My Life in the ’90s #2 – Please Hammer Don’t Hurt Me

This Groveshark playlist contains my favorite songs from February 1990.  You should listen to it while reading this.

 

Please Hammer Don’t Hurt Em is the bestselling rap album of all time, and one of the least respected. It’s not hard to hear why; set it next to Mantronix’ “This Should Move Ya,” an all but forgotten rap album that came out at almost the same time, and it becomes pretty clear that MC Hammer has no business on the mic. But Hammer’s songs are catchy, even if they do rely too heavily on hooks from other songs (the biggest hit on the album, “U Can’t Touch This,” would be nothing without its sample from Ricky James’ funk classic “Super Freak.”  James actually sued Hammer for copyright infringement, and got a songwriting credit on “U Can’t Touch This” as a result.  But Hammer was all about the showmanship, the dance moves, and the cross-marketing.  The things that get you lots of 12 year old fans.

I vaguely remember hammer pants being in style in sixth grade.  I think my mom made me some, but I don’t think I ever wore them.  I don’t know if that’s because things my mom sewed never really came out right, or because I wasn’t bold enough to wear hammer pants to school. I also remember “Batman” being all the rage.  That movie – Tim Burton’s Batman, though in sixth grade none of us knew or cared who directed a film – came out in summer ’89.  I wasn’t allowed to watch it.  I saw it late one night at my grandparents’ house, probably over Christmas vacation, probably several years later.  They had cable.

Toad the Wet Sprocket‘s “Pale”  sounds like the ’90s to me, but not exactly in a good way.  Toad the Wet Sprocket weren’t famous yet, but the mood and tone of this album embody something I remember clearly.  The songs are soggy and whiny.  The singer sounds like he is so busy drowning in melancholy angst that he can barely muster the effort to sing about how everything he does is half right, and it’s so hard to tell right from wrong these days.  I can see him wearing his faded plaid flannel, his long unwashed hair, his stubble, his coffee cup and fingerless wool gloves.  Actually, that might be me I’m picturing, circa 1998.  So I guess that makes this album ahead of its time.  Maybe that’s why nobody was listening to it – yet.

Jon’s grandfather died around this time. Jon was his only grandson, and he spoiled him, like grandpas are supposed to do.  And more than once, I got to come along and get spoiled, too. I remember going to a hockey game with Jon and his grandpa, who treated us to snacks and candy and even bought me a hockey puck souvenir that I proudly took to show and tell the next day (and that dates the memory; that show and tell was in fifth grade, either ’88 or ’89.) This memory speaks to either how poor we were as a family or how stingy my parents were; I’m not sure which.  But going to a minor league hockey game was a major event for me.

Grandpa V (he let me call him Grandpa: my own grandpas lived too far away and so I never got to do anything with them) got terminal cancer and, after months of being confined to bed, shot himself in the head.  Of course my mom didn’t tell me that last part, I found out the way most 12 year olds find out about most “adult” things; I overheard adults talking about it.  I was upset when my mom told me he died; it’s the only time in my life I can remember literally bursting into tears.  I was horrified when I found out how he died, though looking back on it now it doesn’t seem so terrible.  It was the cancer that killed him, not the gun.  If it had been a few years later, there would have been a legal and much less dramatic way to end his life; we were in Oregon, after all.

A couple of things that last paragraph brings up:

1. I don’t think I overheard adults talking about Grandpa V’s suicide.  I think our pastor announced it from the front of the church.  He had a habit of saying things he probably shouldn’t; his motto was “better to ask forgiveness than permission.” But some things are hard to ask forgiveness for. How do you apologize to a 12 year old for telling him that a man he loved but barely knew had committed what seemed to me then like an unforgivable sin?

2. Why was going to a minor league hockey game such a big deal?  Because we never did things like that in my family.  I remember my dad took me to one Portland Trailblazers game, in the fifth grade.  They got slaughtered by the Milwaukee Bucks; it was a boring game.  My dad and I cheered for the Blazers regularly together, watching games on the TV.  Those were some good teams, those years, and I have lots of fond memories of watching basketball with my dad.  Why did we only go to one lousy game? Nosebleed tickets weren’t all that expensive, and it would have meant so much to me then.  Were we really that poor?

The Cramps – Stay Sick

I wonder if psychobilly ever made it out to the Oregon town I lived in.  Surely somewhere in that backwoods town were some weirdos cooking meth (wait – did people cook meth in backwoods shacks in 1990?  When did that become a thing?) and listening to “Bikini Girls With Machine Guns.”  I can remember one guy who might have been a candidate.  His name was Kevin, he was several years older than me and wore unlaced army boots and sleeveless t-shirts.  He might’ve been missing a tooth. He played tuba in the band; he was a pretty sweet-hearted guy (not lack the sullen and nasty guys who tormented me on the bus) and was an outcast in a totally different way than I would be.  I have no idea if he cooked meth or listened to the Cramps, but when I hear this album, I think of him with a smile.

The Fall is the kind of thing I’m always trying to like, even pretending like I like, but really, I don’t.  That’s one of the main reasons for this project. For most of my life, I have pretended to like things that other people – cooler people — liked.  Sometimes, I pretended to like things I had never heard of, let alone heard.  At this point, I’m not even sure what I like and what I’ve just pretended to like for so long that it just seems like I like it.  I’m done with this.  I don’t care what anyone else thinks.  I don’t like the Fall.

I do like the Cowboy Junkies.  ”The Caution Horses” is kind of monotonous, one song sounding basically like the next, but it’s monotonous in a soothing, enjoyable kind of way.  There’s a later Junkies album (the Trinity Sessions) that I listened to a lot in high school, and it will figure more importantly into my high school years, but I’ll save that story for later.

My Life in the ’90s #1 – January 1990 – You’ll Never Vote For Me Again

(This link is a grooveshark playlist of songs from January 1990. You should listen to this while you read this post.)

I was elected class president in sixth grade. It was a huge deal for me. I got elected because I made promises I couldn’t keep; I promised a longer Christmas vacation and better school lunches. But don’t hate me; I wasn’t being cynical or playing the system. I didn’t know I couldn’t keep those promises, either. I had no idea what I would have the power to do (mostly choosing new playground equipment) and what would be completely out of my hands. I was in sixth grade. My understanding of authority structures and the politics of the public school system was very weak.

Listening to They Might Be Giants makes me think of Tiny Toon Adventures, because of one episode in 1991 where they made cartoon music videos for “Particle Man” and “Istanbul.” How weird was that, for a kid’s show to make their own music videos? I had no idea at the time that the songs were real songs by a real artist with a popular album — I just though they were part of Tiny Toons randomness. Now, 22 years later, I know better.

But let’s face it, “Flood” might be the only record released in 1990 that I actually would have listened to and liked in 1990. My sixth grade self would’ve loved its weird jokes and randomness, songs about night lights and changing the name of New York from New Amsterdam. They Might Be Giants is a nerdy band to like, so I guess that makes me a nerd from early on. The difference between nerds and geeks, I think, is in their sense of humor. Nerds like terrible, corny, random jokes, the kind of jokes TMBG traffic in. I love this album now, and I would have loved it in sixth grade, too.

I started to hate the words “smart” and “potential.” Teachers always wanted to talk about my potential, and it was never a good thing. It sounds like praise when someone says “you have so much potential” but really it just means they want you to work harder. I can remember an exercise Miss O would do during lunch where one student was put in front of the room and everyone else had to take turns saying something nice about that person. And everyone just said how smart I was, and I didn’t want to hear that. I wanted to be more than just smart. Or I wanted people to see me as more than just the smart kid in the class.

 The Sundays are all jangly guitars and dreamy vocals. It makes me think of people a few years older than me who seemed hopelessly more sophisticated than I was. But not really anyone in particular. Just older kids. It reminds me of the first Sixpence None the Richer album, which I wouldn’t listen to until college, and of the Cranberries, which I listened to a lot in high school.

I had a big crush on my teacher, Miss O. She was young and pretty and single and very, very nice. I can remember being depressed when she got married, but that was a few years later.

