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.

Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, put his finger on it when he wrote in his 1950’s poem Advent, ‘We have tested and tasted too much lover, through a chink too wide comes in no wonder’. Experience too much of something, and you become immune to its splendour. So, it should come as no surprise that it’s a Manchester band, rather than some Californian sun-drenched slackers, that majestically captures the spirit of waking to a beautiful day.

There are songs, few and far between, that immediately befriend and impress you. Within the first minute of On a day like this by Elbow it’s apparent that it’s going to be one of those. Nuanced and swelling, from the strings through to the well-judged lyrics of singer Guy Garvey, this is quite simply gorgeous. Which is just as well, because, as a rule, I’m obsessively against rock bands - of any ilk - using string sections. At best they usually just padd out a song, and are a lazy shortcut for the band to stress their importance and profundity to the listener. At worst they conjure up images of panoramic videos. Once you’ve listened to this song once, though, it’s hard to imagine how they could effectively have done it any other way. Perhaps it’s because Garvey’s voice goes so well with the violins, straining in and out of the lines in tandem with the strokes of the strings.

And stroke is the key word for this song, from the movement of the violinists to the lyrically broad brush strokes which create an overall picture by the song’s end. Atmospheric without wandering into Prog-Rock excesses, this is a brilliantly judged marriage between indie-rock simplicity and elegant ambitious song-writing.

The song opens with an introduction which establishes the main melody - no doubt a musicologist would be muttering ‘opening movement’ at this point. Gentle to start, a melodic expression of what it’s like to open one’s eyes, building into a lush and unabashed melody. Then, the indie element creeps in as Garvey switches the emphasis onto the lyrics. The opening line, sung with a gentle mancunian drawl, “Drinking in the morning sun” is beautifully ambiguous. Are we looking at the morning sun through the eyes of a Patrick Kavanagh, or a Liam Gallagher - or a combination of the two (Kavanagh like all penitents was more than capable of indulgence - one night,after a ‘couple’ of pints, he found himself floating in Dublin’s Grand Canal, unsure of whether he’d been pushed by some companions jealous of his genius, or had drunkenly stumbled). The verse continues, pointing us to the latter conclusion:

“Blinking in the morning sun
Shaking off a heavy one
Yeah, heavy like a loaded gun
What made me behave that way
Using words I never say
I can only think it must be love
but anyway, it’s looking like a beautiful day

Let’s turn back to the orchestra, momentarily. Usually, at the risk of repetition, an Orchestra gets dragged in to satisfy the pretensions of some tossers who think themselves above your average songwriter. It’s a production choice, and a bad one at that, which goes some way to explaining the burst of popularity that MTV’s ‘unplugged’ enjoyed at the start of the ’90s. Throughout on a day like this, though, the entire band demonstrate that they have the ears to match their undoubted ability - making the right choices. The orchestration is right. The understated but essential rythm section of Pete Turner and Richard Jupp acting like conductors to channel the song. Garvey, lyrically also makes the right choices - allowing himself to be open to joy (no minor feat for an Englishman), without having to shade it excessively with poetic caveats. The crescendo of the song is perfect

“So throw those curtains wide
A day like this a year would see me right”

Listen to the rest of their superb new album, The seldom seen kid, and it brings home to you exactly how deliberate On a day like this actually is. Songs like An audience with the Pope and Some Riot show that they’re no strangers to lyrical and melodic complexity (not to mention melancholy).

So, when you feel giddy and uplifted at the end of this particular tune, you’ve arrived exactly where these craftsmen intended to bring you. Thank god for the Manchester rain…

The artist Robert Luxemburg, in the thought-provoking Steal this film II (freely available through bit-torrent - download it, watch it, pass it on), talks about the absolute fear that record companies and the film industry have that the average consumer will, with the aid of cheap technology, morph themselves into producers. With the aid of filesharing and sampling software, the idea goes, we’ll be able to see that the Emporors really have no clothes on.

Where does that fit in with this brilliant tune from a Dublin vanished-without-a-trace band called  Moneypenny? Well, it’s a song that encapsulates that moment when admiration mutates into inspiration, when a band finds a voice of its own.

The local health authorities can attest to the fact that during the mid-late ’90s Dublin had the highest infestation level of singer-songwriters in the English singing world. Turn a corner in the Hibernian capital, and you were likely to run into an angst-ridden, seldom-washed troubadour busking their latest sparse offering claiming some direct connection with Rimbaud, or Van the Man at least.

Against this backdrop, a blues guitarist/singer Dave Murphy bravely held an open mic night in Dublin’s decidedly dingy International bar. The open mic (or lack of mic, in reality, as the venue was so small it needed no amplification) dragged both the best and the worst songwriters out of the woodwork, and every tuesday night you could hear the sublime (Mundy, at the start of his career), the ridiculous, and a collection of dirges that would have been better off remaining in the bedsit where they were composed. On various occasions, though, a truly special song would shine through, and become week in and week out an anthem. Moneypenny’s ‘hangin out with excellence‘ easily became one thanks to its immediate melody, its lightness of touch, and its limpet-like ability to stick in your mind.

“Hang out with Einstein, he knows it all
Hang out with Jesus, if your name is Paul
Hang out with God himself, he gets it right
Come to the International Bar, on a Tuesday night”

Self-referential without being arrogant or elitist (they cast themselves very much on the ‘hanging out with’ side of the equation); passionate without being earnest, and clever without being either calculating or slick, this is a perfect pop-song (it clocks in at just over 3minutes) which captures the uncertainty and longing of a band’s first faltering footsteps

One of the other reasons I love this song is because it has become that rare thing, a song that stands on its own, uncontaminated with images of the band that produced it. Ask me to tell you something about Moneypenny, aside from the fact that they crafted this genius of a song, and I’ll draw a blank. Blame it on the fact that there’s a richer American band of the same name, perhaps. Search for information on the band, and you’ll be dissapointed. I saw them, at most, two times, and yet the chorus of their song burned in the back of my mind, until, thanks to the charity of file-sharing, I stumbled upon the song and managed to get a copy. Now it’s a regular in any playlist - holding its own in the company of excellence