelation that it's better to call again on the Goddess by a waging '...war with Hindu images of Kali growling/Her two-edged blade slicing demons entrenched within the system/Of rich and richer/Moguls who piss on lower social/My song called hate'll break em, my Love Supreme not supposed to.' Again, using song titles from the DPS ('War of Images', and 'A Song Called Hate'), I communicate that the real battle is injustice on all fronts, the weight of the world. The Goddess can get us out of this, but we have to move our hand as she moves her hand, slicing patriarchy, economic imprisonment, waste dumps in underpriveleged areas, below standard school systems, etc. That's what this second verse is about.
Whew, that was long. See, that's what you get when you ask me to do an exegesis (interpretation) of my songs.
Feel free to leave your thoughts on I B and my walking across the border into our Advent.
Peace
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Who is this goddess person, I think I need an intro to your beliefs (in a nutshell, no deep deep thought needed), where can I get that?
ReplyDeleteGood question. And thanks for kickin' off the discussion. Goddess is simply what many would classify as 'God.' To use Anselm's terminology, that which no greater can be conceived. That's the Goddess. The Goddess is the Yahweh of Israel, the supreme reality of the Christians, Brahma of the hindus, etc. I'm really conscious of the limits that Christian theology in particular runs into when it mostly restricts gender metaphors of the divine to male. Throughout ADVENT, I refer to God as woman. I'm building off of the thought of Judith Plaskow (her book Standing Again At Sinai), Carol Christ (her books Rebirth of the Goddess and She Who Changes), Rosemary Radford Ruether (her book Sexism and God-Talk and others), etc.
ReplyDeleteWhat interested you in particular in our work?
Ah, hmmm. so you feel that the Christian faith is limited or bias due to the overwhelming male influence of the time rather then the symbolism and relationship of why God presents himself as Father, Christ as son, and Holy Spirit? Also, so what you are also saying is that this "Goddess" is what all the religions are worshipping, and there is really no distinct "god" but a force and the force is manifested differently via religions?
ReplyDeleteAs for your work, I've heard bits and pieces, Jon owes me all his work for me to hear, I've know him since he was a wee little lad. I've heard whispers about his philosophies, so it's interesting to hear, but we would vehemently disagree and just about everything. There is relative truth and there is absolute Truth and all the thoughts and philosophies in the world or the universe can not change what is absolute, and Christ is absolute. The war we rage then is really not with God, but with ourselves and our unwieldiness to live under, through and within God, we rather live over, above, and without God; placing God into our own rubix cube to manipulate depending on our thoughts and action, our own culture and ideas, our own knowledge and power.
So it begins...(you've got to excuse me..I've been watching too much Lord of the Rings)
ReplyDeleteYeah, you pretty much got my view on the goddess stuff down. With a few clarifications:
1. I hear how you're looking past the gender references and focusing on the essence of who/what the Godhead is. I respect that, and am right on board with it. Where I run into problems is that its hard to separate the essence of the Godhead from the language traditionally used to describe it. A woman who was abused by her father as a child may have a hard time seeing the first person of the 'trinity' as 'dad.' The metaphor has expired, and needs to be updated. That's where Tillich goes in Theology of Culture. And beyond that, these images of God as male in Christian theology have given men primacy in clerical roles, and in many ways are linked to the exclusion of women from ministerial positions (one of the greatest examples of this in Christendom is Roman Catholicism). We're still a patriarchal society. What better way to combat this evil than by referring to the divine as both female and male? I would be amiss to say that Christian theology has not done this at all, because many communities of faith are there. That's the heart of that one for me.