Joan Jett released an album of covers called “The Hit List.” There are a few decent songs on it – her cover of the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” isn’t bad, and shows us what the Pistols might’ve sounded like if they’d ever learned to play their instruments. I can’t escape the feeling, though, that this is what butch lesbians in high school were listening to in 1990. Especially if they drove convertibles. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know any butch lesbians who drove convertibles, but I was pretty young, and naive. I may not have recognized one if I’d seen them. But they would’ve been playing Joan Jett very loud behind the football stadium.

I collected a lot of baseball cards. I almost collected the entire 1990 Donruss baseball card set, one pack at a time. A pack of Donruss cards cost 45 cents. You could buy two packs for a buck and still have a dime left over for dubble bubble. You couldn’t buy them at the grocery store, you had to go to the next store over – a five and dime called Sprouse-Reitz.

My best friends were Jon and Andy. They collected baseball cards, too. I think Jon got me started collecting cards. He had more than I did, and I had more than Andy did. That was pretty much how everything went. Jon’s dad was a mechanic, so I don’t know where their money came from, but Andy’s dad was a pig farmer, and they never had much. Neither of them went to the same school I went to, and this will be a recurring theme of my life in the ’90s.  Almost all of my church friends (and those were my close friends) were homeschooled, and school was a pretty lonely place for me. But not so much in sixth grade.  I was class president.  Everyone liked me.  I was on top of the world.

Ricky Van Shelton has a nice voice, in the same neighborhood as Roy Orbison and the same zip code as Elvis. And his producer surrounds him with a very listenable, classic country sound that avoids a lot of the pitfalls of modern country music. But he apparently can’t write to save his life — only one track on RVS III is a Van Shelton original — and he’s not that great at picking songs to cover, either. “Life’s Little Ups and Downs” (originally recorded by Charlie Rich in 1969) was certainly better off left in the vault. This is the kind of music my dad would’ve listened to, if my dad cared about music.  I guess I should say this is the kind of thing that would make him stop fiddling with the radio tuner.

Yesterday I listened to a terrible prog-rock album by a guy named Fish that seemed to go on forever, then a critically acclaimed synth pop record by The Blue Nile. Frankly, I couldn’t tell the difference. On second listen, Fish is truly terrible and the Blue Nile is the kind of thing I try hard to like and mostly fail. I found one song I’d like to keep on the playlist — “Headlights on the Parade.” If someone were to tell me that “Hats” was their favorite album of 1990, I’d nod politely and say it was a very good album. If someone were to say that about Fish, I’d give them a funny look and try to get away before they started talking about Dungeons & Dragons.

Other albums released in January 1990: 

Luka Bloom is an Irish folkster who could really have used a producer and a maybe a backing band, which means it’s January 30, 1990. He has that cheap, tinny guitar sound of so many folksters who just plug into an amp and play. He’s not great, but not terrible, and he makes me think of so many artists I’ve listened to because I saw them live, or they were friends, and I wanted to be friends with somebody famous; somebody doing something interesting.

Tanita Tikaram was a weird low voice I can’t get used to, and don’t want to.

Earth, Wind & Fire, who were so hot in the ’70s, are trying to be relevant in the ’90s, and the musicianship is there, but it just feels like they’re trying so hard to “reach the kids these days.” There are some truly terrible hip hop tracks on “Heritage.”

Hank Williams Jr. is another of my dad’s favorites, and I can find a few songs to like. “Good Friends, Good Whiskey and Good Lovin’” sounds a lot like John Lee Hooker’s “One Bourbon, One Scotch and One Beer” reworked. I especially like “Man to Man,” where he asks St. Peter if he can talk to Hank Sr in heaven. Sounds hokey, but the song works for me.

I started 7th grade in 1990.  I graduated college in 2000.  The ’90s were a pretty formative decade in my life.

This blog is an attempt to sort through those years in my life, using music from the ’90s as an impetus and a trigger.  The music you listen to when you’re a teenager is generally what stays with you for the rest of your life.

This will be a gargantuan task, but I’m going to attempt to listen to every popular album that came out in the ’90s.  Of course I can’t possible listen to everything, but I’ll use Wikipedia’s charts like this one: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_in_music#Albums_released) to guide me.

