PART II, ARTICLE I: A CRITIQUE OF THE TRAGICALLY HIP, SECTION V

I used to enjoy some songs by The Tragically Hip. That was decades ago. Naturally, I did not understand what I was hearing, which perfectly suited my drunken state. Sometimes, for an instant, a message emerges, as in the following lines from Locked in the Trunk of a Car—: “They don’t know how old I am/They found armor in my belly/From the sixteenth century.” But what has this to do with what follows?—: “Passion out of machine revving tension/Lashing out at machine revving tension/Rushing by the machine revving tension.” Not only are the songs not lucid enough, some of them are defiled by foul words or irreverent references to persons of divinity. Others of them contain lines that overtly encourage dissolute conduct, like these lines from Blow at High Dough—: “But I can get behind anything/Yeah I can get behind anything.” At least this tiny part of the song is comprehensible. But there is little agreement on Song Meanings about what the song is about. I think the lines preceding the part about ‘getting behind anything’ are about a movie being shot at a racetrack. “They shot a movie once, in my hometown/Everybody was in it, from miles around/Out at the speedway, some kind of Elvis thing/Well, I ain’t no movie star.” The rest of the song is, tragically, typically obtuse. ‘Getting behind anything’ is the philosophy that anything goes. That much is obvious. So it is not merely that we should not listen to songs that are unreasonable; we should not listen to songs that induce, through their mood and what little sense they contain, behavior that can ‘get behind anything.’ We should apply these two reasonable lines from his song called Poets, though—: “Don’t tell me what the poets are doing/On the street and the epitome of vague.” The ‘epitome of vague’ is Tragically Hip songwriting; the ‘street’ is the base lifestyle that one may be tempted to engage in by listening to a meaningless pop song; we shouldn’t want anything to do with any of that. Aliena optimum insania frui. (It is best to profit by the madness of others.) We profit by criticizing it and then alienating ourselves from what madmen do. Songs that are unreasonable or immoral are unfortunately popular. “Folly is set in great dignity” (Ecclesiastes 10.6.) Songs that are unreasonable or immoral may be joyful to both songwriter and listener. “Folly is joy to him that is destitute of wisdom” (Proverbs 15.21.) We should ‘go from the presence of a foolish man’ when we perceive that he transmits no knowledge (Proverbs 14.7.) We should do so because ‘a companion of fools shall be destroyed’ (Proverbs 13.20.) It matters how we spend our time. Going to concerts may be fun. But ‘even in laughter the heart is sorrowful’ (Proverbs 14.13.) Why is it like that? Because even while a person is tearing it up, he knows that something is not right. What occasionally nags his conscience is the fact that a thoughtless lifestyle of getting behind anything is a way that leads to both death and hell. “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14.12.) Should we not consider this verse in light of the slaughter that took place on October 1st, 2017 at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, two weeks before Downie’s death? Going to this concert seemed right to many. It was ‘a way which seemeth right.’ But the end of that way was death for fifty-eight persons and injuries or terror for the rest. The songs being reveled in when the shots rained down were not much better, maybe no better, than what I am criticizing in this essay. You might not believe that concertgoers were shot because of the sin of going there; and it is true that there are more factors to consider in these deaths than the sin of going to a concert as a beguiled merrymaker among many. It is nevertheless a fact that the victims would not have been shot if they had stayed home to read their Bibles. “Well, they died doing what they loved to do!” That’s the kind of thing people say. “Well, it was their time to go!” This is the other thing that people say. But would their time not have been some other time if they had been somewhere else? Would a thirty-four year old woman who got shot and killed at a concert have died in some other way if she had decided to stay at home that night to read Augustine’s Confessions? That seems unlikely, doesn’t it? How many days we get to live is predestined; but the Bible does not command us to live conscientiously and cautiously for nothing. We can’t square the circle of predestination and responsibility any more than we can drive through a black hole with a Volkswagen Beetle. Some things in both General and Special Revelation lie beyond our abilities.