2.And on the Goddess as a universal for all religions, yes. That's what I'm saying. Just about. I', a bit technical about the way I talk about this, but for the sake of brevity, I hold that all religions have an idea of ultimate reality, and the idea itself is the same. The ultimate reality is not, because its in the hands of the people who are describing it. For example, the Gods of the Hindus emerge from a distinct culture, social location, economic concerns, etc., and are constructed from these elements. Therefore, those cannot be the ultimate reality of Christians because different empirical factors went into this ultimate reality's construction. So, the 'force' is really what we make it, but the idea that there is a 'force' (for lack of a better word) is what runs throughout all faiths. Because how we understand the 'force' is painted by human experience, and we can really know nothing of the 'force' except our own experience with what we consider divine, then we have to reverence all perspectives on it. None of us know what we are talking about when we talk about God. It's a shot in the dark, which puts all religions, indifference, and atheism on a level playing field. The illuminating part is this: in those 'shots in the dark,' we find some really ways to make what we think is true about the divine change the socioeconomic, cultural, racial, political, and other ills of the world. That's faith. Faith is Kierkegaard's 'leap' into the unknown The minute we confuse faith with knowing, we've lost it in my opinon.
Once again, I respect and understand the Christ as absolute piece. I sat in the same church seats that you sat in. And I tell everybody how much of an example you and the others in your group like Paul, Davin, etc. were to the youth coming up. You all represented Christ as absolute well, and I'm grateful, cus that helped me a lot. In saying that, the question I would ask is this: Is Christ really absolute? Let's go back a bit. What is relative truth? What is absolute truth? How do you define either? Back to Jesus. The last thing that Jesus did was establish himself as an absolute. How could he? He was killed. The last thing Jesus did was promote anything absolute. He was like an ancient Derrida (at least like Caputo paints Derrida in the book The Prayers and Tears of Derrida) in that he deconstructed everything around him. Jesus opened the door for religious pluralism. He said that the whole of the law is reduced to two things: Love God and love neighbor as self. Now of course you can say that the God he's referring to is the God of the Jews, and of course he was. But was that all that he was referring to? What Jesus revealed to his context and centuries after (and he wasn't the first to do it, there were many before him, including Buddha) that communion with the ultimate is inseparable from communion with the other (neighbors, communities, other races, social stratification, etc.), and care for this other in a variety of forms is reverence to God. One can do this without even being conscious of any kind of divine reality, yet they are absorbed within it for it is second nature to the universe. So, for me, the absolute nature of Jesus lies in his role, not his person. This role is known as the 'messianic'. This messianic role has been taken on by many from Martin Luther (reformation) to Malcom X. The messianic breaks into history and reveals its true essence, presenting a 'divine' way to live in the world, attacking oppression from the religious to the secular. The messianic makes a mark on history that cannot be avoided, but has to be reckoned with. Jesus could not come now with his 1st century rhetoric and illuminate the 20th century. If Jesus was absolute, he could. New Messiahs arise every day. In the sense of revealing and redefining Black identity, Jimi Hendrix was a Messiah. There are others, and I'm trying to end, so I won't list them. You know them though. Maybe one works with you and you don't even know they are there. Maybe she is a homeless woman walking up and down your street begging for change (Listener's 'Train Song' helped a lot with this idea, he'd be a good one for your Truth Sessions one, no doubt). The message is not about the symbols (the church, the divinity of Christ, the infallibility of the Bible, etc.). What do these symbols mean to whatever culture they find themselves in, and how can they be either implemented or done away with? In a nutshell, no absolutes, just the messianic.
ReplyDeleteSorry that was long, but you got me going. Didn't even get to everything. Holla at ya boy. Let's continue.
There is a lt there Jon, but from what I've read what you are taking out of the picture is the divinity of Christ. Did Christ establish himself as absolute, absolutly he did! "I and the Father are one"; " Before Abraham, I AM" The Jews were going to stone him for equating himself as equal to God, and yes He was killed, but 3 days later . . . you know the story. The role he fills is God the son. No one files that but Him and no one coms to the Father except through Him (but you've heard all this) I'll move on.
