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.

April is the cruellest month - always has been, and always will be, just like tuesdays never come out right; but there is hope at the end of the tunnel, glimpsed briefly through the showers. In those long northern winters, when you’re cooped up, it seems natural to think ahead, to dream - more often than not about getting things that will make you happy, a new laptop, i-phone, gadget bullshit. But you know, really, that the heat of the sun on your face is what you need/want.

Get yourself ready, then, for that first moment when you can sit in the gaze of the returned sun. And there’s no better companion (or presager of the moment) than this song by one-time Man-at-Work Colin Hay. A simple guitar, strumming purposefully and naturally as a wave, and a voice that’s like warmth itself.

“My, my, my it’s a beautiful world, I like swimming in the sea” - banal, beautiful, and perfectly structured. It doesn’t mess about, and with authority lets you know that cynicism, irony, and smart-arsed back-watching have no-place in this particular three-minutes. This is a song where you can check thousands of years of evolutionary defence mechanisms at the door, and relax in the moment.

There’s no need for me to single out the lines that made me smile, that made me sing-along - they’re all clear to the ear, out in the open. All you have to do is listen, and be grateful that Hay is brave / wise enough to have brought these sentiments out into the open. Sit back and relax. “Perhaps this is as good as it gets”.

Though it’s officially springtime, celebrating the sunshine I find myself paradoxically listeing to Paddy Casey’s Ancient Sorrow (rather than the more appropriate Sunnyside of the Street by the Pogues) - a song that, with a brave production that highlights the voices of Casey and the real foundation given by the soulful singing of Terry Sutton. It’s a song that manages to be profound because of the production and performance, rather than because of its banal lyrics.

What’s this got to do with Paul Brady? Well, that ancient sorrow tapped into by Casey and Sutton lives and breathes in Brady’s unmistakable voice. Listen to him sing his pre-Celtic Tiger immigrant songs - in particular Nothing but the same old story, or the majestic (and, once again, banal) Homes of Donegal - and you have a voice that conveys history and all the reasons we choose to sing the blues.

And, though it’s long since been snatched by the supermarket/dinner party moozak brigade thanks to its simple melody, his 1985 hit The Island is one of his finest moments (before you get all hot and bothered, that’s not to dismiss Hard Station, or his work with Andy Irvine).

A songwriter dismissed by many of his contemporaries for the twin sins of a) remaining silent during the Hunger Strikes protests, and b) selling songs for big bucks to stars like Tina Turner and Bonnie Raitt - sins from a small Island where Independence is sanctified but independent spirits are, more often than not,  scorned.

The Island was a two-fingered risposte delivered in a honed, radio-friendly ballad that packs as political a punch as anything ever done by any of his more vocally flag-bearing peers (not looking at anyone in particular, Mr Moore). And it all rests on his voice, and that ancient sorrow we’re talking about. But, in this case it’s not just production and performance, with a set of lyrics that - taut as a tripwire - are anything but banal

Well I guess us plain folks dont see all the story
and I suppose this peace and love is just copping out
and I know that young boys dying in the ditches
is just what being free is all about

And all sung in a time when rebel songs were sung like hymns, but the notion of singing ‘we’ll make love to the sound of the Ocean’ outraged the theo-fascists.

It’s hard to choose just one song from Loudon Wainwright’s skeletal, bruised, shocking - and yes, at times extremely funny - 1979 live album a live one. Wainwright is a far more versaitile songwriter than he’s often given credit for, and this collection, perhaps more than any other, shows off his talent in a raw expose.

I brooded over School Days, a beautiful song, full of melody, passion, and sex - not bad for a pigeon-holed folk song! But it took a step-backwards, admitting a certain po-faced seriousness as its limitation. To choose a song by Wainwright, that fails to provoke even a twitch of laughter, seemed somewhat pervers. I smiled and swayed to Whatever happened to us, with it’s bilious narrative (”you said I came to early, but it was you who came too late”) set to the folk-world’s equivalent to the classic rock riff, simple, repetitive, and unforgettable. It, though, declined the honour, aware that its gurned final line - “it’s a whole-lot of crap about a tender trap, what it is is a suicide snare, all I want to do is to forget you, and our lousy love affair” - while fitting, leaves the song leaning to much on smart-arsed ryhme. One song, more than any, stood out - albeit in a ’sitting in the back of the classroom uncomfortably’ kind of way.

Red Guitar is one of the shortest songs on offer on the album, or elsewhere for that matter. It clocks in at just 1.58 seconds (including opening applause), and within two lines has Wainwright’s almost-too-smart signature:

“I used to have a red guitar, till I smashed it drunk one night
I smashed it in the classic form, as Peter Townshend might”

It’s a song that hinges on drama. It opens with an action - and a violent one at that. The old dictum that ‘character determines action - action reveals character’ was never truer, and in less than two minutes an arch storyteller manages to create a complex tragedy.The action, smashing the guitar, is initially jokingly underestimated. It’s treated flippantly, but with savage brevity the act is put into a different context.

“I threw it in the fireplace, and left it there awhile
Kate she started crying, when she saw my sorry smile”

No laughing matter, the narrator and the listener are jarred. With that simple line, we’re suddenly thrown into history - without underlining it, it becomes obvious that this is an action that is characteristic, and so lined with tragedy. 

While the two, presumably, lovers contemplate the burning guitar, we have a moment to consider the weight of the word red. Now, it’s perfectly plausible that the song was provoked by an actual incident involving a red guitar. In that context, there’s little to dwell upon. It could also be simply that to sing ‘red guitar’ instead of ‘guitar’ helps the metre and rythm - true. Instead, we’re going to read too much into things - because a sparse and haunting song like this deserves that, at the very least. The color red takes on a different significance, when paired with the word used to describe the replacement guitar that our narrator buys in New York city at the end of the song. The replacement is a ‘blonde guitar’. Now, pause a moment, and recall the last time you heard a guitar described as ‘blonde’. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the last time was, in all likelihood, never. So, suddenly our red and blonde guitars announce themselves as something else - and what do we most often describe as ‘blonde’? People, or, more often than not, given the patriarchy, women. So with this contorted, but substantiated line-of reasoning, our singer’s destruction of one guitar in favour of another, has a much darker resonance. No wonder Kate cries, and tells him ‘you are a fool, you’ve done a foolish thing’ (a line that, perhaps, has been devalued in recent years thanks to forest gumpery).

Thus far, we’ve paid scant attention to the music, but the bare piano that pauses and plays alongside the narrative makes the song. It’s simplicity incarnate, and yet it poses plenty of questions in and of itself. Wainwright plays the majority of his songs (more than ably) on the guitar. The one song about a guitar is played on a piano - go figure. And yet it provides a narrative coherence - as, in the universe of the song at least, he is guitarless by the end (let’s not give away the ending exactly, though, eh - you have to listen to the song, as part of the deal). The simple melody, that moves between major chords, and - dare we say it - the minor falls, is devastatingly appropriate. They’re small steps, that giddily balance the song between positivity and despair.

End the song, and while you think you’ve been told so much, in reality the question that is begged from the opening lines has remained defiantly unanswered. Why did he smash the red guitar? And, after the traumatic journey in the song, has some kind of self-awareness been reached, or are other ‘guitars’ in for the same treatment?

Add in to the mix Wainwright’s voice, which while lacking the multi-range versatility of his son Rufus, makes up for it tenfold by unfussedly allowing the words to speak, as it were, for themselves, and you have a near-perfect song, from a song-writer who, more-often-than-not during his career has sabotaged himself.

Or maybe it’s just a throw-away ditty, about a guy with a Who fixation.

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