I’ll write about the music — what I thought about it then, what I think about it now – as well as about what I remember happening in my life when that music was fresh and new and in the air.

This is mostly a therapeutic exercise for me.  I have several reasons for diving into those years, but I don’t want to get into them yet – they should become more clear as the blog progresses.  I hope this is blog is enjoyable for people who don’t know me.

The First Rule of Lent…

…is you don’t talk about Lent.

Seriously folks, I’m tired of hearing about how you gave up soda/candy/sugar/caffeine/whatever for Lent.  If someone offers you something that would break your Lenten fast, just say “no thank you.”  You don’t need to sneakily highlight your own spirituality by informing that you’ve given up what they just offered you for Lent.

Guns, God and Liberty

A family member sent me a link to this video over email and asked for my response.  Below is what I wrote back.

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I know your mind’s pretty made up on this issue.  But since you sent this to me, it seems like the courteous thing to do is reply.

I would ask you to read this whole thing if you’re going to read any of it, and to read all of it before you respond.   I know it’s long, but I don’t operate very well in sound bytes. It takes me a while to say what I think.

I can’t speak for the politicians.  All I can do is explain my views on this political issue, and why I support certain gun control measures.

To the video:

1.  He says,  “I never, in 15+ years of doing this, arrested someone on a gun crime who had that gun LEGALLY.”  

Yes.  People who commit gun crimes often steal those guns from people who buy their guns legally.  This was the case with both the Sandy Hook shooter and the Batman shooter.   This is why I think it’s not going to be very effective to keep passing laws that make it harder for people to buy guns legally.

One solution to this would be to make it harder for people to steal guns.  So maybe we pass a law that requires anyone who wants to purchase a gun above a certain caliber or magazine capacity to also purchase or prove that they own a gun safe, and/or pass a law where, if your gun is stolen and it wasn’t in a safe, that carries a criminal penalty (like a fine or a restriction on your ability to buy guns in the future.)

Big picture, though, I think it’s about supply and demand.  Guns are easily stolen because guns are plentiful.  If we effectively passed laws that decreased the number of guns in the country, they would be harder for criminals to come by.  Would they still get them?  Yes, some of them would.  The really determined criminals will find a way to get their hands on a gun.  But I think a lot of them wouldn’t.  Consider the Sandy Hook killer.  He stole his guns from his mom’s closet.   If she didn’t have those guns where would he go?   Would he have the determination and wherewithal to seek out an arms dealer and purchase the guns he needed?  I doubt it.   We can’t stop everyone from getting guns.  But we can put up roadblocks, make it more difficult, and stop a lot of people from getting guns.

Looking elsewhere, I think there’s evidence to support this.  For instance, ownership of fully automatic weapons (M-16s for instance) is heavily restricted in America.  It’s not illegal to own one, but it’s really hard to come by a legal one.  As a result, there aren’t very many crimes committed with M-16s.  Can a determined person get one?  Sure, if he has the money and the contacts.  Is there demand?  Sure.  I’m pretty sure that if the Sandy Hook killer or the Batman killer were able to get their hands on a fully automatic weapon, they would have.  But they couldn’t, so they didn’t.

You’ve got to ask yourself: if the biggest, most powerful weapon the Sandy Hook killer had been able to steal from his mom’s closet had been a Glock, would as many people have died?  Would she have been any less safe from criminals?

2. He says, “I could have carried a gun, my entire time, anywhere in the United States, on planes, anywhere I chose.   I didn’t.  That was my choice!”  

Not exactly. That was his special privilege, afforded him by his job.  As a secret service agent, he has gone through intensive screening and special training to make sure a) he’s not a nutcase who’s going to hijack a plane and b) he knows how to use his gun responsibly, and when, as well as how to make sure it doesn’t get taken from him. Also, as noted above, the kind of gun he’s allowed to carry anywhere in American is limited by gun control laws.

He says “That was my choice!”  Like every American has the right to choose whether or not they want to take an AR-15 as their carry-on item when they travel.  Not only is that NOT the case, I’d be surprised if he really thought that SHOULD BE the case. Let me ask you: do you think every American should be able to bring an assault rifle with them on an airplane? 

