Long before streaming music, even before the compact disc, there was the album. Vinyl records. The “LP”. Unlike streaming services which enable the user to personally create playlists to their liking or only hear songs curated to their personal interests by an unseen, all knowing algorithm, and even different from the CD which allowed you to easily skip to the song you wanted to hear, shuffle from a preprogrammed variety of discs, or “burn” a hand selected playlist, there was the record player. People listened to music differently on a record player. Technically you could drop the needle on the specific song you wanted to hear, but that required the kind of steady handed skill that fell somewhere between a divination and surgery. Most people just put on the record and pushed the start button — if you had one that spun the platter automatically and had an automatic arm. At that point you were committed to the ride of listening to all of Side A. Depending on the album, that could be a journey of 15 to 45 minutes, at which point you’d flip the record and repeat with Side B.
My point is, back in the day, people had a tendency to listen to an entire album from start to finish. Musicians didn’t just make singles — though record labels only wanted singles they could play on the radio to drive record sales — the true artists were intent on making an album, because an album allows you to tell a more complete story than a single song ever can. An album is an opportunity to go on a journey, to become a traveler with a storyteller who points out the details in the landscape and the adventures along the road you might otherwise never notice. Long play records would ebb and flow, taking you to peaks and valleys, into the darkness and back into the light. Not every song was a good one but you listened anyway and with time and analysis you came to see its purpose in the tapestry of the album. The real treasure came when you unearthed the otherwise unreleased jewels that are only found in the valley of the deep Cuttack and never heard in the radio. Those songs became a sort of shibboleth you could use to identify who was part of your tribe, because only the true believers would have become familiar with Side B Track 3.
One of my all time favorite musicians would definitely be categorized as an “oldie”. His stage name is simple, just one word, a single name that you immediately recognize like Prince, Madonna, or Dolly. His name is “David” and he has written such classic hits as “The Heavens Declare the Glory of God”, the soul crushing tear jerker “My Sin Is Ever Before Me”, and probably the number one hit song of all time “The Lord Is My Shepherd”. Maybe you are more familiar with them by their track listings, Psalm 19, 51, and 23 respectively. For a lot of folks David is more well known and beloved for his military career, or his years as a politician, but I prefer his contributions as a musician, and my favorite of his albums is a three track EP of deep cut songs that come near the end of the collection: Psalms 137-138-139.
Not all of the Psalms, or even all of these psalms, were written by David, but the genre itself seems to have been redefined and cultivated by his contributions. Rick Rubin never sang a song, but because of his contributions as a talent scout and producer we have legendary albums from The Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Slayer, Weezer, Jay Z and Neil Diamond. David may not have written every song in the catalog of Psalms, but you can’t think of the genre without him.
As with most of my favorite music, I stumbled across the EP via another artist. Sometimes you fall in love with a song before you later learn that song is actually a cover of a much older song. Such was my introduction to “By The Rivers of Babylon”. Though the original recording is roughly 2,500 years old, the version I first encountered was recorded in 1992 and was a deep cut from the self titled debut album by the all female Cajun/Zydeco/Country band Evangeline. The second to last song on the album was titled “By The Rivers of Babylon” and it captured me with its haunting beauty and four part harmony. In time I would learn this was a cover of a 1970 Reggae anthem by The Melodians, which became a global hit in 1979 when it was recorded by the German disco pop group Boney M, for whom it was a platinum selling record and top ten all time single in the UK. The song itself has origins that are much, much more ancient than the 1970’s. The lyrics are derived from Psalms 137 and 19, expressing the pain of exile and the yearning to return home felt by the Judean people following the destruction of Jerusalem and their Babylonian captivity. One of the things that captivates me about these lyrics is their universal appeal. The song has hit #1 on the charts in 19 different countries — as diverse as Australia Zimbabwe, France, Ireland, West Germany, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, and Spain — in a diversity of styles as unique as Cajun/Zydeco - German disco pop - Jamaican reggae — ancient Israelite lamentation. You know you have an all time hit when it can be recorded in any era, in any genre, and still have mass appeal. Music is one of the few languages that everyone speaks.
The song tells the story of heartache and longing felt by a displaced and occupied people who are being asked to sing their patriotic hymns as a form of entertainment for their captors and they no longer have the heart for those songs.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
One of my favorite old quotes says, “Music is what feelings sound like.” Perhaps that’s why Elton John once sang, “Sad songs say so much.”
Guess there are times when we all need to share a little pain
And ironin' out the rough spots
Is the hardest part when memories remain
And it's times like these when we all need to hear the radio
'Cause from the lips of some old singer
We can share the troubles we already know
[Chorus]
Turn 'em on, turn 'em on
Turn on those sad songs
When all hope is gone
Why don't you tune in and turn them on?
They reach into your room, oh-oh-oh, oh
Just feel their gentle touch
When all hope is gone
Sad songs say so much
If someone else is sufferin' enough, oh, to write it down
When every single word makes sense
Then it's easier to have those songs around
The kick inside is in the line that finally gets to you
And it feels so good to hurt so bad
And suffer just enough to sing the blues
This song certainly tells a tale of pain as deep, dark, and cold as George Jones “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, only this isn’t about one man losing the woman he loved and dying of a broken heart, it’s about an entire civilization losing everything they loved. When we feel the cold winds of loss blowing through our souls, we too can feel like we’ve lost everything good in the world. On those days — to borrow from Layne Staley of Alice In Chains - it can feel like we are “Down in a hole and I don’t know if I can be saved…Down in a hole, feelin’ so small, down in a hole, losin’ my soul”.
Grief and sorrow and loss can take us to some very dark and scary places — call it the hidden underbelly of our pain — and whoever penned the lyrics to “By the Rivers of Babylon” certainly descended to the depths of human depravity, when suddenly, out of the blue, he hits you with jarring lyrics as his pain turns to pure rage and hate:
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
Despite all the protests and parental warning labels, Marilyn Manson never wrote anything so vulgar and obscene. The Psalmist is literally praying that God would send someone to take the Babylonians babies and bash their heads against the rocks. Maybe I should let Todd Snider take this one for a minute, from his anthem to banned music “The Ballad of the Kingsmen”:
Marilyn Manson's real name isn't even "Marilyn Manson"
He's a skinny public high school kid from Florida, not some monster from out of this world
And like of a lot other skinny long haired public high school kids, he was sick of getting beaten up by the pulling guard all week only to go out on the weekend and watch the quarterback get all the girls
So he formed a band, man
Now he gets all the girls
A few years later a couple of latchkey kids go tragically mad and everybody's standing around the television store at the mall trying to figure out what went wrong
This guy says, "You think the life of a kid going to high school could've gotten so bad?"
This other guy says "Nah, it's just the words to one of them goddamn Marilyn Manson songs, you know the one"
You know, every ten years or so, our country and some other little country, we start firing all of our newest weapons at each other
For some reason or another, right or wrong, like it or not
It happens
And when it happens people get shot
And when people get shot they show it on TV a lot
Every night at six o'clock
And you don't even have to be eighteen to see it
You don't even have to be in first grade
Now brothers and sisters, I am only one guy
And I don't even know the words to that song "Louie Louie"
But I can tell you right now without battin' an eye
That the next time some latchkey kid goes wrong
It ain't gonna be 'cause that Eminem gets to say the word "fag" in his song
If you’ve made it this far but you’re hanging on by a thread because of some “adult language”, let me reiterate, the Psalmists — as in one of the guys who wrote the bible — is singing about wanting God to tell him its ok for him to swing babies like a baseball bat into a brick wall. Would rather your kids hear, write, or sing some “bad words” or be filled with the bad feelings of wanting to kill innocent people because they are hurting? If you’ve ever been in the abyss of anxiety you might have felt a tinge of that overwhelming hate and rage and violence in yourself. It’s powerful, it’s ugly, it’s scary, and it’s dangerous, and it’s perfectly human. Don’t mistake this for saying it should be encouraged — it shouldn’t — but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be expressed so that it can be addressed. That’s how we usually respond to what we perceive as injustices, especially when they are perpetuated against us or those we love. We want someone to pay, someone to suffer, as if that would somehow make us feel better — it won’t. I’ve tried it. When you hurt someone just because you are hurting you just end up hurting double.
