Danielson Famile at Schubas, March 2
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Anybody feel a little shiver of agreement reading that? Well, if I’d rattled off a similar list of unappealing stereotypes about Jews or Buddhists or Muslims, you’d be appalled, and rightly so. In educated liberal America, it’s only sort of OK to be a Christian, and only if you keep it to yourself. Which is not what Christians are supposed to do–they’re supposed to spread the good news to everyone they meet. And that’s part of what makes the rest of us think they’re creepy. Jews don’t knock on your door at indecent morning hours (when only sinners are sleeping) with apocalyptic little magazines. Muslims don’t harangue strangers in bus stations. And Christians, whether they believe it or not, hold power in this country. Why are so many things closed on Sunday? ‘Cause it’s the Sabbath. And who says Sunday is the Sabbath? Christians. Why can’t gay people get married? It’s not like the Buddhists care. So if you’re feeling in any way under the heel of Christian doctrine as (crudely) interpreted by cultural powerbrokers over the centuries–and it’s hard not to–Christians might seem creepy.
I grew up in a part of the country where “religious diversity” means that the Methodists and the Baptists both make an effort to be polite to the Pentecostals. So I heard a lot of this stuff, and at the time I decided that the least creepy music actually came from the Holiness folks, because at least, with the crying out and the waving of hands and the collapsing to the floor and the hair-raisingly plangent harmonies, they seemed to be expressing something I could have brief, intense flashes of believing in–or at least believing that it existed very powerfully for them. The hymns in the richer Methodist churches, by contrast, were just too stately; they seemed to be trying to emulate an orderly, formal heaven full of angel choirs that presumably (unlike their earthly imitators) were never ever out of tune. I still read the Bible in those days, but those elegant, soaring nearer-my-God-to-thees seemed out of phase with what I saw there, especially the violence of the Old Testament and the passion of the tribulations visited by the Lord upon his chosen people. To me, the divine was just as likely to sound like howls and cries of confusion and despair, or inexplicable joy.
Which is why its appeal is, so to speak, cross-cultural. I don’t know how many of the folks crammed into Schubas while the Danielson Famile brought down the glory a couple weeks ago have voluntarily set foot in a church lately–lots of the dancing was decidedly secular, beer sales didn’t seem to be down, and the person who was singing along louder than anyone else happened to be a Judaic scholar. Is there an unbreachable gulf between indie hipsters and hard-core Christians? You’d think so, and yet the joy of Danielson is that they play their hearts out just as though there isn’t. You don’t have to buy a single word of their message to enjoy their lush creative overgrowth.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
