New Gods

"Mother," by Blind Melon; "Mama," by Cam Cole

Religion and rock and roll are not exactly synonymous. Besides the distinct genre of ‘Christian Rock,’ there aren’t many songs praising any particular deity (at least none that one might traditionally conceive of as a deity. It’s almost ‘uncool’ to believe in God—in fact, there’s a longstanding tradition within the genre to flaunt your disbelief, in the form of Satanic images, irreverent displays of how little the concept means to you.

Despite this, creation and God are inseparable. Whether he knows it or not, an artist is tapping into a divine well of knowledge that pours out through them. I’ve heard it called different things, conceptualized in different ways: “The Great Creator” in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, the “logos” in Philip K. Dick’s Valis (among many, many other places). The ‘lore’ essentially this: the art that we create, the knowledge that we obtain—the entirety of our own lives, really—exists in totality in a spiritual realm that overlays our own world but that we cannot see. This ‘logos,’ this complete everything that is the entire universe, expresses itself through living things, through us. It is a difficult concept to explain. We don’t have the proper words to (which is why we’re constantly creating imperfect symbols). It’s hard to wrap our heads around, because it is so much larger than our minds. Yet it is a concept that we surrender to when we are in the act of creation, whether we realize it or not.

Some people are more in touch with this truth than others. There are some musicians that are very aware of their spiritual roots. Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins is one example. He is quite vocal about his belief in a higher power, and is thus humble about the source of his music. But he is perhaps the exception rather than the rule—after all, he often incorporates Biblical and other mythological references into his music, and definitely doesn’t fall under the blanket of ‘irreverent, God-denying rock star.’

Most musicians are not so self-aware. I think this is why so many of them fall into the trap of drugs and alcohol. It is an artificial means of surrender, a painful and temporary way of striking down the barrier between ourselves and the ‘logos’ that we channel when we create. Julia Cameron writes about this in The Artist’s Way:

In my mind, drinking and writing went together like, well, scotch and soda. For me, the trick was always getting past the fear and onto the page. I was playing beat the clock—trying to write before the booze closed in like fog and my window of creativity was blocked again.

This stuck with me. It’s how I used to write for a very long time. It’s a painful, fearful ritual, extracting short bursts of ingenuity amidst hours of suffering. Nevertheless, it is a ritual. A forced, sacrificial means of surrender.

I suspect that people who use this method are typically unaware of the true nature of the space that they are accessing. If they did understand, they’d likely abandon their impulse to drink or smoke or overcaffeinate or whatever else their drug of choice might be. They’re unhappy. Tortured souls. Many of them are very talented. Extraordinarily talented, which is perhaps why the art can’t help but leak out of them, even though they block themselves off from its source as much as possible. A lot of these people probably die with no knowledge of what it is they are accessing. I have one musician in particular in mind as I write this: Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon.

An erratic, often out-of-control addict, Hoon was an extraordinary rock singer and songwriter. With a unique and powerful high-pitched voice, he was the perfect complement to an extraordinary talented band. He was brilliant. Blind Melon as a whole was brilliant—they had a gift that would have gone down in history if it had been allowed time to mature. Hoon died of an overdose at the age of twenty-eight, leaving behind an unfinished album and a baby girl.

One of the best songs off of this album is titled “The Pusher,” and is a remake of a Steppenwolf song of the same name. The Steppenwolf version condemns drug ‘pushers,’ dealers who get people hooked on deadly illegal drugs and then profit off of their addiction. The type of ‘pusher’ ridiculed in the Blind Melon song is a different type. In the song, Hoon trashes people who try to force their religion on others. He retains a lot of the same lyrics—“the pusher don’t care if you live or if you die” being one example—but instead of condemning drug pushers, he says “goddamn that Bible-pushing man.” One might gather from this lyric that Hoon was an atheist. I’m not sure what exactly he believed. Perhaps he was quite spiritual, and simply loathed religious cult-leader types that tried to ‘sell’ false beliefs for a profit. Either way, I’m reminded of a different Blind Melon song, which paints an entirely different picture of Hoon’s spirituality: “Mother,” a b-side of their self-titled debut album.

This might be my favorite Blind Melon song, which is remarkable because, in addition to not appearing on the actual album, it was recorded live. The ‘mother’ that the song is referring to is Mother Nature. It’s a sad song, actually, about how badly humanity has foresaken its ‘mother,’ with our cities and pollution and overindulgence. It is an apology for the way that we’ve destroyed the beauty of nature that was gifted to us. It reminds me of another rock song: the 2019 song “Mama,” by Cam Cole. The message of both songs is that we must be repentent, that we’ve sinned against the universe that has given us birth. It personifies this universe, and deifies her. In fact, besides the fact that the god it worships is female, this type of thinking sounds an awful lot like Christianity.

Isn’t all mythology just a collection of symbols created in order to communicate an abstract concept?

I don’t know why people today feel more comfortable worshiping ‘Mother Nature” than “God the Father.” Perhaps it’s a rebellion against the way we were raised. Those old Christian symbols have come to represent something ugly and oppressive, something that Christ probably never intended, but that nevertheless took hold after generation upon generation of re-imagining and distortion. It is natural for old systems of thought to give way for new ones. After all, it’s not what you pray to that matters. There are Christians who use their belief system to bring them close to ‘God,’ and Christians who go through the motions whose true spirituality is fundamentally hollow. The same goes for Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or any of the infinite number of belief systems out there. They are all abstractions that people use to name that infinite well of existence and all of its components. The same goes for people who forego traditional symbolism altogether, and create their own names for the things that they can’t see but nonetheless know are there.

I think ‘Mother Nature’ being our modern God is quite fitting. After all, every mythology is a reflection of its culture, and our culture, with its emphasis on pragmatism and science, might feel comfortable with worshiping a force of nature that can be seen and experienced, as opposed to an abstract figurehead that can seem fantastical and silly. Perhaps, with all of our emphasis on individuality and empowerment, many of us find a female deity less threatening. Whatever the reason, I see beauty in the fact that we can’t stay away from our spirituality for long. Even in an ‘atheistic’ society, these images keep popping up in unique forms. It is a human instinct, like curiosity and doubt and love and creation itself. So God bless Mother Nature, or, rather, Mother Nature bless us all.