Just as pop music is the soundtrack to our lives, so can it tap into our spiritual yearning.
life took place in a car with Tom Waits singing on the stereo. On both occasions, the galvanising theme was homelessness.
In the first incident, I was barrelling down the freeway when Gavin Yet came on the radio.
recording of a homeless man singing a religious song. The lyric "Jesus' blood never failed me yet" is repeated over and over, the orchestra.
It's intensely moving. In the 1993 recording, the gravel-voiced Tom Waits joins the tramp's song.
road, I had to pull over in the emergency lane to catch my breath.
When Waits joined in, I had an overpowering feeling of being means a religious person. I was unable to drive until the song was over.
A couple of years later, Tom Waits' singing (one of his own driving a homeless Aboriginal woman to a welfare service.
Mary had just been assaulted and robbed. She'd been sleeping rough and her boyfriend had been sent to jail. Mary was overwhelmed by hopelessness; she was suicidal.
As we listened to Waits' music on the car stereo, something remarkable took place. I watched as Mary's mood lifted from despair to joy. The singer and the song moved her so completely, it transfigured her state of mind.
When it had finished, she practically radiated goodwill the music, she said was one of the greatest things she'd ever experienced. The spiritual force of Waits' music was revealed to us both.
prominent Christian overtones in Waits' oeuvre.
Performing songs Changed, you can see why. Quoted in The Times, an offers listeners a form of spiritual succour. Although he has never publicly professed a Christian faith, Waits' lyrics are often simpatico with Christ's message.
His songs venerate the downtrodden, the dejected, the prostitutes and the beggars. According to Father Spadaro, Waits' often grungy material offers clearly seems to inspire a sense of the sacred. And this obviously Spadaro's argument, it occurred to me that my CD collection is full of popular artists who, like Waits, traffic a compelling brand of spirituality.
Some are indeed inspired by the Bible, others borrow from Hindu, Buddhist or Jewish sources. Given the demise of the mainstream church and the erosion of faith in our era, it just resting place. Waits is, of course, only one of many popular pious, but from an understanding of suffering and ordinary life.
Transcendence. In his view, even some of the more unlikely pop resonated spiritually with listeners; they topped the charts, sold millions of copies, and won Grammy Awards."
So much pop music, says Friskics-Warren, caters to "our innate It all seems so obvious, really.
In the well-worn path to substance, commentators often ignore how much of it has been equally obsessed with matters of the soul. Employing the vernacular, pop artists habitually explore deep questions about who we are and what we should live for. Irish pop group U2's classic best articulates the ongoing quest.
Even in these secular times, can we ever really suppress our desire to experience the numinous? almost becomes a public nuisance. There is Madonna's enthusiasm for Jewish mysticism, Nick Cave's fervour for Christian imagery, Jim for Afro-spirituality, Leonard Cohen's embrace of Za-Zen Buddhism and George Harrison's earnest appropriation of the Hindu path.
to become the next World Redeemer, or at the very least, a prophet. era. Leonard Cohen's very surname provides an amusing comment on his art "kohen" means priest in Hebrew.
And what about that other great monotheism? It's hard to forget how 1970s balladeer Cat Stevens became Yusuf Islam, a devout Islamic convert.
Within the older African-American blues and soul traditions, it Christianity.
There was the great blues singer, the Reverend Gary Davis, whose musical style influenced many artists including the appropriately named Resurrection Band. One of my favourite soul divas, Mitty Collier, eventually left her pop career to pursue full-time spirituality as a pastor in Chicago. She now exclusively performs gospel music.
human history. Even Plato, who was mistrustful of the arts, said that "music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and everything". It doesn't have to be Mozart.
A Lennon-McCartney pop song can arouse both tears of joy and profound introspection.
integrity of a pop song? Surely much pop music is simply posturing and cant?
In fairness, you could make that argument about any number of religions, too. Spirituality has a significant element of subjectivity attached to it. One man's spiritual path may be another's vulgar abomination.
Just take Australian Christianity; it Costello to the furiously censorious Reverend Fred Nile. The fact extent to which spirituality is an innately human expression.
works, which tend to be unambiguous dedications to the glory of God.
Popular music's spirituality is more subtle and robustly complex. It is concerned with meaning rather than God. A fine listener above the paraphernalia of the material world, above from the dogma of established religion.
So powerful is Imagine at communicating the dignity of the human soul, it was chosen by For me, it is impossible to ignore the rampant mysticism and Goldfrapp. It's a broad church, and when you stop to think about it there are so many artists you could include, a basic list would run as long as this essay.
The power they generate can be astonishing.
When I listen to Nick Cave's 2001 song Darker with the Day, for instance, the attended. The song doesn't just make you think, it gives you tingles. It reminds you that who you love is more important than and love followed just behind me, panting at my feet, as the steeple tore the stomach from a lonely little cloud.
Combined with Cave's sonorous delivery and Old Testament gusto, this is one of the greatest six-minute sermons you'll ever hear.
rock and roll. His 2005 book In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work charts, among other fascinating things, the spiritual journeys of our greatest pop stars.
For DeCurtis, deeply spiritual." In an intriguing interview, David Bowie was writing. Always.
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dreams an infectious musical form. His most recent album, Modern with heavy-duty soul searching. Most of the songs suggest that the loving relationship.
In his lyrics to Beyond the Horizon, wretched heart is pounding, I felt an angel's kiss/My memories are drowning in mortal bliss. After listening to the album you're be a mess of suffering and commercialist decadence, as long as there are songwriters like Dylan, the human race is going to be OK. He's been channelling our redemption forever.
Surely this gift of hope is one of the greatest contributions an artist can offer.
lives, and it's certainly true that we all remember what we were Abba/Blondie/Eminem/Pink song. But it's more than that: the better songs help us endure.
They make our daily travails bearable. Take a a train. Lost in musical prayer, they could be attending a silent church service.
popular culture. While the Jesuits' Father Spadaro may insist that Tom Waits is doing Christ's work, it might be more appropriate to think of Waits, and those like him, as providing a lyric road map to a better place. Country legend Emmylou Harris (whose delicate "There's an old Sufi saying, something like, 'The thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, but only seekers will find it.
' Just the act of searching is sometimes the end in itself." Amen to that.
Chris Middendorp is a Melbourne writer.
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