Note: this was orginally published with National Review Online in the original Post-Modern Conservative group blog, Nov. 11, 2014, but after a few years their version suffered a mangling apparently driven by problems with youtube embedding—two-thirds of it vanished. This happened to handful of my pieces, so from time to time I offer restored versions here. For an explanation of my Songbook, and a link-bank to all First Things numbers of it, and the pre-101 NRO numbers, go here.
For various reasons, it seems good to begin thinking about rock and religion again, and this song, along with a few others, stands as signpost, circa the early teens, of a certain tendency in millennial-gen rock to forthrightly reject Biblical religion. That feeling, I suspect, is now shifting…I’m noticing thinkers of various generations and stances admitting that the events of the last few years are pushing them towards a reconsideration, which I may seek to illustrate with another Songbook post soon.
Its title is stark, even rude, but it is not a song that tries to convince anyone that there is no God. It assumes that most of us assume that. In that way it is unlike classic anti-God rock songs, such as John Lennon’s “Imagine,” or The Dead Kennedy’s “Religious Vomit,” or the more detailed critiques of Biblical religion which I’m told are present in several songs by The Dave Matthews Band, and which I assume are in those by the explicitly anti-Christian punk band Bad Religion.
In fact, the song seems more directly about another subject than God’s assumed non-existence, namely, the loss of Cate’s grandmother. Le Bon has said in interviews that a number of the songs from Mug Museum, released in 2013, have to do with her death, or at least with how that changed relationships in her close-knit family. Here’s a live version more like the one we hear on the album, and here’s a solo version:
Well, say what we will about the message of her lyrics, there’s no denying her talent. Hers is a song-craft solid enough to shine through even the sparsest of presentations. I hope you hear the echoes of hymnody, such as the way the single syllable God is given a full line of notes.
My analysis here will focus on the chorus, ignoring the verses, because while I have figured out what their words are, their meaning still eludes me. There are bits about someone working with a (potter’s?) wheel, someone making a bell, someone leading lambs, a lot about a mantle that “you” get to wear, but which is “ruled out” for the narrator—perhaps there is a point there about Christianity having excluded women from the priesthood—but overall, the meaning of the verses is elusive.
The chorus, however, is painfully clear:
I…I saw her face, again.
I pulled…it from, my head
No looking, I know it well:
no God.
In some kind of vision or dream, the narrator sees the face of a deceased female loved one--if we’ve read the interviews or noted the liner notes, we will assume it is that of Cate’s grandmother. The narrator knows there’s no way to really see those who have died, because she knows, and “knows it well,” that there is no God. Despite what various 19th and 20th century spiritualist teachings have suggested, once God goes, all possibilities of personal immortality and of connection to the departed depart also. So, no matter how real the vision seemed, it had to have been “pulled” from Cate’s memories.
By itself, this would not amount to much in terms of lyrical artistry. Its real impact comes with sensing its place in Cate’s larger body of work, first within the album as a whole, with most fans realizing its relation to her grandmother’s death, and second within one of her songwriting’s longstanding themes, the one about impermanence and parting that I discussed in No. 102. Within Mug Museum, it becomes clear that “No God” is the companion song to the album’s main single, the gracefully lilting 70s-ish number “Are You with Me Now?”
A great song, and its own lyrics describe its relaxing impact better than my prose can:
There is a feeling I love,
buried in my brow.
I have no reason to run; I see no reason…
And then the chorus swells up asks the question Are you with me now? This question is in turn is elaborated by two later add-ons to the chorus. Since the first states it’s not impossible, it’s not unfathomable…and the second yearningly sings as she knows me now, it seems that the “she” must be the spirit of a deceased female loved one, i.e., that of her grandmother. So overall, while the song begins with the narrator describing herself in a sinking spell, a new feeling then comes, a lovely and reassuring one; what is more, it is powerful enough to make her suspect the possibility of her loved one’s spirit being with her now. Cate wonders if her grandmother is at that moment giving her the feeling, and even wonders about the manner in which she might be knowing her now.
If that is the way to interpret the song, there can be no question that “No God,” which comes later in the album, replies to it with disavowal. As there is no God, the “she” of both songs is no more, and just as a vision of her face must have been simply pulled from my head, any feeling that I (i.e., the song’s narrator) might associate with her actively comforting me is said in parallel language to have been one buried in my brow. Thus, while we are told that the feeling of the album’s main feel-good song is not one to be run from, its companion song reminds us that the hopeful wondering about the departed’s existence that the feeling provokes is deceptive.
