Murmurings of a Movement

soundslikeamovement:

Many of you have asked when another movement will be.

We’ve taken the past month off from gathering in local community hubs to strategize, dream, and bring other people around us into the vision of SOUNDS LIKE A MOVEMENT. 

Our team is ramping up for a new season of gatherings that mobilize communities from awareness to action around cultural renaissance. Someone once said that between knowledge and action there is a great chasm. Awareness is simply not enough. We must find ways, no matter how small, to shift culture from knowing there’s a need to doing something about it. 

That said, there are murmurings of a movement coming to a new city this July. We’re particularly stoked about partnering with this city but don’t want to give everything we’re planning away at once. Let’s see if you can figure it out…

• This city is in Southern California. 
• It has a population of 461,522.
• 268,000 of those people are unemployed.
• The town was laid out and settled in 1881 by developer W. E. Willmore, who sold lots on the site as a seaside resort community called Willmore City.

Tweet your guess to @SLAMovement. First one to get it right gets free home-made milk & cookies for them and their friends at the next event. Not even kidding! 

A Culture of Doubting-Hipsters?

Too full of fear and prophecy to see
The revelation right in front of me
So sick and tired of trying to make the pieces fit
Cause it’s not what bearing witness is
-  David Bazan

But you, You’ve gone too far this time
You have neither reason nor rhyme
With which to take this soul that is so rightfully mine
- Mumford & Sons

Let’s face it. It’s hip to doubt.

Just take a look at the current indie music landscape.

Lately there’s been a swell of connection and intrigue over artists who have grown up Christian, become disenfranchised with their faith, and are now transcribing their complex conversations with God on vinyl and mp3s for a new generation to hear.  Artists like David Bazan and Mumford & Sons are among the list of well-received musicians using their influence to fight through their inability to reconcile their questions with the God of the Bible. The result?  Some haunting, deeply poetic, thought-provoking, and beautiful songwriting. Props to these artists for capturing the dialogue between man and the Creator in such personal and relatable ways.

The tragedy is that they stay there…in the tension, in the unresolved, stuck in their doubt.  It alerts me because I believe their state of being doesn’t simply reflect a musical trend but embodies an entire generation of culture.

Let me say that doubt is an absolute necessity.  Historically, the church might have been better off had they embraced it a bit more. Instead, the bride has gotten hung up on theological details and debates making them non-negotiables for a successful marriage. I’m convinced our culture of grown-up church kids wouldn’t be as unsure as they are now had they been given the freedom to ask difficult questions in Sunday School.

Consider this, however: Doubt for the sake of more doubt is meaningless.

Doubt should inevitably lead to faith. That is its purpose. If there were nothing to doubt there would be nothing to find faith in.  One simply cannot exist without the other.

So, why are we so stuck as a culture? Why are our lyrics so entitled when they speak to the Creator? Why do we insist He explain himself (read Job 38-40)?

Some of this artistic expression is not only extremely healthy but incredibly biblical. Read the Psalms and you won’t get far before running into one of David’s tantrums with Dad. But if we remain in the tantrum, if we don’t move forward with faith and hope, if we don’t exhale our questions with radical expressions of bravery and trust, we have nothing to say for ourselves, nothing to point to. We’ve depleted the hope our world has in this generation and diminished ourselves down to a collective of insecure, cynical pessimists.

I’m not sure how it is for girls (you’ll have to fill me in with your comments) but I see this attitude in guys a lot.  We can’t figure out the world and why it’s so broken, why all the commandments we were told to follow when we were kids don’t seem to fit with how we’re wired to live as adults so we use our doubt and disappointment to get out of any responsibility and courage we should carry.  We cement ourselves in this ongoing argument with God blaming him for the very prisons He came to rescue us from. I know guys well into their thirties still living like 16 year olds, convinced they’ve been dealt a bad deal in life and God owes them. They’ve wasted years of courage, freedom, influence, and strength.  And that to me is incredibly, incredibly sad.

I desperately want to see our culture converse freely about the aspects of God they don’t understand. And I desperately want our culture to stand confident in the truth that they’ll never fully understand Him, embrace his mystery, and risk trusting his “other-ness.”

What would it look like for us to carry unexpected faith in a culture full of broken expectations?

Listen..and Make Some Noise

Each of us lives in two cities.

There’s the city that we breathe, sleep, feel, fight, and work in.

And there’s the city we communicate, socialize, learn, shop, and play in.

While our geographic cities may receive our physical selves, our laptops, mobile devices, and global networks receive our social, mental, and consumer energies.

It seems, as a generation of millenials, we have the unique opportunity to become better at merging our lives between these two realities. We need to become better listeners in our physical cities and better noisemakers in our global one.

All too often we reach for our iPod to drown out the noise of the culture outside our backdoor, unintentionally ignoring the artists, the musicians, the filmmakers, the poets, and the prophets saying something awakening and unique just steps away from our living room.  We’d rather grab the nearest Starbucks than a caffeine fix from our neighborhood coffee shop.  We’d rather chat with a picture and a profile than strike up a conversation with a three-dimensional stranger.

Conversely, we don’t own our second city the way we should. If we stopped and realized the unprecedented magnitude of communication accessible to us at this time in the history of the world, if we really took it in, saw it as a responsibility, a gift, a sign of hope…it would profoundly change the way we utilize the technology that’s become so common to us now.

With the ability to connect with anyone in the world with a wi-fi signal, injustices oceans away are now as close to us as our fingertips. The Haiti victim, the Ugandan child-soldier, the woman without water are now closer than our neighbors next door.  We now share a responsibility for our global community, a unique connection that should move us to breathe, sleep, feel, fight, and work together in it rather than passively observe.

I want to be better at living in both these cities.

I want to change the world, not buy a bumper sticker.

I want to be a better listener and a better noisemaker.

How about you?

Talking with Frightened Rabbit

There’s an electric energy that fills the small, historic dive club in Hollywood, California. It’s not because Rainn Wilson and John Kransinski are there to watch their favorite band. People couldn’t seem to care less. Rather, the packed out, A/C deprived hipster crowd is fixated, their adrenaline hormones haunted by the driving Scottish melodies of Frightened Rabbit, a band whose anthems reverberate idioms like “Jesus is just a Spanish boy’s name” and “It takes more than f*cking someone to keep yourself warm.” Behind these spiritual musings and loose proverbs is Frightened Rabbit’s frontman, Scott Hutchinson, a twenty-something son of Scotland whose dabbling in artistry and ability to transmit the melancholy story over crashing symbols and cranked amps have gained him significant attention both in his home country and the US alike.

“I started out as a solo artist,” Scott says, recalling the band’s beginnings. “You can’t even say artist actually. I was really, really bad. It was really difficult to get people to pay attention to what I was doing. So my brother joined on drums and people started paying attention. It was really f*cking loud. But then there was something missing because I was layering things up at home with my recording equipment and I wanted to expand the live sound so Billy joined and started playing a little guitar. By that time our first album, Sing the Greys, was done and we toured that as a 3 piece in Scotland and the US. Then, Midnight Organ Fight was written, produced, and recorded in the US. Andy joined then to flesh out the sound. With the new record we again find ourselves ready to add a new member. He’s going to be joining us when we get back to Scotland.”

When asked to describe Frightened Rabbit’s interwoven landscape of indie, pop, rock, electronica, and folk, Hutchinson confesses, “It’s all by mistake. None of it’s contrived. It’s just, I have bands that I love. I do admit to just taking from here and there but I try to put as much in as possible. The sound of Frightened Rabbit is basically me trying really bad to sound like other bands. One of the nicest things people say about our band is, ‘You know, you’re not really doing anything new but I just can’t put my finger on what makes it so special.’”

While some may argue over their sound reflecting everything from The Frames to Snow Patrol to Death Cab to Weezer, The band’s loyalty to Scottish folk tradition and storytelling carries an unwavering and undeniable current that sweeps across the breadth of their musical landscape. “At the core of everything there’s always a song,” says Scott. “And the song structure remains traditional, even with the new record we just finished over the summer, the arrangements are a little more experimental, but still at the core there is a song and that for me is what ties us back to folk, what ties us back to Scotland… the fact that it’s really important to have this melody and something to say.”

Hutchinson is true to his convictions. The lyrics of Frightened Rabbit are rarely without “something to say.” In a society of authorities that seem indifferent to doubts and uncertainties, bands like Frighten Rabbit resonate with a post-modern, question-driven culture. Hutchinson’s lyrics don’t wrap up and don’t play down…they brood, they muse, they challenge in a manner that would provoke anyone to ask big questions about the role relationships, sexuality, and religion play out in their life.