ReplyDeleteYes, I understand that it may be hard for a girl/woman who was abused by her father to relalte to God as Father, but that is exactly the point. God love is what heals her heart, warms her soul. The establishment of the ralationship of Father/Son is so strong, and the "role" of a Father in the household is exactly the point God is making and I wouldn't refer to God as a woman because He doesn't refer to himself as woman. You make it seem like the Christian faith was just made up out of the blue by man, crafted and shaped, that is the furthest from the truth, Christianity is God revealed (yes, there have been many that have currupted the church, false teachers etc.) but the essesnce of the Christian faith, the pillars, are God imspired and as Paul says "God breathed"
another note, yes there are people who have been leaders in the world, if you want to say messaiahs based on the cold definition, sure, but Jesus stands apart, is the standard, is the absolute and all other leaders should be measure to Him, and fall short. doesn't mean they haven't made changes to this world, but Christ is one with the Father (God)!!!! and it goes around . . .
I'm sure you've heard this all before, and I'm not someone who knows a lot about other philosopheies that are piled out there, for I haven't studied them. BUT, I can defend the Gospel and give an account of that which has saved me.
We'll get together, Mr. Gill.
Listen is a good artist, I know members of his crew.
Yo Johnny B....
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry. Been busy so I haven't had time to respond. Let's keep it going. We could make a book of this conversation.
To put it simply, the divinity of Christ is not an issue for me at all. The 'I Am' statements actually are very hard to use to assert Jesus divinity even if you believe that the Bible is totally factual (not saying that you do, but you are arguing for Jesus' divinity based on the 'I Am' statement of John 8:58). When Jesus said, 'Before Abraham was, I Am?,' Could he have meant that Jesus, as the 'logos' was begotten by God to be God's agent in the world? If Jesus is begotten by God, is Jesus God? It is possible to interpret this as implying that Jesus is simply an embodiment of the 'logos,' or the 'logic;' to use Calvin's definition of the word, that is the agent of creativity in the world (we'll get into this a bit more when we get into the song 'Sophia', which deals directly with the female representation of 'logos' in the book of Proverbs). Jesus can still be 'before Abraham was...' and not be God because, according to Paul, he is the 'firstborn of every creature' (Colossians 1:15-19), so he's way before Abraham. According to this, Jesus is the embodiment of the creative essence that made Abraham and all that exists, if you want to use the Scriptures to make this divinity argument. Furthermore, the nature of Jesus was debated for hundreds of years before it was 'decided upon' at the Council of Nicea (presided over by Constantine), and it still wasn't accepted across the board, so there were the councils of Constantinople and Chalcedon, mixtures of religious and imperial motives for establishing or not establishing the divinity of Christ (a lot of it was based on what king or queen was in power and what he or she believed about Christ's divinity or humanity, that had a lot to do with people's opinions of Christ, and the divine opinion became more or less standard, and still is the common conception of people on the outside and inside of Christendom today).
But, to be clear, I don't try to cross reference Biblical texts to prove or disprove Christ's divinity. For me, I hold that the Bible, while a great book, is the by product of the history and culture surrounding its authorship/compilation, and its pros and cons are a direct result of this. In other words, the construction of the Bible was decided by those with authority, influenced by what the communities who read these texts understood as meaningful to them. When you talk about this Bible that's 'God-breathed,' which one are you talking about? There are several Bibles, and the reason that we even have the compilation of texts that we now call the Bible(s) is to delineate the beliefs of certain communities and establish what's right. Because several communities and thinkers in the beginning centuries had different takes on what was orthodox and what wasn't, we have several different Bibles. Which one is 'God-breathed'? The ones that establish Christ as divine? The ones that don't? I'm saying all this to say that the Bible is not authoritative, only prescriptive. Accounts of Jesus and his supernatural (virgin birth, miracles, etc.) nature represent the metaphorical culture of the Jews/Romans that birthed them, and are symbols not to be taken literally, lest we miss the timeless kernel of wisdom that they point to. I don't hold that Jesus was any different than you or me, but I do hold that his understanding of the workings of the universe is uncanny, and is one of the best examples that I could ever follow to achieve harmony with the inhabitants of the universe and the universe itself.
