Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Words launch other words, and names have a way of establishing themselves as footholds - nothing could be truer than with the name Jesus, which -  thanks to the centuries of teaching, tradition, imposition and imperialism which have used him as currency - has come to mean whatever you earnestly wish. The devil may have the best tunes, but in at least several top-class songs Jesus gets a mention.

Jesus the Mexican Boy - Iron and Wine

O.k, so it’s not the ‘real’ Jesus, but that’s exactly the point in this word-made-flesh ballad, where the singer and subject drink beer on the fourth of July.  Underneath the soft beautiful melody there’s a tight-packed tale of debauchery and human failing.

File this along side the excellent Frightened Rabbit tune  Heads Roll Off : ‘Jesus, is just, a spanish boy’s name’. 

They ain’t makin Jews (like Jesus any more) - Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys

This is judo music, a strange oriental power-play where you use your opponents strength/momentum to flatten them. Kinky  strolls into a redneck country music bar, both in the narrative and musically speaking, and proceeds to trash its foundations using a pedalsteel guitar and some home-truths.  Alice Walker, in The Colour Puple had her characters debate whether Jesus was black: “”Somewhere in the bible it say Jesus hair was like lamb’s wool, I say. Well, say Shug, if he came to any of these churches we talking bout he’d have to have it conked before anybody paid him any attention. The last thing niggers want to think about they God is that his hair kinky…”. Kinky Friedman and Alice Walker together, though, agree in art on one thing - whatever race or colour Jesus may have been, he sure as hell wasn’t a w.a.s.p’y-texan, beer-drinking, god-loving, race-hating bigot.

 

Plastic Jesus - Ed Rush and George Cromarty

Written by two beatnick hippies in their student days as a social satire and folk parody, the song gained extra weight by being included in the Paul Newman film Cool Hand Luke. It’s been covered and added to by everyone from the Flaming Lips through to little-known social satirist Billy Idol (?!?)
“I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus, riding on the dashboard of my car”

on a follow up theme you could also check out Soundgarden’s Plastic Jesus: “Plastic Jesus, where are you from? Korea or Canada, or maybe Taiwan”

Jesusland - Ben Folds

The crash course collision between christianity and capitalism that is the American dream is captured brilliantly by the man that wrote Satan is my master (not to be confused with the equally splendid Satan is my motor by Cake).

If you’re going to listen to this, I suggest the spine-tingling accappella version recording that Folds produced of the The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Loreleis choir for his University A Cappella project. 

This is a song that makes you yearn for and hate that ‘beautiful mcmansions on the hill’ society.

Personal Jesus - Depeche Mode

The practice of building churches on ground sacred to other cults became a guiding principle of the expanding Church in its early centuries and through to the Spanish conquests of the Americas. Take a winning formula and change it slightly, give it a ‘value add’ and see where it takes you. So too, then with Depeche Mode, the band that started out as Basildon whitewashed jeans and synths likely lads on Top of the Pops, and merged into S&M rock n’ roll beasts with an eye on the darker side of faith, love, and devotion (all the while reigning supreme in the US church of Stadium rock).
The majesty of this song is testified to by the fact that artists poles apart like Johnny Cash and Italian metal band Lacuna Coil have chosen to cover it.

The Mercy Seat - Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds 

Speaking of Johnny Cash - a man with a bit of a thing for Jesus, it’s safe to say - it’s no surprise that he was drawn to this, perhaps the most emblematic of Cave’s songs. Jesus has turned into Christ here, ‘born into a manger, like some ragged stranger he died upon the cross, and might I say, it was quite fitting in its way, he was a carpenter by trade, or at least that’s what I’m told’.

There are no atheists in the trenches, they say, and this is a song battling between old testament defiance and new testament redemption, all told on death row as the singer awaits that most American of judgements, the electric chair.

Jesus Gonna Be here - Tom Waits

This is what you get when you get America’s greatest song-writer rhapsodising about the rapture. With his gravel-rolling vocal chords taking the lead, accompanied only by some twanging and clapping, it sounds as if Tom’s been called from the grave, ready to greet a cargo-cult ass-kicking Jesus, back to judge the living and the dead. Forget the beautiful ballads, the doomed romanticism, in this tune Waits puts himself into the worn-out shoes of a believer walking the last mile. The results are spectacular.

It could hardly be more rock n’roll - the frontman dies, and the group disbands with one member going off on a crazed visionary tangent. St. John, beloved disciple  - the only one, according to the gospel, to stay awake in Gethsemane while Jesus swept blood - according to tradition ended his days on the Greek Island of Patmos, holed up in a cave writing what would become the New Testament’s White Album, the book of revelations.

In all its blood-soaked ambiguity, John the revelator’s testament has captured artists through the ages, with its symbolism shrugging on and off interpretations as epochs change. His famous beast has been seen as Nero, Napoleon, and - according to my mate Clinton, down the pub - Simon Cowell.  It’s apocalyptic numerology and epic sweep seeled its success.

Let’s skip from early-Christian Greece to 1930’s America, and the bluesey recording of a traditional spiritual, John the Revelator, by  Blind Willie Johnson. There’s something almost comical about the opening verse, with it’s ‘who’s that writing - john the revelator’ call and response culminating with ‘writing the book of the seven seals’, translating a venerable figure into one sitting casually in the corner, writing freaky shit. Almost, though, as nothing could be less comical than Blind Willie Johnson’s gravel-loaded, melodious but tortured vocals.

His voice is agony and ecstasy in equal measure - not  surprisingly, for the man who sought solace in Jesus and the blues after apparently being blinded in his youth during a domestic incident between his Mother and Stepfather (she, it seems, threw some caustic soda at her violent partner during a fierce row, but caught her hapless son instead, blinding him).  Vision, loss, and the seeing of things beyond the veil - these are all of revelations, so little wonder that of all the artists who have sung this spiritual (including Son Ra and Taj Mahal) Blind Willie Johnson seems to be the one to have made it his own (that his is the earliest widely-known recording helps).

There’s an urgency and certainty to the song, precisely because of that haunting call-and-response technique so favoured by teachers and preachers everywhere - throw out a question to which you have the answer, and all the world seems to be certain. The guitar, the voices, the tempo all make it mesmerising and fearful. Listen to it and, just for a moment, you may get a glimpse into what those rapturous headbangers worldwide feel when contemplating the supposedly imminent second coming.

Skip from the depression through to the terror-laden 2000’s and a slick electro packaging of the age-old theme. Depeche Mode’s John the Revelator is like a younger brother to Johnson’s blues - it shares some family traits, like the call and response, and some melody lines, but it’s got a voice of its own. If Johnson’s song was a soulful support, Dave Gahan’s is a nihilistic charge down on the revelator. Johnson’s blues is a submission, while Martin Gore’s lyrics are a denunciation: “Well who’s that shouting? John the Revelator! All he ever gives us is pain”. 

Blind Willie Johnson - John the Revelator

Depeche Mode - John the Revelator