round 1
(5) collective soul, “shine”
dismantled
(12) ministry, “jesus built my hot rod”
394-391
in overtime
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 4.
THIS KID I KNEW: tucker leighty-phillips on “shine”
This kid I knew played basketball at the end of his street.
There was a basketball goal there, at the end of his street. The goal did not have a backboard, and the goal leaned forward a little bit, like it had a bad back and was lurching. You had to be careful while shooting at this basketball goal, because there was no backboard. If you shot too hard, too far over the goal, you’d shoot past it, and have to pull the ball from the hedges, which were tall.
But there was a net, and it made a satisfying swish when you shot the ball just right.
This kid I knew was learning to shoot the ball just right.
Square the elbows, complete the follow through.
This kid I knew always wanted to be an athlete. He wanted to swish in a game, in a college game, for the Kentucky Wildcats. In the kid’s fantasies, he wasn’t the sixth man, more like the tenth man, a walk-on player. Someone given a chance in garbage time. He was from Appalachia, where even in his dreams he was asked to bootstrap. This kid shot free throws at the goal at the end of his street and pretended they were important free throws for the Kentucky Wildcats. He was making an appearance off the bench in a conference game. He had a system. If he hit a certain number in a row, Kentucky won. If he missed, Kentucky lost. There was a heaviness on his shoulders.
Also on the block was a neighbor, a woman who claimed to see angels in old photographs. She would invite this kid I knew into the house by offering him a Pepsi, which this kid’s mother never bought, and she’d have shoeboxes of pictures across her kitchen table. Look, do you see him? the neighbor would ask, pointing at the background of an old family photo, an easter lunch or a day after church. She had named the angels, each after her many uncles. She was the only one who saw them in the photos, but he couldn’t tell her that.
This kid I knew didn’t just love sports, he loved the aesthetics of sports. He wanted to pitch in the majors, but also wanted to sit in the dugout, ice pack resting on his arm. He wanted to make a crucial save as a goalkeeper, but he also wanted to shout instructions at defenders, to motion them into better positions. He wanted to sidewalk slam his opponents like Kane, but he also wanted to enter the ring like him, adjusting his glove as he strutted. This kid I knew appreciated theatrics, the performances within performances. He mimicked the slapping of high fives between free throws.
One year, this kid’s school had thirty-two bomb threats. At some point, students realized they were a prank phone call away from a waltz to the football field, a reimagined recess. There must have been fifteen kids cycling through making the calls, a secret network of break-makers.
With his first paycheck, This kid I knew spent eighty dollars on used CDs at On Cue, which was what Sam Goody was called before it became FYE, before it went out of business. He bought Dylan, The Specials, AFI, Collective Soul. He burnt them to his computer. He put them on his first MP3 player. The full albums, not just the hits. He believed in the sequence of things, liked believing in numbers, that adding and subtracting made sense. He created a game with his baseball cards where players competed against one another through a competition of compared statistics. The game relied on numbers. Without them, there was no game. Sometimes you can play without a backboard, but you can’t play without a backbone.
This kid I knew was simultaneously desensitized and untouched by the outside world. He was a ten-year-old during 9/11, watching the news at school, thinking this is what happens in the world. He was taught to assume the war.
This kid I knew believed every alarm or warning or siren was just that: a threat. The things on the news were just programming. He couldn’t imagine violence that wasn’t telecast. He grew up in a small town. He heard a guy was shot at the root beer stand once. Actually, that might have happened after all this. Most of the pain he knew, at least the action-packed pain, shootings and car crashes and knifings, he saw on television. He knew about the slow-burn pain, drug addiction and poverty and hunger, he even felt some of it, but that wasn’t televised pain. He had been taught that all these pains were natural, inevitable. What could he do about what happened on the TV?
There was a shooting at a college campus, he saw it on television, but this didn’t feel like television pain. This felt closer. He wasn’t a college student, and he wasn’t planning on going to college, but he was in high school, dreaming dreams of playing basketball in college, even if he didn’t play basketball for high school, or anywhere for that matter, since his stepdad couldn’t give him rides to tryouts, though he’d tried once; he’d driven him halfway to the gymnasium before pulling into a Save-A-Lot and saying, we won’t be able to give you rides, you know, maybe we should just turn around. This kid I knew was at the basketball goal without a backboard thinking about pain, about pain that wasn’t his but felt like his because he was a number added to a much larger number, and people in that number had been subtracted. Some in that number had been failed.
This kid I knew watched the news, dialed up the internet and read the news, found message boards and read those.
This kid I knew loved Collective Soul. But so did this kid I didn’t know. So did this kid that did this terrible thing, that shooting on campus. He listened to Shine on repeat, scribbled the lyrics onto surfaces in his dorm room, searched it for a message.
This kid I knew couldn’t listen to that song for a while, fearing what he might find.
