What's in a psalm?
That which we call a human experience by any other form would be as human
I’m a bit disorganized now, but my next Substack will be about my most recent travels. I went to some remarkable places and fell in love again and again, so I do want to give that piece the time and space it deserves to get as right as I can.
So here’s a Substack about pop music.
I love pop music.
As recent as five, maybe even three years ago, I wouldn’t have admitted that. There was something about it that left me somewhere between ashamed and disappointed in myself for liking it. I viewed it as somehow unappealing—not to myself, but to others, which was what made it “not good” or “not appropriate” to me. Either it wasn’t as chic as a classical piece, as grounded as a country ballad, as storied and eloquent as a show tune, or as [[FILL IN THE BLANK]] as I thought music should be.
I’m well over that now, and thank goodness.
I’ve heard arguments that the likes of Madonna and Lady Gaga are either:
Prophetic voices channeling the Gospels à la socio-political transgression bedazzled with camp aesthetics,
or
God-hating blasphemers in league with the Devil to sow evils of all kinds across the generations.
Obviously I’m not going to make the case for them being in communion with the Devil. These might be my clowns but that ain’t our circus.
There’s something about pop music that maybe doesn’t link directly to the prophets of old, but there is something about it that makes me think of the psalms. Especially in the work of performers as defined and refined as the two I’ve mentioned, who have voice and perspective and humanity in every project they touch, the similarities between pop music and the psalms is palpable.
Psalm 38: 8, 10–11 says:
I am utterly spent and crushed; / I groan because of the tumult of my heart.
…
My heart throbs, my strength fails me; / as for the light of my eyes—it also has gone from me.
My friends and companions stand aloof from my affliction, / and my neighbors stand far off.
In “Boy Problems,” Carly Rae Jepsen sings:
"If you're gonna go then go," she said to me on the phone
"So tired of hearin' all your boy problems
If you're gonna stay then stay, he's not gonna change anyway
So tired of hearin' all your boy problems"
Just like the speaker of Psalm 38, Carly Rae Jepsen is so heartbroken, and the people around her want nothing to do with her! They’ve seen this film before and they didn’t like the ending!
I am writing this at about a 50/50 serious/humorous level. As much as I do love her and had a fabulous time at her concert back in ‘23, Carly Rae Jepsen is not the singer-songwriter of the millennium. But what she does do is capture, often in good-to-excellent verses and then questionable-to-good refrains, snapshots of her experience as a Canadian woman in her 20s and 30s trying her best to navigate the world.
That is literally what the writer of Psalm 38 is doing, but with a lot less Canada and a little more poetry.
The latest pop darling is “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga. The second single released in anticipation of her eight studio album, Mayhem, “Abracadabra” has been widely lauded by both fans and critics as a return to form for Gaga, who departed from her edgy pop roots around 2013/14 following the mixed reception of (the spectacular if admittedly salacious) Artpop.
Whether or not the years following Artpop were a result of this reception, we can only speculate. What is known is that her fans, dubbed “little monsters,” have been craving another Gaga pop success, which hasn’t really been seen since Born This Way in 2011.
This background matters, I promise, just stay with me a little longer.
Gaga teased an “Act 2” to Artpop at the time, but we never saw this come to fruition. Instead, we got the Grammy Award-winning Cheek to Cheek with Tony Bennett in 2014, the Grammy Award-winning Joanne in 2016, and the Grammy and Oscar Award-winning soundtrack for A Star is Born in 2018—all of this to say she was doing just fine without pop. That being said, she released Chromatica in 2020, itself a Grammy Award-winning album AND a return to the pop form, although this didn’t seem to satisfy the charts-hungry fans on the internet. Compared to the previous successes of The Fame, The Fame Monster, and Born This Way, this just didn’t deliver for fans.
The year is 2024: Enter “Disease.”
Just kidding! This also didn’t satisfy the voracious, insatiable fans, although it was a harbinger of happier things to come. Unlike Chromatica, which was defined by colorful music videos and upbeat collabs with Ariana Grande, Blackpink, and Elton John, “Disease” is gritty and ugly. It juxtaposes a punk, leather, zippered, flailing Gaga against the setting of an Edward Scissorhandsian suburban neighborhood.