Well, I agree with you on wanting to save this Father/Son imagery that the Godhead classically has represented. I never wanted to get rid of it. I only desire to aid in the theological/philosophical work to fulfill it with the female counterpart of this spiritual reality that knows no gender. When you say that the relationship of a father/son is so strong, we have to ask ourselves why is that so? Why do we commonly associate power and authority with manhoood and weakness and fragility with womanhood? You've done well by identifying a primary problem in this classic construction of God. Throughout the Bible, God is portrayed as a king, warrior, authority figure, etc. Of course! This is not startling, since the Bible comes from Jewish patriarchal society. Is God gung ho about this father/son/authority/power dynamic that you ascribe to male metaphors of deity, or are we? Are these excuses to take land from people, commit genocide, enforce unfair economic policies on people, etc.? Since God tells people to kill people for no reason (sometimes Israel was in danger, thats different; but sometimes that was just bloody conquest) Any of these 'pillars' of Christendom that you say are 'god breathed' can be explained by historical sketechs of the time periods from which they emerge. This is not to say that they are worthless. Far from it. But they must be taken and refined, changed with time, maintaining the central/ever transforming wisdom of justice key to Christianity (and many other religious traditions, how dare we claim access to some exclusive truth) while allowing it to take different forms that even the writers of the 'inerrant' Bible would disagree with. Tillich calls this the 'Protestant Principle,' the mechanism within the Christian tradition that creates a way for it to be continually reformed. In light of that, I can call God woman, and never lose the essence of God, for God is spirit, not male or female anyway. You say God never refers to Godself as woman. We'll get to that next week with the song 'Sophia' again. If you hold that the 'logos' was God (John 1:1), then you would have to hold that 'sophia', or Wisdom in Proverbs, is God as well, because the words 'sophia' and 'logos' are virtually the same and imply the same. I'm not saying that I go for this because I don't. But with your argument, you have to end up around there.
ReplyDeleteI understand what you're saying about Jesus being the absolute. For me, that breaks down though. Again, the gospels are written with an agenda by the authors to prove their own contentions. A good example is how Matthew keeps going back to the prophets and saying when Jesus did this, he fulfilled this prophecy of Isaiah, or when he did that he fulfilled that prophecy. You know what's up. Case in point: Isaiah 53. The suffering servant passage. A lot of people immediately point that to Jesus. That's where Matthew pointed. But, looking at that in its own context, it more than likely was referring to Cyrus, the Persian king that ended the Jewish Babylonian captivity. That makes more historical sense. This is not at all to say that Matthew is wrong to say that this referred to Jesus. It is to say however that Matthew gave this text his own interpretation, and did what he wanted to with it. I could relate Isaiah 53 to Martin Luther King. That could be my own interpretation. Back to the original point. What we know about Jesus is largely the interpretations of Gospel and epistle writers who emphasize what they thought was important for the audience they were talking to (it's not likely that you and I were remotely in mind when they were writing). Back to the original point. Jesus as absolute was/is an interpretation. Really, we don't have anything that Jesus said, because to our knowledge, Jesus never wrote anything. Now to be fair, the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) generally have the same material with some minor omissions, so we do have pretty consistent accounts of Jesus sayings (not his life, because the Gospels are neither historical nor chronological documents). But, we still don't have anything from Jesus verbatim. There was something compelling about this man, something so compelling that my life has been immensely impacted by what the Gospel writers say of him. But, when it comes to their possible assertions on his nature (again, getting divinity from the New Testament is a tricky thing because of the terms involved), I have to use my reason and say that it's impossible for a man to be born without sexual contact, and must look at legends of the time, which cast great women and men as being the progeny of some magical union of divinity and humanity (Greek mythology, demigods, etc.). For me, Jesus was just a man like you and I. But a man with an unnatural grasp on the laws of the universe that usher in peace and justice, just like Gandhi, Che, and maybe even yourself.
ReplyDeleteListener was supposed to come through here on the 13th. Was trying to fill the date for him, but it didn't work.