This kid I knew wanted to help, but didn’t know how. What could a kid in the holler offer anyone who had felt real pain? He had no idea; then he had one idea. He’d shoot free throws for the college. For every free throw he made, he’d donate a dollar to the university. He didn’t know anything about charities or NGOs and didn’t really have any money in the first place, but he wanted to help, to find a way to contribute, to provide numbers that added to a great cause, to make sense of something unsensible.
He was fifteen. His heart was in the right place, his mother said, but there wasn’t much he could do. So he shot free throws anyway, just to have some sense of equilibrium. The sound of the swish was soothing. Angel Neighbor hollered at him from her front door. She wanted to give him a Pepsi, which was her way of saying she wanted him to look at her angels. This kid’s mother had been fighting with Angel Neighbor. She believed Angel Neighbor was stealing her mail. She angled a video camera at the mailbox to catch her. Angel Neighbor had been mowing into their front lawn, four long stripes on the other side of the hedges, claiming she’d found blueprints that showed it was her property. This kid’s lawn was always half-mowed, his mother racing to complete what Angel Neighbor started so the block didn’t gossip. But she said she had the blueprints, blueprints only she could see. This kid’s mother didn’t want this kid to spend anymore time with Angel Neighbor, but this kid was too nice to say no.
Angel Neighbor was watching the news about the shooting. A man in a suit from the college was talking about tragedy. On the crawler was a statement from Collective Soul, who were heartbroken about the tragedy. This kid sat at the table with his neighbor, looking for angels, trying not to think about the tragedy. Angel Neighbor smiled as she pointed to photographs, telling him each of the angel’s names. Each one an uncle. He squinted over each picture, scanning the shadows and glares of light in the background, trying to catch a glimpse.
Tucker Leighty-Phillips is a writer from Southeastern Kentucky. His website is TuckerLP.net. He was never a walk-on for the Kentucky Wildcats, but likes his odds this season.
The Church of Truth Without Christ: oscar mardell On “Jesus Built My Hotrod”
(A Sermon in Six Parts)
1.
The Butthole Surfers are in Chicago for the inaugural Lollapalooza. Ministry seizes the occasion to drag Gibby Haynes into the studio. But Gibby is too drunk to sit on a stool, let alone to sing, let alone to sing to this. The drums are in four-four with the snare on the second and fourth, but the guitar is in five. Gibby can’t even figure where in the bar he is. He falls to the floor some ten times during the recording and spews gibberish in between, a logorrhoeic corpse.
For two weeks, Al Jourgensen cuts the tape to pieces, stitches it back together, supplements it with exhumed parts; desperate to re-animate the thing, to make the monster speak.
The label isn’t impressed. It wanted Ministry, not this bing bong bullshit. But it releases a single anyway, hopeful to make something back on its investment. Promo copies come with a quart of motor oil, gratis.
And it’s a runaway hit, more eloquent than its creators had ever thought possible. But what does it say? The actual lyrics are of little assistance.
2.
Its success might be due to those supplements. “Redline/Whiteline Version” (as opposed to the “Short, Pusillanimous, So-They-Can-Fit-More-Commercials-On-The-Radio Edit”) samples from two important sources.
The first is John Huston’s 1979 film Wise Blood—a faithful, if budget-constrained, adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel of the same name. Brad Dourif plays Hazel Motes—a young war-veteran turned puritanical atheist who spreads his godless gospel from his car—in O’Connor’s novel, a “red coloured” Hudson Essex (albeit, rendered here as a 1958 Ford Fairlane).
Early in the film, Motes takes a taxi to meet a prostitute named Leora Watts; the song’s shorter samples—“Listen: get this” and “What are you talking about?”—are borrowed from his conversation with the driver. But it’s from Mote’s impassioned sermonising that the longer lines are plundered:
Nobody with a good car needs to worry about nothing, do you understand?
Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.
I’ve come a long way since I believed in anything: I come half-way around the world.
Where you come from is gone. Where you thought you were going to weren’t never there. And where you are ain’t no good unless you can get away from it.
The film, like the novel, expects us to take these utterances ironically: as the dogma of a fanatic zealot whose car is not simply a mode of transportation, nor even a makeshift pulpit, but itself an object of veneration, a false idol before the One True God. Motes eventually finds redemption, but this is the kind of gibberish he spews beforehand.
In appropriating that gibberish, Ministry’s intention is clear: to canonise Mote’s sin and to condemn his salvation, remapping his octane-fuelled nihilism as the actual path of righteousness. Cars, for Ministry, are no distraction from the Almighty, but the Works through which He is known. Or to put it more eloquently, ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’.
3.
The second important source is David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet. Five minutes into “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” there’s a brief lull in the noise and a voice announces, “Let’s hit the fucking road”. Turns out it’s Frank Booth—the gas-huffing gangster played by Dennis Hopper, and better known for the phrase, “Don’t you fucking look at me.”
