3/21

samuel rafael barber
on
norman greenbaum, “spirit in the sky”

(march badness)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

It’s not uncommon for artists to look back at a particular work and bemoan a missed opportunity, or an overstuffed clause, or a single brushstroke out of keeping with the larger composition. Even with works as celebrated as Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky,” you’ll read an interview and never see the piece the same way after considering its creator’s mixed feelings. It’s one thing for Delillo to (at least apocryphally) purchase all available copies of a first work (Americana) to burn them. It's another thing entirely for a work that has resonated with millions to represent failure in the eyes of its creator.

It's a good thing then that I feel no such reservations about my essay. I said what I came to say (in Norm’s spirit) and at least seventy-three human beings enjoyed it enough to vote for it. Or, I said what I came to say and at least seventy-three human beings sufficiently enjoyed the song to rationalize voting for my essay. Or, I said what I came to say and at least seventy-three human beings completely ignored it and voted for the song anyway. It’s all the same in the end.

It was always a lost cause. “Morning Train (9 to 5)” is a tough first round matchup under the best of circumstances, and buttressed with an enlightening essay by T Fleischmann, I didn’t have a chance. It was all in vain (it always is).

I’ve made my peace with this outcome in the five years since. I’d always made my peace with this outcome. Norm helped prepare me. Sure, I was that kid with a morbid sense of humor from the earliest of days. “Expect the worst and hope for the best” or "Everyone you know now or will ever know will be dead one day, and soon" might as well be tattooed under my armpit. It was never in question that the final sentence of the biography attending any published piece of mine would provide an update as to exactly how many remaining years I was projected to live according to the Social Security Administration’s calculator. It was never in doubt that I would lead Norm astray. I’m not Cinderella—I’m Sam in case you’ve forgotten—and I don’t write her sort of stories. We would not be making a deep run into the bracket and pulling off the upset of all upsets. I knew that going in. Still, the first-round loss hurt.

Foreknowledge of your fate will not save you. This is what aging has most taught me. I thought it might save me, back when I began including my life expectancy in my bio. I thought I could condition myself in this way. I hadn’t read Kafka’s letters at that point. The odds of “winning” the competition were outrageously slim, as were the odds of attending dream school after dream school pursuing my passion for literary absurdism for that matter. It’s a wonder that I’m here at all—that out of nothingness came something, and out of that dust and debris came a 5’8’’ Chicano who will never come to terms with how outrageously bad the Mexican food in Colorado is.

I might disagree with Norm on a lot of things. I don’t believe that there’s any sort of spirit in the sky—not in the way he means, at least. My childhood dog is not there. My friends and family will not be waiting for me, there, where we can relive the glorious 2002-2003 Spurs Championship run at a leisurely pace divorced from the system of wage slavery which governed our corporeal lives. But the place he’s singing about? I know that place. My essay is there. Someday, I will be there too, and out of that nothingness will come a 6’2’’ Chicano capable of writing an essay about “Spirit in the Sky” which makes it out of the first round. Or, if that is too much to expect (as Kafka reminds us, “there is always hope--but not for us”), a 5’9’’ Chicano who will eventually come to terms with how outrageously bad the Mexican food in Colorado is. That would really be something. That would be a start. —Samuel Rafael Barber

A Convenient Lie: Samuel Rafael Barber on “Spirit in the Sky” 

I was fifteen or sixteen, in chemistry with Mr. Malasky, or perhaps pre-cal with Ms. Flores. In any case, the teacher was out sick. In contrast to the school at which I would work a decade later, every single minute of every single day of class was not meticulously accounted for, on a lesson plan or otherwise. Rather than have a social studies or English teacher deliver the lesson without preparation to the best of their ability, we watched Remember the Titans. Rather than work on homework for another class, I participated in its viewing.
Fifteen or sixteen, in chemistry or pre-cal, it was a day of revelation. It was a Monday or Tuesday, to be sure . . . or, now that I strain to really think about it, likelier still a Friday, of course the possibilities of this existential breakthrough having occurred on a Wednesday would be symbolically potent, narratively neat, convincing me that this day I am now recalling in all its granularity thanks to the miracle of memory must have been a Thursday. In any case, I then realized that everything I think and believe and create is fundamentally at odds with the vision of humanity on display in the Boaz Yakin-directed property, that the clear preference for death over life in Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” makes the song’s intergenerational resonance all the more perverse in what it reveals about a culture saturated with an obsession with death it dares not confront, and that the song might be bad, but is also, without question, good.
A portion of “Spirit in the Sky” plays 18 minutes into a property conventionally held to be one of the very best sports movies of all time, as the grown men depicting teenaged boys struggle in adjusting to the interracial bunking policy at training camp, eventually deciding to handle the conflict as those of my gender often do: by attempting (and mostly failing) to beat the shit out of each other. As a white linebacker intimidates the black quarterback from choosing a spot near him, Greenbaum reminds us that, “When I die and they lay me to rest / Gonna go to the place that’s the best.” As Wood Harris and Ryan Hurts brawl, Greenbaum answers the immortal question of what happens when we reach the void, “When I lay me down to die / Goin’ up to the spirit in the sky.” While testosterone and insecurity fly about, causing a ruckus and breaking things, one wonders, contextually, how this song’s usage in this moment of the movie makes any sense at all. Greenbaum, an observant Jew, has insisted throughout his career that the undeniable influence of Christian thought is merely malleable material, clarifying in a 2011 interview with radio talk show host Ray Shasho that, “The song itself was simple, when you're writing a song you keep it simple of course. It wasn't like a Christian song of praise, it was just a simple song. I had to use Christianity because I had to use something.”
All this haunted my mind nearly a decade later, when various clips from the film—including the brawl over bedding—were taken out of context in order to instill teachers new to a particular charter network with the mantras and frameworks of leadership we would recite at the beginning of every four hour block of professional development every Friday afternoon for the next ten months. Iron sharpens iron. We are a united front. Those in charge of training a few hundred of us during these two weeks in the summer of 2018 spent primarily in a high school cafetorium—in advance of a year of grappling with the consequences of housing discrimination amongst other manifestations of Capital segregating people of color to predictably substandard outcomes—were enormous fans of Remember the Titans. Denzel certainly has the gravitas to carry the burden of confronting audiences with a version of racism which elides more or less every reality of how it manifests within the world in which we actually live, it’s true. For telephiles, there's a pleasure in identifying a young Avon Barksdale and Dr. Chris Turk and Randy Hickey and Ryan Gosling (in only his second picture) from among the enormous cast. And so we remember the Titans for the worst of reasons.
Nationwide anti-busing activity was remarkably successful. Let there be no mistaking the disconnect between actual trends and the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night. Schools are more segregated now than when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided. The movie is ostensibly telling the story of integration in public schools, not that you’d notice by watching. One can forgive a viewer of Remember the Titans for not realizing this. For thinking, wistfully, that if we rounded up all boys of all colors so they might give each other brain damage in this manifestation of social-sanctioned violence under the direction of an eloquent black man, racism would be a product of a past in which the median African-American family didn’t possess a tenth the wealth of the median white family.
So I can’t help but laugh, now, when Norman Greenbaum reminds us all over and over again that our lives of strife and conflict will end, eventually. That, sure, think what you will of modern life with its broken representational democracy and oceans warming at a rate equal to five detonating Hiroshima bombs per second, but the best place is waiting for us. If only we might die. And soon.
The case I’d like to make for this song does not rest on its intrinsic badness. Its lyrics redefine repetition—even within the domain of pop—in that the chorus is barely distinguishable from the almost internally-identical verses, to be sure. The case I’d like to make for this song does not rest on its redeemableness in comparison to other similarly-celebrated cultural detritus, either. Its instrumentation, typically-spare compositionally, has nonetheless created a deservedly iconic opening. There are respectable riffs, or at least passable approximations of riffs! This song has plenty of ‘Tude.
No. I humbly ask you to vote for “Spirit in the Sky” because never before has a song with gloomier implications been so co-opted by the toxic culture from which its voice promises blissful escape. There is no better representation of the essential badness of persevering within a perversion of this so-called free country than its cynical appropriation by the very forces who would do anything for a buck but nothing for any other reason.
