My wife and I just got back from a wedding in Charleston, and while we were there, we wanted to sample some of the local flavor. We both noted that franchises and food chains had infiltrated the picturesque historic downtown area, and we wondered why. Our conversation went something like this:
“Why would someone rather go to Starbucks than to a local coffee shop?”
Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, is up there with Brian Wilson’s Smile as one of the greatest works of art never properly completed. But Dead Souls, at least to me, is so much more troubling because of the circumstances of its failure to launch.
Dead Souls was intended to be a literary trilogy paralleling Dante’s Divine Comedy. The three parts of the divine comedy are Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The first part of Dead Souls, the only part ever completed, pictures the protagonist Chichikov (whose name is meant to remind the reader of a suppressed sneeze) as a sniveling, scheming, petty worm of a man scraping for honors and wealth he never intends to earn or justify. It’s the Inferno portion of Gogol’s piece, and Gogol realized the ugly Chichikov (and the opulently indifferent feudal Russia) masterfully. The second part, what fragments are left of it, was to be Chichikov’s redemption through suffering (the Purgatorio portion of the narrative). Gogol was never satisfied with it. He burned almost every manuscript for it he wrote. Critics have wondered what happened to the project—and Gogol. His fictional output basically ground to a halt before his death. Most critics think the key to the whole thing is Gogol’s conversion to Christianity in 1840. As Robert Maguire explains:
In a meeting recently with a Christian businessman, Justus and I presented our case for why art in the church should be supported by a patron system rather than the market.
A few minutes into the presentation, the businessman interrupted us with a question that had been nagging at him: “But if the market has been so effective in other areas to get the best product to the people at the lowest price, why not allow the market to continue to work in the arts? Why should we promote the free market in every other area, but not in the arts?”
You may have noticed that many talented Christian artists split with the church—either completely, like Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan—or partially on various issues, like Michael Gungor or Dan Haseltine. It seems that many “fringe” Christian artists feel disconnected from the church, or at least uncomfortable inside of it. This is actually a common experience, far more common than most people know.
Derek Webb, former member of Caedmon’s Call, had this to say in an interview with Richard Clark:
First, I want to be honest. I have never liked Mumford & Sons. I wish I could tell you that without sounding pretentious. It’s not because I’m too hipster for the hipsters. There are a number of reasons why their music rubs me the wrong way: the guy’s impassioned “English Dave Matthews” voice annoys me. And I feel like all of their songs sound the same: How many times can you listen to the same banjo arpeggiating, kick drum stroking, guitar hyper-strumming, generic lyric moaning redundancy? I really don’t care how well it’s produced or how polished it has become. It just doesn’t hold my interest. Mumford & Sons is to indie folk what Jack Johnson is to surf pop. And if you like both of these music-by-numbers artists, well, I’m sorry—you probably also think Thomas Kinkade beats out Rembrandt as the “painter of light.”
Redundant consistency has been the mainstay of pop movements for quite some time. But that isn’t what really irks me about Mumford & Sons. What annoys me is that Mumford & Sons and many of the other mainstreaming “indie” bands seem to be selling sincerity without being sincere. And people buy it because it looks sincere. The popularity of Mumford & Sons and bands like them originates from the fact that the general population is tired of cynicism and the ironic distance. But I hate to see what will happen to people when they find out that yet another “authentic” voice turns out to be nothing more than a hollow receptacle for their own longings.
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