Late in the film, Frank and his goons take Dorothy Vallens (lounge singer and sex slave to Frank) with Jeffrey Beaumont (her lover and the film’s protagonist) to meet Suave Ben (who is holding Dorothy’s husband and son as hostages). Ben treats his guests to a lip-sync performance of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”. It’s a deeply disquieting spectacle. Caked in makeup, his features oddly exaggerated, Ben looks an awful lot like ventriloquist’s dummy; Orbison appears to be singing through him, as part of some camp possession. But all’s too much for Frank; the spirit must be expelled. He ejects the tape and utters the line in question, “Let’s hit the fucking road.”
In appropriating that line, Ministry’s intention is, again, clear: the joyride doesn’t wake the medium from the trance; the joyride is the trance. Gibby isn’t spewing gibberish: he’s speaking in tongues.
But what spirit does he channel? What kind of ‘Jesus’ builds a ‘Hotrod’?
4.
When Hopper first read Lynch’s script, he said to the director: “You have to let me play Frank Booth because I am Frank Booth.” True, Hopper is perfect in the role, not least because he cannot help but remind us of his character Billy in Easy Rider. Frank is like the nightmarish result of the hippy dream, the Charles Manson borne of the John Lennon.
But Michael Ironside has said that the role was written for him, and that he turned it down “Because I was at a stage in my life where portraying… a knife wielding, vigilante rapist just didn’t appeal to me.” Steven Berhoff also claims to have refused it, finding in it “nothing…except destruction.” And so does Harry Dean Stanton, who reckoned, “I just didn’t want to deal with it because of all the violence.”
What if Stanton had been in Blue Velvet? What, for that matter, if Frank had been in Wise Blood?
5.
In Wise Blood, Stanton plays Asa Hawkes—a street preacher who purports to be blind, but whose story turns out to be fraudulent: Hawkes attempted to blind himself with quicklime (and to absolve himself, thereby, of his worldly concerns) but failed because his faith wasn’t strong enough. It is to Hawkes that Motes utters his most succinct defence of his secular creed, his insistence that the pilgrim’s real progress is not spiritual but geographic:
I’ve come a long way since I believed in anything: I come half-way around the world.
Hawkes’ retort doesn’t make it onto the Ministry single, but it’s every bit as cutting:
Now you ain’t come so far that you could keep from following me.
Whatever progress Motes has made, in other words, is insufficient to quell in him the urge to seek the preacher, to extinguish the desire to be saved. Hence, it is only by completing what Hawkes could not—by blinding himself with quicklime—that Motes is able to attain his own salvation. It’s like the world itself is reciting Frank’s injunction avant la letter, while the two men compete to fulfill it: “Don’t you fucking look at me.”
What kind of Jesus builds Hot rods? The one we encounter when fulfill that same injunction, when we absolve ourselves of the world by “hit[ting] the road”—that is, when we do exactly as Frank says.
6.
In Blue Velvet, the same Dourif plays Raymond, one of the goons that takes Dorothy and Jeffrey to meet Suave Ben. As they enter Ben’s lair, the following dialogue unfolds:
Frank: Raymond! Where’s the fucking beer?
Raymond: Right here, Frank. You want me to pour it?
Frank: No, I want you to fuck it. Shit, yes, pour the fucking beer.
It’s every bit as disquieting as Ben’s lip-sync, precisely because Raymond looks an awful lot like Frank’s dummy—a prosthesis expected not only to fulfill but to anticipate his master’s every whim, and chastised when he can’t. And Dourif is perfect in the role, not least because he cannot help but remind us of Motes in Wise Blood. On the one hand, Raymond is like a Motes who hasn’t found salvation—a pilgrim who has continued to measure his progress in miles-per-hour. On the other, Raymond is like a Motes who has—for this very reason—become the perfect ascetic, who has learnt the ecstasy of true faith by abandoning it altogether, who has succeeded in leaving the world by turning wholeheartedly towards it.
Frank has hardly finished asking for beer when Raymond offers it to him—and then he asks stupidest question imaginable. Is Raymond a medium for Frank’s desires? Or just an idiot? Does he speak in tongues? Or just in Gibberish?
What Gibby teaches us is that the two are one and the same: just different kinds of shitfaced.
Oscar Mardell was born in London, raised in South Wales, and currently lives in Auckland, New Zealand, where he plays found percussion instruments, typically cutlery, under the stage-name 'Reverend Spooner'. He made a cameo in the video for Princess Chelsea's 'We Were Meant 2 B', and was one of the masked dancers for Jonathan Bree's 'You're So Cool'. He is the author of Rex Tremendae from Greying Ghost and Housing Haunted Housing from Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers.