Kicking at the Darkness by Brian J. Walsh

Author:Brian J. Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL062000, Cockburn, Bruce—Criticism and interpretation, Popular music—Religious aspects—Christianity
ISBN: 9781441238856
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

What about the Bond?

If ever there was a song that depicted the pain of life east of Eden with an utter rawness, it is “More Not More.” With a vocal performance that reaches a raw intensity not previously seen in the Cockburn corpus, “More Not More” literally screams for something deeper, more true, and more authentic in human experience. After a road tour that could render one exhausted and cynical, the artist cries out for “more.” But this is not the “more” of an insatiable consumerism, feverishly seeking out new experiences to consume. No, this young and emerging artist sings, “not more fame / not more money not more games.” None of this will satisfy. None of this will fulfill the deepest yearnings in the human heart, because fame, money, and the games that we are all required to play cannot address the thoughtless cruelty and loneliness that keep us in chains. Having composed a number of songs that chronicled the advent of a cultural winter of loss, pain, and death, the artist sings that there must be more than this:

more songs more warmth

more love more life.

Rooted in a deep conviction that the dancing Creator is the source of “lines of power / bursting outward,”[274] and that it is “love that fires the sun,”[275] the artist insists that “there must be more . . . more / more current more spark.”

The worn-out, depleted experiences of life can’t be the last word. The cynical dismissal of hope must not rob us of our passion and render us silent. Those who think that the artist is “a fool for thinking / things could be better than they / were today” cannot strip him of his tormented hope. Maybe he is a fool, but we have seen that this is precisely what we are called to be. In the face of personal and cultural stagnation and deception, there simply must be “more growth more truth.” If authentic human life is found in free communion with one another, God, and all of creation, then we need “more chains” to be “more loose.” The shackles that restrain us from love must be undone. The chains of injustice must be broken.[276] Created in love and for love, and declared to be delightfully good by the Creator, we cry out in the face of all that would rob us of our true humanness,

not more pain not more walls

not more living human voodoo dolls.

This is quite a song to be composed on Valentine’s Day, 1980. This is a song of deep lament that stubbornly insists that things don’t have to be this way, a song that refuses to accept our human brokenness as normal while desperately hanging on to hope.

“Sorrow is a creative act,” wrote Nick Cave.[277] The love song, Cave insisted, “is the sound of sorrow itself.” It is “clothed in loss and longing.” We can hear that sound of sorrow in all of its bitterness and disappointment in “You Get Bigger as You Go.” This is as painful an account of a marriage breakdown as you will ever hear.

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