I admit that “Are You with Me Now?” can lend itself to a more general interpretation, as being about personal connection, whether in a friendship or love-affair. The lines It’s not impossible, it’s not unfathomable, which jump off what I have said is the chorus’ question about the departed’s immortality, continue with it’s not unusual, baby, to feel a shadow, in kind, which might simply refer to those having a close connection feeling similar feelings prior to any communication of them. By this reading the chorus’ question is the narrator asking a friend or lover whether they are in tune with her feeling. Still, a shadow in kind could be a departed spirit, a “shade,” and it is difficult to account for the as she knows me now line, nor the similarity of the brow line with the one found in “No God,” without interpreting the song as a moment of being open to the possibility of an afterlife.
Moreover, this fits with an overall wrestling with death spread throughout Mug Museum. For example, the loving recollections in “I Think I Knew” seem to mainly refer to another elderly loved-one, a male this time, who has passed away, and the otherwise hard-to-interpret “Sisters” contains these striking lines, sung in hopeless protest:
And the there comes that old feeling, again.
I’m a sister--I won’t die.
An intense connection, particularly with a family member, makes the future parting brought about by death seem absurd and impossible.
The song “Mug Museum” closes the album, and the way I’d interpret it is that each of her songs, particularly the ones which recall a person, a person either deceased or moved far away from (this is another album haunted by Cate’s move from her Welsh homeland to Los Angeles—see No. 102), is like a hand-made mug, or statuette. The album is to some degree a museum of these, a “Cate’s mug-book,” but the gap between what is conveyable in an artwork about a person, and the person themselves, is more than a little sad once they’ve gone. As is the gap between what is remembered about a person, and the person themselves.
This is particularly the case if every goodbye might be the last look at the person, assuming no God and no heaven. Then, the only immortality available to us is that of long-lasting human renown, won especially by a poet’s preservation of the memory of us. And what is the poet’s own motive for this? Why did Homer so immortalize his Achilles, Dante his Beatrice, Shakespeare his anonymous beloved of Sonnet 18, and so on? In Cate Le Bon’s case, it seems the motive was simply that of wanting to preserve the company of loved ones torn from her.
In my mug museum, I grow
company from the echoes, in my walls.
I forget the detail, but know the ones,
tailored to the letter, till it becomes.
The remembered details about a missed person (or place?) that the poet best preserves are those which fit her word-art. One aspect of the missed person fits a rhyme or a stanza, but another does not. So the characters “grown” by the poet can only be distorted echoes of the real persons; in fact they become their own distinct figures—only in that the sense can they serve as a kind of “company” for the rock poet, and even more so, for we hearers who never knew the persons the songs were based upon.
Poetic art can serve as a protest against death. But when the poet has accepted the “knows it well” atheist catechism, then creating a song-memory of a person necessarily brings with it a futile feeling, and it is thus fitting that by various musical cues, the “Mug Museum” song conveys this. For no parallel can be hoped to exist between the poetic effort to remember the deceased, and their end-times resurrection or continued existence.
Now a perfectly modern person would have no time for any of this. Be respectful when folks die, he would say, but do not get caught up in making “mugs” for, or admiring such within, some museum of memory. There actually is a reason to “run” from intense feelings of remembrance.
The most powerful rock artistry rejects that perfectly modern stance. The best rock usually does not shrug at death nor at the general “disenchantment of the world,” but tends to fight against it. We find this particularly in the rock-originating 60s moment. Syd Barrett, for example, something of influence upon Cate, was more than a bit influenced by the 19th-century vogue for faërie-literature, especially as it had been upheld by the 20th century Christian authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. He wasn’t just tripping on acid.
Cate herself has played this poetic role. On the overtly psychedelic Cyrk, there’s “Greta,” which could be dismissed as a mere snatch of trippiness designed to give the album its overall feel. As if she were some priestess of an astrological cult, Cate tells this Greta that
You existed in moonlight, before you were born.
On the turn of each calendar, inside and outside,
observatories clocked you in stars, they were holding so dear.
Greta, be good to yourself, you’ve always been, here.
