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Are You Gonna Go My Way?

Lenny Kravitz

What I really wanna know is …

Here’s Lenny Kravitz Live in Hyde Park, 9th September 2018. Look at the size of the crowd. The landlord would definitely book you again if you brought that number of customers in to buy the beer! Anyway, the audience are loving it and singing along.

What a star! Lenny won the Grammy award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance four years in a row from 1999 to 2002. Early in his career he played support for greats like David Bowie, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. The Virgin record label president described him as ‘Prince meets John Lennon’.

Lenny identifies as a Christian according to Wikipedia, and there is definitely a religious message in this song. In a 2018 Guardian interview, he explains that it is about Jesus Christ. My reading of the lyrics is that they are sung actually in the persona of Jesus, who is making an appeal to us, the listeners, for a faith commitment. I wonder if the crowd singing along understood that or what it might cost?

Special bonus – here’s the official music video – 47 million views and counting. Love those dreads.

Lyrics here

Anthem

Leonard Cohen

Ring the bells that still can ring

For a fairly introspective 17 year old the music of Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) drew me with a fascination bordering on obsession; I can still remember sitting alone in my bedroom listening to ‘Bird on a Wire’ on repeat. The phase soon passed, and I only recently came to appreciate the depths of this song ‘Anthem’, from Cohen’s 1992 album ‘The Future’.

‘The Future’ contains references to traumatic historical events, including Hiroshima and the Second World War. The massacre of students in Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin wall both happened in 1989; it was a time of massive upheaval and uncertainty in the world.

Listening again in late 2019 you have to ask, has much has changed? Just thinking about our own country (quite apart from the rest of the world!) Britain is facing a bewildering parliamentary election, Brexit is unresolved, the country has more Foodbanks than McDonalds….. there surely still is ‘a crack, a crack, in everything’, but Cohen leaves us with a note of hope, ‘that’s how the light gets in’. We need the light, in our national and our personal lives, as never before.

Currently it is Advent, traditionally the time for preparing for the coming of Christ. For me this song provides a kind of transcendence, bringing hope into the apparent hopelessness of our world. The parallels are obvious I hope.

The true light that shines on everyone was coming into the world. The Word was in the world, but no one knew him, though God had made the world with his Word.
John 1.9-10

Magical Mystery Tour

The Beatles / Paul McCartney

That’s an invitation …

This is the title track from the 1967 Beatles album and film of the same name. The ‘plot’ was structured around a merry band of travellers and strange characters who sign up to a mystery coach trip one day – destination unknown. Over the journey they get to know each other better, have their minds opened and enjoy … adventures. The film gets a mention in the definitive hippy narrative The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which also tells the tale of a band of ‘Merry Pranksters’ travelling the country in a converted school bus and spreading their message of liberation as they understood it.

The link to the idea of Christian life as a pilgrim journey of mystery is too delicious to avoid. Over history, some branches of the church have been architecturally and socially austere, while others have been plush with colourful decor and ornament. Some groups focus on The Word and doctrine, while others find connection with the mystery of God in experience through art and symbolism.

So if that could work for you, this is the invitation – roll up for the Mystery Tour.

Wolfe, Tom, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (London: Vintage, 2018) p.211