This is a song almost everyone agrees principally imbues the listener with hope, but a hope denied to them according to the only physical laws or experience of consciousness possible. According to IMDB, since 1984 Norman Greenbaum’s music has been used within 84 commercial properties, almost all of which are thanks to “Spirit in the Sky.” Greenbaum’s delightful website provides its own listing of the song’s appearances, including some fifty films, a handful of television shows, and advertisements for companies including Dodge, SBC (now AT&T), American Express, Toyota, Enron (!), Infinity, Nike, and Gatorade.
As I reflect and write on this, the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.—an avowed democratic socialist who is remembered for having a dream rather than for his anti-war speech regarding Vietnam, which led to his denunciation by one hundred and sixty-eight newspapers in the days that followed and an approval rating at the time of his death that was lower than Trump’s has ever been––it’s useful to remember “Spirit in the Sky” as another example of how Capital will appropriate anything and everything to sell what’s always been sold using packaging with convenient emotional resonance for the demographic priorities of its target audience.
Audi’s 2019 Super Bowl advertisement is instructive. An average white man makes his way across a scene of bucolic beauty. In the distance, the average white man spots his beloved grandfather, registering surprise as he is welcomed home and ushered into a barn. It’s clear from context—the humming of birds, the curious sterility of everything in view—that the average white man has joined his grandfather in death. Some car or other is unveiled from beneath a sheet beneath the barn’s roof, though its reliance upon electric power will be significant. Gripping the steering wheel, the average white man’s stupid grin makes clear that he is happy, finally. Suddenly, he is jolted out of this satisfaction as a single, whole cashew emerges from, presumably, an esophagus. It flies across his cubicle from within the corporate farm from which, against all odds, he briefly believed he could escape. A coworker saves the average white man’s life with the Heimlich maneuver, or, rather, whatever it is we call it now, after Heimlich tired of dealing with a domestic legal scene in desperate need of tort reform to pre-empt the frivolous lawsuits filed when the act bearing his name failed their loved ones.
Everyone claps. Eyes haunted by a return to a workplace and world from which those of his and my generation will never be able to retire, the average white man recalls the state of power in this country: Worker productivity increased 69.6% between 1979 and 2019, though hourly pay rose a mere 11.6%, leaving us to a world in which millennials (median age of 31) own 4% of real estate by value in comparison to the third owned by boomers (median age of 35) in 1990. These boomers owned 21% of all wealth, back then, and though millennials are four years from a median age in which direct comparison is possible, we currently account for a paltry, a scant, a whopping 3.2% of national wealth, with Mark Zuckerberg’s $68 billion fortune alone accounting for two-thirds of the Capital distributed across the seventy million of us. Even Gen-Xers, with their 9% share of national wealth at the benchmark median age, put our conditions in stark relief.
All of these facts and figures rebound and resound in the noggin of the average white man, now gasping for air. Returning to consciousness, the average white man is full of despair. He yearns for release, a return to the grandfather and barn. He yearns to die. Greenbaum’s tune kicks into high-gear as Audi agrees, “A thrilling future awaits.” A beat, as “On Earth” fades into existence, joining this first sentence using an animated text transition straight out of Powerpoint 2002. “One third of all new Audi models will be electrified by 2025” the advertisement ends amidst the crooning.
Never mind that racism is better addressed by dismantling specious single-family zoning policies which enforce modern day redlining. Never mind that electric power includes sources like coal which too must be unequivocally abandoned. Never mind that wars will soon be fought over water, that hundreds of millions of people will require cross-continental relocation in the decades ahead, that 400,000 people already die every year as a result of climate change. Never mind any of that. Shut up, feel the things the song usually makes you feel in a non-commercial context, and lease if you can’t buy.
As I grow older and older with each and every passing day, as I grow wiser and wiser with each and every passing day, certain truths become inescapable. At twenty-seven, I’ve had another revelation. Its profundity remains as self-evident as ever. Continuing to listen to this song while continuing to live in this world while attempting (and mostly failing) to articulate the scope of doom and suffering which await those of us who will live long enough to witness the full collapse of a decaying empire forty years into its inevitable decline, I’ve finally come around. Finally, I too believe we’re going to a better place when we die. Is it the best place? Norman and I might quibble, there, given the theological incompatibility of our understandings of what is entailed within this state. But is it a better place? As I listen to the song on repeat for perhaps the ninety-seventh time while writing this second-to-last sentence, I’d like to think we’ve developed a real psychic bond, Norman and I. I’d like to think Norm and I have managed, against all odds, to reach a kind of consensus.

Samuel Rafael Barber is 0.00000001343724% of the population and the author of the chapbook Thousands of Shredded Scraps of Paper Located across Five Landfills, That if Pieced Together Form a Message (The Cupboard, 2019). He has degrees from Brown, Arizona, and Columbia, and is a PhD student at the University of Denver. His fiction has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, Green Mountains Review, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, The Rupture, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. According to life expectancy tables, he will live another 55.1 years.