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.

A couple of years ago I heard novelist Ian McEwan talking about his novel Saturday, lamenting the fact that work doesn’t crop up in novels these days. Characters do everything in the modern novel, other than work - or if they do, there’s no particular detail paid to the minutiae of their trade, unless, of course, they’re detectives in which case we get to hear too much.

Try looking for mentions of mortgages in the modern pop/rock song and you’ll hit the same brick wall. Foreclosures, or even dissapointing returns on pork bellies from the chicago market - something which one is sure that the investment minded songwriter, like M. Jagger, is probably more than a little aware of - are noticeably absent from the classics, so bear with me as we put together a tenuous play-list with which to confront the credit crunch.

R.E.M. It’s the end of the world as we know it
Best played over your morning coffee as you check to see whether the bank in which your savings are held has gone bust, or as you check to see how much your variable rate mortgage is going to cost you this month.

Jenny Owen Youngs’ What the Fuck was I thinking
With a slight modification, it could work as a soundtrack when you’re trying to think exactly why you signed up to a particular mortgage.

Jimmy Eat World Futures
Perhaps the only song in the list to fit the tag without adjustment, Futures hits a hard-rock nerve on the Bush administration zeitgeist which has helped create the conditions to change to cost of living for millions worldwide

“Hey now, you can’t keeping saying endlessly
My darling, how long until this affects me?
Say hello to good times
Trade up for the fast ride
We close our eyes while the nickel and dime take the streets completely”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Brother my cup is empty
Let’s get melodramatic, and imagine that things really do go over the edge. Cave’s begging song is no shrinking-violet, but filled with indignation and menace. Best played, at ear-shattering volume, to any banker you may know.

O brother, my cup is empty
And I havent got a penny
For to buy no more whiskey
I have to go home [...]

O my friend, my only brother
Do not let the party grieve
So throw a dollar onto the bar
Now kiss my ass and leave

And finally, for a glimmer of hope, Cake’s version of Gloria Gaynor’s I will Survive, for the main because, unlike Gaynor’s version, there’s no doubt in the cake version that the subject of the song will indeed survive, and is completely over the object of his misplaced affections. Hopefully an anthem to be adopted by economists in their droves abandoning the neo-liberal ship.