Injury, healing, illness, and recovery are not new thematic grounds for Gaga. In 2017 she released the very random but very good single “The Cure” for no apparent reason other than it was a good song.
If I can't find the cure, I'll
I'll fix you with my love
And the last music video of the Chromatica period, set to the song “911,” flips between the scene of a car accident in which Gaga is metaphorically dancing the line between life and death and an alternate scene in which she literally dances the line between life and death on a brightly colored, surrealist art film set. And yeah, the music saves her life.
I think the success of “Abracadabra” has something to do with David Lynch, may he rest in peace.
When he died last year, a clip from Twin Peaks season 3 (released some twenty-seven years after the end of season 2) made the rounds. In it, we see Lynch’s own character FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole having a conversation with David Duchovny’s Denise Bryson, a transgender FBI agent introduced way back when in season 2. The quote that struck a chord is one Cole says to Denise in reference to his support of her over the years. It ruffled some feathers, we’re to understand, when she first opened up about being a transgender woman, but her boss Cole came to her defense:
When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.
“Abracadabra” comes to us with a similar battle cry. In the music video, one of the characters played by Lady Gaga (dressed in red leather and dubbed by some as “Mother Mayhem”) announces, “The category is: dance or die.” The song begins.
Pay the toll to the angels
Drawin' circles in the clouds
Keep your mind on the distance
When the devil turns around
There’s almost a thomistic appeal to satisfaction for atonement here, but that’s more of a cautionary prelude to the greater warning to avoid evil, which in the context of this song is refusing to dance and, I’d argue, refusing to live. The alternative is death, after all.
Hold me in your heart tonight
In the magic of the dark moonlight
Save me from this empty fight
In the game of life
Here in the refrain, Gaga begs for salvation. Contrary to many of her songs, there is a complete absence of a lover character. She is not singing to someone, and this is not a love song. This is a prayer.
After a haunting pre-chorus in which she invokes the “lady in red,” she hits us with the chorus and thesis of the song (italics added for emphasis):
“Abracadabra, amor-oo-na-na
Abracadabra, morta-oo-ga-ga
Abracadabra, abra-oo-na-na"
In her tongue she said, "Death or love tonight”
This is the choice Gaga has been presented time and time again: Death or love, dance or die. She has faced it throughout her career, in and around “The Cure” and “911” and “Disease,” and now, she offers the choice to us. We could actually argue that she hasn’t presented this choice to us at all; all she has done is point out that the choice is in front of us at all.
Like an Old Testament prophet, she merely points in the direction of something more profound. She demands that we look to our higher power, that we examine our consciences. Whether the lady in red represents doubt, fear, social pressure, spiritual exile, body dysmorphia, mental health—literally, you name it!—she demands the same from each of us.
Fix your hearts, or die.
There’s a lot of other great detail to the song, such as the “the floor’s on fire” line (likely a reference to hell) or the “choose the road on the west side” as a potential reference to the Holy of Holies, which would have been located in the westernmost end of the Temple in Jerusalem. Let no one say Lady Gaga is a dummy!
My point is that pop music draws from the same well as the psalms in the sense that it so effectively paints the human condition in a time and a place and a circumstance and connects that to people everywhere.
The psalmist writes, “I am utterly spent and crushed; / I groan because of the tumult of my heart.”
MUNA asks, “Would we have turned a corner if I had waited? / Do I need to lower my expectations? / If we'd kept heading the same direction / Would we be home by now?”
Gaga tells us her “ARTPOP could mean anything.”
The psalmist says, “I have a goodly heritage.”
Same, psalmist. Same.
Some of my all-time favorite pop albums, and I’m using “pop” very loosely here:
Born to Die by Lana Del Rey
Melodrama by Lorde
Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain
MONTERO by Lil Nas X
The Loneliest Time by Carly Rae Jepsen
The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan
Body Talk by Robyn
1989 (Taylor’s Version) by Taylor Swift
A Robyn shoutout! Yay!