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.