Their most recent album, Midnight Organ Fight exploded in the US as part break-up album, part existential excursion. On “Head Rolls Off,” Hutchinson denounces Christ as any sort of deity and wonders “How come one man got so much fame?” “Head Rolls Off” is my thesis for spirituality, Hutchinson explains. “It comes back again on the new record. I love using religious imagery in my songs because it’s really amongst the most powerful imagery that we have as lyricists. It’s a huge part of Scottish life as well – religious tension has shaped the way our country has come to be.  I love using it but I don’t want it to be mistaken for actually believing in it. So in that sense I like to use it perhaps to display just how pointless I feel it is sometimes. Because we’re just alive and then we’re dead.  That’s as simple as it is to me: You’re alive and then you’re dead.  It can happen at any point in time. All you have to do is something while you’re alive because there’s no opportunity to do it after.”

That theme reaches its peak on Midnight Organ Flight with its blunt ballad “Keep Yourself Warm,” a song that begs for life to move beyond the superficial pleasures of screwing around and asks the forthright yet sincere question, “Do you really think you’ll find love in a hole?” “That one’s not about me so much,” Hutchinson says, his eyes lighting up as if about to tell another Scottish folk story. “I wrote that one about a couple of friends of mine that were having different experiences. One of them, alright, was f*cking around and there was nothing in it and he just wasn’t happy. No matter how much he complained and complained about it, he’d go back and do it again. I’d just be like ‘man, come on.’  Then there was the other guy who was doing nothing: sleeping in until 4, not actually meeting anyone. So there are these two aspects of that song whereby one is quite clearly…‘the hole’ [laughs] and the other one is “the hole,” as in, ‘you’re stuck in a rut and you can’t get out of it.’ Maybe they’re both kind of like that because they’re both a place where nothing productive is being done and you’re not really advancing yourself as a person or helping anything.

Frightened Rabbit’s new album, The Winter of Mixed Drinks, is streaming on their myspace now and releases world-wide next month. The album promises to break apart the band’s traditional rock band mentality and surprise even close fans of the group.  Says Hutchinson, “The new record is really layered. With the last one, there were a lot of things missing that I really wanted to be in there that I didn’t have time to do. This time I think I went purposely overboard and we pulled it back in the mix. We’ve also got a new member who’s going to be joining us when we get back to Scotland. Hopefully he’ll be able to add those elements from the new record live. He’s going to play a bunch of everything. We have a lot sampled, we have more interestingly layered drum sounds…we’re not trying to use the kit as much. There are a few easily identifiable Frightened Rabbit tunes that could have easily cropped up on the last one but this new one is very much disregarding the four piece guitar band attitude that we had at the time of doing Midnight Organ Fight. “

Whether or not Frightened Rabbit’s new record departs too much from their former sound in the opinion of American hipsters is currently up for debate.  What is resolute is the underground phenomenon this band of Scots has created, seizing the attention of indie college-something culture by its skinny jeans.

Not an Artist, So Why Should I Care?

Well, the truth is, you are.

The dictionary defines an artist as, “a person having superior skill or ability, or who is capable of producing superior work.”

If God is a creative God, and we are made in His image, then we carry an imprint of that creativity with us in our humanity. Whether we’re a doctor, engineer, barista, mechanic, painter, musician, or administrative assistant, we each possess unique giftings and abilities that mirror the heartbeat of the Great Creator.

It isn’t so much about the fact that our drawing skills may peak at stick figures or our singing voices may be confused by some cats for a dinner invitation. It’s about the incredible realization that the elements that make you and I unique branch from the God whose roots were deeply planted in rich creative soil long before time began.

This is the God who created the universe with both purpose and beauty,

“Who stretches the heavens out like a canopy and spreads them out like a tent to live in, “

“Who brings out the starry host one by one and calls them each by name.” (Is. 40)

And we are his offspring! His story for humanity is our story for humanity.

When the doctor who visits Haiti decides to build a hospital using merely tents and the limited medical supplies available to heal the hopeless….he or she becomes an artist.

When the barista sees their customer not simply as another credit-card transaction but as a living, breathing work of art with a story to tell and finds creative ways to draw that story out each morning as they serve them their coffee….he or she becomes an artist.

It seems to me that there is no such thing as the mundane, only moments we fail to see God’s still, small voice speaking into them, breathing profound holiness.