That’s why I love this song — Psalm 137 — so much. It’s gritty, it’s raw, it’s real, and most importantly, it’s honest. I may not always agree, I may not always understand, I may not always be able to relate, but I can always appreciate when someone has the courage to tell the truth, even if no one wants to hear it. Maybe especially when no one wants to hear it, and the Psalmist said the quiet part out loud….and you know what? God didn’t freak out.
As obvious of a choice as it may seem to us now, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” didn’t originally make the cut for their album “A Night at the Opera”. Their record label Elektra rejected the song because they didn’t think radio stations would play a six minute single that was a bizarre mix of ballad, opera, and hard rock. If Psalm 137 was being written, recorded, and released today, the record label would certainly say the song is great, but you’ve got to cut the last verse…but God didn’t. He didn’t demand the Psalmist cut the track, step into the studio and scream, “You can’t say that! We can’t put that in the bible!” God did quite the opposite. God said, “That’s a keeper.” The question is why?
Sadly, far too many believers interpret this song as a sort of divine endorsement of violence, even when the innocent are the ones who pay the price. If you think God is endorsing, allowing or ordering the killing of children and babies here — or anywhere in the bible — then you have not yet met God. There is a reason, despite Abraham, Moses, and Elijah all having encounters with God in the Old Testament, the New Testament proclaims, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” If you want to know God you only get to know Him in Jesus and Jesus is overwhelmingly clear about His stance on violence — be the one who endures it and not the one who inflicts it. But when people feel like their personal power, their autonomy has been ripped away from them, they often seek to fill that vacuum of control by exercising power over someone weaker than them, and in the case of the exiles of Psalm 137, that weaker someone is Babylonian babies.
So why did God allow this in the bible? Because that is how people feel sometimes. As Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes sang in "Thorn In My Pride", "Sometimes life is obscene." Sometimes people are so eviscerated by pain and grief that it all coalesces into a singular form and expresses itself as unfiltered rage. You might have even experienced it yourself. After 9/11, many of us good Christian folks shook our fists in anger as tears streamed down our faces shouting we needed to “Nuke those people until the sand glows.” I did, and yet, if you had put the gun in my hand and the families of those terrorists on their knees in front of me, I could not have pulled the trigger. I know men who literally did under the banner of a “war on terrorism” and I’ve counseled many of those men in the decades since and I can tell you unequivocally, they wish now they’d never done it.
Sometimes humans do feel like the author of Psalm 137. Is it good, is it healthy, is it encouraged? Perhaps not, but it is true and real and truth is good and healthy and encouraged. God is love and light and God is truth.
Remember how I told you earlier that an album allows you to tell a more complete story than a single song ever can? An album is an opportunity to go on a journey, to become a traveler with a storyteller who points out the details in the landscape and the adventures on the road. Long play records would ebb and flow, taking you to peaks and valleys, into the darkness and back into the light. Not every song was a good one but you listened anyway and with time and analysis you came to see its purpose in the tapestry of the album.
Psalm 137 is just the first track in a three song EP. The story doesn’t end with the singer raging against the Babylonian machine. That’s just where the journey begins, in the valley of the shadow of death and hate and fear and the vulgarity of violence. When the opening chords of track two — Psalm 138 — are struck, you can already tell he has walked through the valley of the shadow of death, not merely into it. As Winston Churchill is alleged to have said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Psalm 137 ends with a man standing before his captors — believing their gods had “won” — weeping, unable to sing or remember anything good about God, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, but Psalm 138 begins:
I will praise thee with my whole heart: before the gods will I sing praise unto thee.
