(Display Name not set)June 2006 Archives

No need to wake early and drink warm beer to enjoy the World-Cup-time flap over English soccer star Wayne Rooney's new billboard for Nike, left, which has scandalized churchmen in the Sceptred Isle because it recalls the Crucifixion. "'The trivialization of Christ's suffering is highly offensive to Christians and to God," says one cleric. "This will cause real hurt to people."

The second part of this statement may turn out to be prophetic. Rooney's war cry might encourage fan violence, which European authorities finally seem to have quelled, which would be an obvious shame. But the red cross shouldn't offend Christians any more than the Swedes' yellow one or the Danes' blue one, which their fans commonly slather on their bodies. The swaths on Rooney's torso represent England's traditional banner, the flag of St. George. (The Union Jack is the standard of the United Kingdoms of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, all of which have their own teams.) It's the banner under which King Richard Lionheart's men marched off to the Crusades--another reason, a disconcerted Labor MPs says, the image is too touchy for good taste, considering the war in Iraq.

If the red cross summons delicate associations, however, it's a coincidence of England's past (often a violent one) as an unambiguously Christian nation. Certainly no one is proposing the cross be removed from all national displays.

The Rooney ruffle comes on the heels of a smaller flap on these shores about the place advertising occupies in our media. During last week's U.S. Open golf championship, Nike ran a commercial that memorialized Tiger Wood's father, who died this spring. Critics said the spot capitalized on Earl Wood's death. But the Woods family, which gave Nike all the footage, clearly viewed it as a tribute. The ad was Tiger's way of communicating his loving grief to his fans.

Rooney's image is haunting, even hard to look at, and its power unquestionably comes in part from its resonance with Christ crucified--not the suffering of Christ itself, of course, but hundreds of thousands of depictions in Western art. Nike has a right to that history, of course, as much as anyone who is trying to capture complex feelings to communicate about what we see or believe. In other words, to create art.

There comes a time in every musical artist or band's life when he, she, or they recognize the superior majesty of another being and succumb to his control. I refer, of course, to the superiority of sound engineer Brian Eno, who has cast his spell in the past over Talking Heads, U2, and David Bowie, among others. That moment of surrender has now happened to Paul Simon.

Simon's new album, "Surprise," can't really be called a collaboration between Eno and Simon, since the songwriter's restless patter and wondering voice are too intimately recognizable. But there are moments where Eno's skein of background sound seems to levitate the usually solidly earthbound Simon into a more transcendent musical place.

Which is entirely suitable to what is Simon's most openly transcendent album. He has spoken in earlier songs of living in "an age of miracles and wonder," but awe is not the prevailing spirit of the new album. "Surprise," which has the wide-awake face of a baby on its cover, is the work of a man looking back on a life mostly lived, one who claims to be tired. "Who's gonna love you when your looks are gone?" Simon asks in the song "Outrageous." And he is thinking not only of his dotage, but beyond. Since his days with Art Garfunkel, Simon has sung about how to live rightly within situations (like the world, we are meant to understand) that are inherently morally compromised. Drug dealers, lovelorn misfits, bad kids on the lam, broken-down boxers have all spoken through Simon's voice. On "Surprise," they all seem to show up looking for peace at the end. "I want to rid my heart of envy, and cleanse my soul of rage before I'm through," he sings in "Wartime Prayers."

There is some direct discussion of religion on the album, much of it championing a liberal Democrat's view of the Higher Power. The opening track reduces the notion of individual religions, sects, or denominations to a matter of regionalism. The song's title, "How Can You Live in the Northeast?" is followed by a list of questions, including "How can you be a Christian? How can you be a Jew? How can you be a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu?" and follows this by asking, "If the answer is infinite light, why do we sleep in the dark?" A bout of conscience, Simon sings, "sure don't feel like love." It sounds more like low self-esteem.

But the surprise of the album—the surprise for all of his characters and for all of us--is that God does exist, and Simon's not afraid to say it. To his question in "Outrageous"--Who's gonna love you when your looks are gone?"--he answers simply, "God will." Even in "I Don't Believe," in which the speaker doubts whether even kindness is anything more than a fairy tale, he ends with a plea that one's love not be "all that there is or could ever exist."

