Incongruous Music - Part II

A few mornings ago, I was singing one of my favorite songs, Chicago, from Sufjan Stevens' Come on, Feel the Illinoise album. The song has some really powerful first few bars - fit only for the first or last song of a concert, I would think - and catchy lyrics. But the particular line that caught my attention that morning was this: "I've made a lot of mistakes," repeated over and over again. It should come as little surprise that this reminded me of an earlier post about music with peppy tunes and depressing lyrics.

In the comments to that post we discussed various reasons for this phenomenon, with a general consensus that it began as a folk music reaction against the sorrows of life, as if to say, "This upbeat melody is my way of coping with the suffering I'm singing about. It's not so bad, right?" But Sufjan made me think there might be another possibility.

At the feet of the great Gregory Roper, I learned that the essence of tragedy is a world in which faults are punished, brutally punished, by the dark and primeval forces of nature; in a comic world, however, faults are overcome, defeated, mocked and transformed. If tragedy is characterized by the grim justice of death, comedy is characterized by the triumph of love over death.

Sufjan's lyrics reveal that his is a comic song, a song about love and redemption. True, mistakes have been and there are plenty of tears shed. But the peppy tune is not simply a rearguard against this sorrow or an attempt to ignore it. No, the music is a manifestation of the same redemption, the same triumph of love over death, that the lyrics - considered in their entirety - proclaim.


I fell in love again
All things go, all things go
Drove to Chicago
All things know, all things know
We sold our clothes to the state
I don't mind, I don't mind
I made a lot of mistakes
In my mind, in my mind

Chorus:
You came to take us
All things go, all things go
To recreate us
All things grow, all things grow
We had our mindset
All things know, all things know
You had to find it
All things go, all things go

I drove to New York
In a van, with my friend
We slept in parking lots
I don't mind, I don't mind
I was in love with the place
In my mind, in my mind
I made a lot of mistakes
In my mind, in my mind

Chorus

If I was crying
In the van, with my friend
It was for freedom
From myself and from the land
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes
I made a lot of mistakes

Chorus

You came to take us
All things go, all things go
To recreate us
All things grow, all things grow
We had our mindset
(I made a lot of mistakes)
All things know, all things know
(I made a lot of mistakes)
You had to find it
(I made a lot of mistakes)
All things go, all things go
(I made a lot of mistakes)


(Go to 2:00 if you want to skip the talking section.)

Sports and Catharsis

Is it possible to find catharsis through sport, as we do through art?

This question popped into my mind as I watched the Cubs-White Sox game on Saturday, and I felt compelled to consider some of the similarities between watching a sports game and going to the theater.

Both a good game and a good play (note even the similarity in language) draw the spectator into the action, making him forget about everything else around him. Both a game and a play are self-contained worlds, which allow us to reflect on our own lives. Interestingly enough, in ancient Greece both athletics and drama began as parts of religious festivals.

Moreover, as a life-long, long-suffering Cubs fan, I'm thoroughly convinced that baseball has taught me all I'll ever need to know about tragedy. What can you say about a team that has not won a championship in over 100 years, despite many excellent teams and many outstanding opportunities? The Cubs' woes easily compare with those of a Greek tragedy. Babe Ruth called his famous home run shot at Wrigley Field to defeat the Cubs in the 1932 World Series. Thebes suffered under the Sphinx, and Chicago has been cursed by the billy goat. (One important difference, though, is that while many Cubs fans unwind at the famous Billy Goat Tavern, Thebans probably didn't go out for drinks at the Taberna Sphinx.) Only just recently, it was revealed that the Cubs' most recent hero, Sammy Sosa, owed many of his home runs to performance-enhancing drugs. A great man's ambition becomes his tragic flaw. Clearly, the Cubs' history bears all the mark of a Greek tragedy.

If this all sounds a bit too fantastic, if you don't believe the Cubs deserve to be compared to Oedipus and Orestes, or Chicago to Thebes and Mycenae, you must still admit that the Cubs' misfortunes are at least worthy of an Old World folk tale. There's the black cat at Shea Stadium that caused the Cubs' promising 1969 season to fall apart in the last month. There's the story that it was Bill Buckner's old Cubs batting glove which caused him, even as a member of the Red Sox, to let a ground ball go through his legs in the World Series. There's no arguing--this is all empirically verifiable fact!

Well, to be a little more serious...My basic point is that I don't understand the snobbishness of people who look down on pro sports. After all, many of these self-appointed snobs, who think of theater, ballet, and classical music as the only serious arts, make the same objections to professional sports that many ancient philosophers (e.g., Plato in the Republic) made against theater-goers: rowdy, drunk, concerned only with images, etc. These accusations are not entirely unfounded, but they should not take away from the glory of sport.

Sport illuminates the experience of victory and defeat better than any play. The intense effort, the grand hopes, and the dejection of defeat--these are all things which we see most clearly in a closely-contested sporting match. That, I'm sure, is why St. Paul chose to compare life as a Christian to a race and a fight (2 Tim. 4:7).