This is what gets me every time in this debate: people who act like it’s all or nothing.  Like there’s only two positions in this debate:  PRO gun control or ANTI gun control.   The fact is, it’s a scale of deadly weapons, where “1″ is a pocket knife and “1000″ is a nuclear bomb.   If there were only two positions, than one side (the “liberty” side) would have to believe that nuclear bombs should be for sale at Wal-mart, and the other side (the “safety” side) would believe that possession of a pocket knife should be a felony offense.   I don’t think anybody believes pocket knives should be illegal or nuclear bombs should be for sale (well, you never know – maybe a handful of kooks out there.  There’s always a handful of kooks.)

Instead, we’re somewhere on the scale with our current laws – say, everything below “300″ is legal, and everything above “300″ isn’t.   And one side is arguing that everything above “295″ should be illegal, and the other side is acting like our essential liberty is defined by the guns between 295-300.   And next year, one side will be arguing that everything below “305″ should be legal, and the other side will be acting like keeping the guns between 300-305 illegal is all that separate us from absolute, apocalyptic chaos.

When the fact is, ALL of us (except for some kooks) believe in some degree of gun control, and ALL of us (except for some kooks) believe in some degree of liberty.  And all we’re really arguing about is whether or not we’re going to slide the laws 5 or 10 degrees to the left or right.

3. “It was my God given right to protect myself and my family.”

First off, I don’t think that’s a God-given right. At least not the Christian God. Jesus says love your enemies, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, and then he demonstrates it by refusing to protect himself when he’s arrested and put on trial, as well as refusing to protect his family when John the Baptist (his cousin) is arrested and executed.  And if you say, “well, that’s Jesus, he was special, that’s not for us to presume to be like him,”  let me point out 2,000 years of martyrs who also refused to protect themselves and were willing to die rather than fight.

Secondly, he seems to imply that in order to protect his family, he needs to have a gun and be willing to kill someone with it.   I don’t agree with that at all.   There are nonviolent ways to protect your family.

I do believe we have a responsibility to protect our families, and the weak and innocent. But not at the expense of another person’s life.  I will lay my life down for my family; I will die before I let someone hurt them.   But if it becomes a choice between losing my life and taking someone else’s, I will lose my life, because my eternal destiny is secure.

These are my convictions; I hope that if they’re ever tested, I have the courage to stick to them.

Having said all that, I absolutely agree with him that our rights are not given to us (or taken away) by our government.  To quote the great anarchist and rabble rouser Utah Phillips,  “The state can’t give you freedom, and the state can’t take it away. You’re born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.”

4. He says: “We live in a society of wolves.  You do not fight back by creating more sheep!”

I don’t believe that we live in a society of wolves.  I believe that we live in a society of people.  Created in the image of God, loved by God enough that he would die for him. The worst, most depraved, most hardened and violent criminal in America is still loved by God and bears his image.  God gives life, and God takes away life.  If God decides that someone is too wicked to live, he can stop his heart in a second.  If I decide that someone that God, in his mercy, has let live, is too wicked to live, than I am standing in judgement over and against God on that person.   And Lord help me if I ever do that.

Maybe refusing to own a gun makes me a sheep.  Jesus said “I send you out like sheep among wolves,”  and he himself was led “like a lamb to the slaughter.”   If believing that there is another way to fight evil in our world – a better way, JESUS’ way, the way of the cross and of laying down our lives – if that makes me a sheep like Jesus, then I’ll be a sheep.

5. He says, “I’m just a guy who wants to live and let live… but ladies and gentlemen, to use your tax dollars to pay a government that slowly but surely every day whittling away more and more of your ability to live and let live is not what people who died and bled for meant this country to be.  That is not what [the flag] represents. That is not a piece of fabric, it’s not a tablecloth, that is an idea, an idea that’s unique to this place, right now right here!”  

This little part of his speech is wonderfully libertarian.  It’s not hard to hear Cheech and Chong shouting it in the ’70s.   It could be copied word for word by someone who wants to legalize gay marriage, legalize marijuana (or any other drug) or keep abortion legal.  Among a dozen other things.