We could dismiss this, but it’s just that upon repeated listens, “Greta’s” power grows, and we can’t help but wonder if Cate was serious about passing on, to us and to this Greta, who from other lyrics appears to be a child, a doctrine of the soul’s pre-existence and immortality. This would fit, after all, with the spiritual feeling she gives to her lyrically elusive songs about home-place and countryside. As the landmark psychedelia of The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” really was an attempt to explore pantheistic religion, perhaps the retro psychedelia of Cate’s Cyrk is at least as serious about semi-pantheistic ideas(serious pantheism, contrary to what “Greta” suggests, rules out one’s immortality as an individual). Perhaps she really was seeking out a priestly role and doctrine.
Well, who can know? An artist’s mystifications are all the less transparent to the extent they are truly artful, and the artist herself can get caught in the spell. But in any case, “No God” might be a final disavowal of the spiritual hints raised by this artist’s mystery.
John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which I began exploring in No. 98, declared that mankind’s getting past Biblical religion would pave the way to a happier fraternal future, since it would enable mankind to evolve beyond property, nations, and war, and to concentrate upon livin’ for today.
But notice: in the dialogue between “No God” and “Are You with Me Now?”, a current rock artist has provided us with a sense of how the realization of the “no religion” part of Lennon’s dream actually feels. It does not feel so good. And it certainly does not, to push the dialogue back to the key lyric from Cyrk, give us greater inclination or ability to “stick” with a loved place or loved ones for the long-haul, however well we may fly flags for such in song.
Cate’s songs nowhere suggest that we can take much comfort from the idea each one of us can be part of a purported unity of all the people that are livin’ for today. How could we? Particularly when a temporary sense of this, which I suppose one might get at a rock festival, occurs in the midst of continually dislocating change (against which even David Bowie revolted for a moment, saying to the older generation of his time Where’s your shame, you’ve left us up to our necks in it!). What Cate most wants—despite her own admitted wanderlust--is to stay connected to things “real,” to the countryside, family, and loved ones, even in the face of death and separation. She similarly wants to tell little Greta that she belongs here, and has infinite value.
Her politics are likely left-leaning, but I detect no signs that Cate is a dogmatic leftist who would advocate faith in “Imagine’s” program of no property and no nations. I suppose it would nonetheless be fair enough to label her a hippie, for she is one who sings grow your hair longer, and who certainly encourages us to slow down, work the land, attend to the animals, sit with loved ones, etc. My argument here is that her art admits that the “no religion” part of Lennon’s dream coming to seem like the plain fact of the matter makes all of that harder to believe in. So, in “No God,” it is only with a palpable sense of reluctance that she disavows the intimations of immortality she expressed in two other songs, and only with a sense of resigned duty that she affirms the key words of the modern creed.
And so the spirit leads me, once again, to quote Chantal Delsol, the contemporary French philosopher, this time from her “God in Exile” chapter in Icarus Fallen:
…for the peoples deprived of religion experience this deprivation as an absence, even if…they do not wish to call back the gods they have left behind. The confrontation between the feeling of deprivation and the refusal to restore what has been abandoned is one of the defining characteristics…of the contemporary spirit.
…The desire for the absolute, and the expression of the desire to escape death and finitude, no doubt constitutes one of those human categories that is grounded in our very being… …it is a truncated world indeed that must be content with finitude without being able to name it as such, that is, without even questioning it.
Cate Le Bon looks us in the eye and says “no God,” but like Wordsworth, Syd Barrett, etc., she is obviously not content with the truncated world Delsol describes. If she has poetically toyed with spiritualism-entertaining, pagan-esque, and perhaps pantheistic ways of voicing this discontent, as did her hippie and Romantic forbears, we would be most surprised to find her coming to espouse regular New Age belief i.e., what Ross Douthat describes as the widespread contemporary heresy of “God Within” spirituality. The raw edge of our situation, which so many and especially in America try to deny with the “spirituality not religion” fudge, remains present in her songs.
They thus exemplify what I have admitted from the beginning of my Songbook about what Rock Does Well: it’s best practitioners explore the dark implications and express the unsatisfying realities of “modern rationalism for living,” and, they often seek to provide an aesthetic refuge from such. There are no answers in that activity, no guarantee that questions will be correctly posed, and plenty of temptations towards art-as-religion; but there are, at least, the right discontents.
Or, I could write about Bud Light!