How I Became a Believer: Religion and Music
If you have kids, at some point you have probably had the suspicion your children’s music is sucking your soul dry. Perhaps worse, you may have found yourself happily humming along to the music that used to suck your soul dry. Maybe you have swallowed your pride as you tried to answer your nine-year-old’s earnest question, “which 1D album do you like best?” Better yet maybe you kvelled when your six-year-old piped up from the back seat of the car that the latest Justin Bieber album just isn’t as good the second time around and you thought – hope surging – he is no longer a Belieber and maybe, just maybe, that means Bieber albums will no longer play on endless loop during long car trips.
In my household, the musical divide is further fractured by the fact that my husband would prefer that the children wouldn’t listen to secular music. In my rational mind, I know he has the upper hand. It isn’t just that – as my daughter once loudly noted while listening to the radio – “a lot of Katy Perry songs are completely inappropriate.” The rejection of secular music also has to do with the role of music in spiritual transformation in the Jewish tradition. Some rabbis hold that music has the ability to uplift and shape your soul, and if you want your soul to bend in the right direction, the right music is important. Yet I also know if I am honest with myself that some of the religious music my children adore (YBC – Yeshiva Boys Choir – comes to mind) wears on me just as heavily as a Bieber album after a few listens. The tunes are catchy and I like the message, but why does it always feel like the YBC children are yelling at me? Songs like “Those Were The Nights (of Chanukah)” are cute, but they don’t exactly lift up my soul. I feel virtuous letting my children listen to YBC’s CDs and videos, but as soon as the children go to sleep, I change the music. On the rare instances that I find a religious music group whose melodies do actually seem to make my soul soar (Simply Tsfat comes to mind), my children mutter angrily from the car’s back seat that “this is BORING.”
Enter the Maccabeats. Originally formed in 2007 as a Yeshiva University (“YU”) student vocal group, the Maccabeats went mainstream four years ago following their YouTube release of “Candlelight,” a parody of Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite.” As their website (and their songs) makes clear, the group is dedicated to the philosophy of Torah u-Madda (תּוֹרָה וּמַדָּע), the integration of traditional and secular wisdom. Thus, many of their best songs rework popular American songs to religious and humorous ends. The implementation of Torah u-Madda in musical form not only is completely in keeping with YU’s mission, but also makes the Maccabeats a compelling example of American Religion at work. Rather than rejecting American popular culture, the Maccabeats embrace it and rework it for religious ends. I’d like look at the group’s blending of Jewish and American traditions in three arenas: (1) genre, (2) language and themes, and (3) parodic humor. It is this blending of secular and sacred, I suggest, that allows the group to entertain and uplift both the children and adults in our household.
At their best, Maccabeats’ songs rework the original lyrics by asking us to reassess what a Jewish life is. A prime example of this is “Book of Good Life,” their rendition of One Republic’s “Good Life.” Whereas the One Republic song seems to base its vision of having a good life on appreciating one’s (commercial?) successes, the Maccabeats’ song plays upon the liturgical phrase “inscribe me in the book of life” to emphasize spiritual growth. They sing,
Hopefully
This year will bring us happiness and peace
Hopefully
Sensitivity to others will increase
Hopefully
We’ll open our eyes and think more consciously
Cuz Hopefully
We’ll go from where we are to where we want to be (Full Lyrics)
Yet despite its long roots in Jewish traditions, the form of parody invoked by the Maccabeats is very much part of digital-age Americana. Song parodies form a major subgenre on YouTube (a quick search yields 17,900,000 results for “song parody”) and range from thinly-disguised attempts to regulate popular taste, to engagements in resentment humor (see Nelson), to fan mashups. Such parodies embrace the power of digital technology to allow mass response. For my young son, for example, almost every song on the radio is an imitation of “Minecraft Song”: Minecraft fans have created so many YouTube mashups of Minecraft footage, popular melodies, and Minecraft inspired lyrics, that for some young fans, the imitation actually supplants the original. In my son’s mind, Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” parodies Minecraft’s “Supernatural Mobs,” not the other way around. Perry’s candified vision of the world is a dim, “inappropriate” reflection of the palpable lived reality of the Minecraft world my son inhabits on a regular basis. In the world of YouTube, the line between parody and original is blurred. The Maccabeats similarly reverse and undermine the hierachies between the original, “real” American culture and the more spiritual version of American life their songs evoke.
Diane M. Nelson, “Gendering the Ethnic-National Question: Rigoberta Menchú Jokes and the Out-Skirts of Fashioning Identity,” Anthropology Today10.6 (1994): 3-7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2783154
Plaut, Joshua Eli. A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to be Jewish. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hjfpf
A Group Blog on American Religious History and Culture
Source: http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2015/02/how-i-became-believer-religion-and-music.html
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