I will worship toward thy holy temple, and praise thy name for thy lovingkindness and for thy truth: for thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name.
In the day when I cried thou answeredst me, and strengthenedst me with strength in my soul.
The gods whom he believed had defeated his God, now have a front row seat for his praise song, and not just that, but soon the kings who destroyed their entire world and enslaved them — demanding they be entertained by the songs of Zion — will eventually join the chorus and sing along in praise to the God of Israel:
All the kings of the earth shall praise thee, O Lord, when they hear the words of thy mouth.
Yea, they shall sing in the ways of the Lord: for great is the glory of the Lord.
Though the Lord be high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly: but the proud he knoweth afar off.
Bear in mind, the troubles he’s endured don’t seem to have ended, but they have changed him, initially for the worse, but now potentially for the better:
Though I am surrounded by troubles, you will protect me from the anger of my enemies.
You reach out your hand, and the power of your right hand saves me.
The Lord will work out his plans for my life — for your faithful love, O Lord, endures forever.
Don’t abandon me, for you made me.
From bashing their babies, to dreaming of a day when enemies can sing a duet to the divine is as dramatic of a shift tonally as “Bohemian Rhapsody” takes sonically. But there is still one more track on the album, Psalm 139.
In the first verse David declares that God already knew what he was going to say, or what he couldn’t say because it got stuck in his throat, even what dwells in the depths of his heart:
O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me.
You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.
You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do.
You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord.
You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand!
Art is all about expression and interpretation. There is what the creator meant by what they produced and there is what the partaker experiences when interacting with it. The power and beauty of art is that it can mean different things to different people and it can even mean different things to the same person at different times in their lives. Art is not static. The second verse of Psalm 139 can mean two very different things depending upon the condition of the heart of the hearer:
I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence!
If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there.
If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me.
I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night—but even in darkness I cannot hide from you.
To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you.
Is this the terror of never being able to escape from the all seeing eye of God or the comfort of knowing He is present no matter your circumstances? Does this mean you can never get away with anything or that He is with you through everything? Either, neither, both. This is simply true, the interpretation is solely in your orientation to God.
My favorite part of the song, and the album, is in how it ends. It ends, not with certainty and answers, but remains ambiguous. How will this all turn out? It’s not set in stone, fatalistically determined by the divine, but it’s up to you.
O God, if only you would destroy the wicked! Get out of my life, you murderers!
They blaspheme you; your enemies misuse your name.
O Lord, shouldn’t I hate those who hate you? Shouldn’t I despise those who oppose you?
Yes, I hate them with total hatred, for your enemies are my enemies.
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.
As the album draws to a close, the Psalmist — the one who wanted to kill infants — is now wrestling with his feelings for his enemies. “O Lord, shouldn’t I have those who hate you? Shouldn’t I despise those who oppose you?” This line is one of the purest, truest, most sincere things ever written. Hate and vengeance seems so natural, so instinctive, and God surely hates wickedness, so these impulsed can’t be wrong….can they….or can they? Lord, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with these feelings, so I’m asking you — you who are in the highest heights, the deepest depths, and even inside my own heart and mind — search me, test me, show me, lead me. I can’t type these words without tears filling my own eyes. This album is the spirit’s journey in this life. A journey from a time and place when everything seems so clear, so plain, so cut and dry, but over time the landscape looks different, perspectives and perceptions change. What was once so clear is no longer so simple. This can be terrifying at first, but if we stay on the journey it can become a comfort, a reassurance that I am not alone in any of this. All that is asked of me is to be honest, and to be humble, which often come as a package deal. As the final notes fade into silence, the Psalmist no longer demands action or even answers, just presence. He realizes the best he can hope for is a recognition of when he is wrong and a willingness to seek out what is right.
I think I’ll close with a line from the Nine Inch Nails song “God Given”:
Come on, sing along, everybody now.
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