Those are my thoughts.  I want to be respectful of the places where we disagree, and don’t intend to offend you or instigate/rile you up in any way.   If you want to respond back, I’m open.  If you don’t, if you just want to agree to disagree, that’s fine with me too.

Question for Old Testament Experts

Most days I don’t wish I was in seminary, but every now and then I’d love to pick an OT professor’s brain.   Here is a question my daily Bible reading has raised for me: if you have some knowledge about this, or know someone who might and wouldn’t mind forwarding it to them, I’d be very grateful if you’d comment.  

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1 Chronicles 21:1 is the first time in the Bible that translators decided to translate the Hebrew word “satan” as a proper noun – “Satan.” The same word appears earlier in scripture, but gets translated usually as “adversary.”

That makes 1 Chronicles 21:1 the first time Satan appears by name in scripture, though we tend to “read him in” to earlier passages, like Genesis 3.

My question is this: when the Chronicler wrote, did he mean the same things we mean when we say Satan? Did the word carry the same associations for the writer and his audience as it carries for us today (Prince of Darkness, king of demons, ruler of hell, etc.) Would contemporary readers of 1 Chronicles known who/what he was talking about? If so, where/when did they learn? Is it in Jewish mythology somewhere besides scripture?

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I believe the most responsible way to read scripture is to ask first what it meant to the original readers, and then ask how it applies to me.  But with this passage, I don’t feel like I can grasp what it meant to the original readers.  

Crossing my fingers and hoping for lots of comments  :)  

 

Ash Wednesday

Today is a day of repentance, leading into Lent, a time of fasting and expecting God to show up in resurrected glory on Easter.  

I am giving up all music and books that aren’t Christ-centered.  

Not because “secular” music and books, art and literature, are bad.  But because they so easily become idols in my own life, and a way I look to be loved and accepted, valued and esteemed, apart from Christ.  

I love to know what’s hip, what’s fresh, what people are talking about.  I want to be part of that conversation.  I am almost a hipster, though I don’t have a handlebar mustache or a trucker ballcap.  I like to know about Frank Ocean and Kendrick Lamar, Foxygen and James Blake; I love to have opinions about 30 Rock’s finlae and the fifth season of Burn Notice.  

Growing up, especially in high school, I wasn’t allowed any of these things.  Our home was pretty legalistic and we couldn’t watch many movies or TV, and every CD that darkened the door had to come from the Christian bookstore.  I went to public high school, but knew nothing about what my peers were talking about; I didn’t listen to Kurt Cobain or Metallica; I didn’t watch Quentin Tarantino movies or Seinfeld.  

So when I left home, without really rebelling against my family or my faith, I rebelled against those strict rules.  I soaked myself in pop culture and tried to catch up on everything I’ve missed.  It becomes a compulsion with me.  Now, years later, I know more about which bands are hip and happening than the crowds I was trying to catch up with ever knew.  I know about the Basement Tapes and Exile on Main Street, too.  I love top 10 lists, or top 100 lists, and — here’s the problem — somewhere, on some level, I measure my own worth by how many albums/movies/TV shows/books on any given list I’ve read/listened to/watched.   I read “War and Peace” not because I’m interested in it (though it is pretty good) but because I saw it on the top of a list somewhere, and felt inadequate because I haven’t read it yet.   I feel the same way about Proust, and “Last Year at Marienbad,” and Ziggy Stardust.  

So I’m giving all that up for Lent.  I’m giving up music and books (my job won’t permit me to give up films) but what I’m really giving up is top 10 lists.  Critical opinions.  Award shows.  Chat rooms.  I’ll listen to music that reminds me of God and how good he is, and I’ll read books that help me grow in my understanding and love for God, God’s word, and God’s people.  

I’m rejecting this idea that if I haven’t heard the latest album, haven’t read the most popular book, my life is empty and meaningless, I’m less than a full person, and I’m not worthy of love.  It sounds silly to put it on paper (or as it happens, web.) But there it is, and I repent.   God forgive me for looking elsewhere besides into His arms for value, worth, meaning, happiness, fulfillment.   Amen.