In a time when even churchmen urge us to approach faith from a place of doubt, Simon approaches doubt from the point of view of faith.

The price of saying seven words you can't say on television just went up: Thanks to legislation pushed by the Christian Coalition and signed into law by President Bush today, fines for broadcasting what the Federal Communications Commission deems indecent content will rise tenfold, from $32,500 per infraction to $325,000. (All seven will now cost $2,275,000.) The law, sponsored in the Senate by Kansas lawmaker and avowed Christian conservative Sam Brownback, is the fallout, so to speak, from Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2005 Super Bowl.

Some commentators believe the sum effect will be to create a filthier and cruder radio culture on XM and Sirius, the fledgling satellite radio companies outside the jurisdiction of the FCC. Much like cable television, which can air racier fare because viewers consent to their programming by purchasing it, the satellite channels have already hired Stern and other shock jocks to attract their loyal listeners and lure more with the promise of outlandish chat.

Like Earth in the End Times, Christian rock's days are numbered, but the industry has to undergo a few transitional stages. The current stage might be called "The Revolving Door." Take Flyleaf, for example. The hard-rock foursome is often described as a stripped-down Evanescence, the Christian goth-rock group that roared into mainstream success with their 2003 album titled "Fallen" and promptly kicked the ladder away. Flyleaf's label, Octone, wants the band to emulate Evanescence's marketing strategy as well as its sound. "We wanted to use Christian radio as a place to start, much like a record company might choose to start a hipper-type group at college radio," an Octone executive told Billboard magazine. "Our goal from day one was to break this band at mainstream rock radio."

Exhibit two is Brian Littrell, who has already enjoyed huge success as a member of the Backstreet Boys, but who has chosen to launch his solo career in the Christian market with his album "Welcome Home." Christian music fans are greeting his reverse crossover as a pure testament of what the genre has to offer a star even of Littrell's magnatude. "Additionally," notes Christianity Today, "one would hope such a talent would bring more experience and artistic credibility to [Christian Contemporary Music]."

The constant lowering of the Christian ghetto wall shows how much credibility CCM has already garnered. It will be interesting to see if the Christian music industry will have the courage of its founding ideal to complete its destiny and wither away altogether.

To evangelicals bent on conquering Hollywood, it was this month's sign of the apocalypse. Last week, the Motion Picture Association of America—invented by Hollywood executives in the 1930s at the behest of Christians to monitor morals in the movies—warned parents that kids might need guidance when viewing "Facing the Giants," a football movie made by two Baptist clergymen from Georgia. In assigning the movie a PG rating, the MPAA said the movie was guilty of proselytizing, especially a scene in which a coach tells a kid, "Following Jesus Christ is the decision that you're going to have to make for yourself."

The filmmakers, whose titles are actually "associate ministers for media" at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, were sorely put out. Christian commentators pointed to the PG rating as evidence that black is white and up is down in today's America. But ironies aside, a risky rating may be the best thing that could happen to a preachy movie about redemption on the gridiron—or to a fledgling Christian media industry. Evangelicals in film need to emulate their Christian-rock colleagues and depend less on their bully pulpit as the majority religion than on their hard-won status as an upstart minority voice.

An executive at the film's distributor, the Sony subsidiary Provident, who knows the value of a racy rating, said it best: "It is kind of interesting that faith has joined that list of deadly sins that the MPAA board wants to warn parents to worry about." Much more interesting. Vive l'apocalypse.

Boston millionaire Larry Baras, whose food services company makes, among other products, Unholey Bagels, has become the driving force behind the Israel Baseball League and is currently seeking out cities and stadiums in the Holy Land to host teams. Baras...

A boorish Jude Law was the stumbling block to Sienna Miller's domestic bliss. Now comes news that a boorish cult leader ruined the marriage of Miller's father, the American investment banker-turned-art dealer Ed Miller. In an interview in the British...

Today's New York Times has a front page story about the widening phenomenon of Faith Night at the ballpark. Always on the lookout for ways to drum up business, minor-league sports teams are hosting religious-themed promotions, hoping to tap into...

Ricky Skaggs knows how the Dixie Chicks feel. So does Randy Travis. Both country singers spoke and sang about what they believed in—faith in Jesus—and both saw record sales and radio airtime plummet, despite the fact that half of country...