doobie smoking Jesus

Jun 22, 2021

Welcome back, dear reader. Let’s skip rocks.

Take a Walk

I write this newsletter for a couple of reasons. For starters, I like having a forum to collect my thoughts. Writing forces me to take inventory of my experiences and interrogate them for meaning; when I search for something that’s newsletter-worthy, I sit with my day, week, or month, reconciling (in a productive way, I think) with memorable events. Plenty of experiences never find their way to the finished product, and that’s okay. Considering things that never get written is half the point.

The newsletter also gives me an opportunity to be creative in a generative way. As a person that makes things for fun (a creative, dare I say it), I’m floored when I read, watch, or listen to something that makes a lasting impact on me. You know the feeling. It’s that post-movie moment with friends when you’re talking about the ending, bewildered and excited. It’s the moment when you look at a sculpture, dumbfounded and thinking how the hell did someone make rock look transparent? It’s also the moment when a book brings you to tears, or when you finish one and feel a pit emerge in your stomach.* Writing helps me approach some level of creative achievement, however insignificant, through which I can change someone’s day, make them think, or make them smile.

*(It was Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance cycle for me. I cried harder than I should’ve in 2011 when I finished the last book; I grew up with those characters, and closing the back cover of the last 800-pager felt like losing a group of best friends. Same with the homie Percy Jackson. Shoutout God, shoutout Mom, shoutout Rick Riordan. And shoutout Annabeth, aka bae. What a woman.)

Nothing moves or impresses me quite like music, though. I listen often and look for music purposefully. My Discover Weekly is my Rosetta Stone; it helps me understand my music taste (and myself) better, prompting me to explore musical worlds I never thought I’d enjoy. Most of the time my Discover Weekly dive is pretty fruitful. I’ll consistently find 5 or 6 songs a week that I enjoy, and honestly, 5 or 6 (out of 30) is enough for me to listen to that sonofabitch religiously.

Every so often I find a diamond in the rough. The way it plays out is pretty uniform: I’ll listen to a song and love it, I’ll play it fifteen-hundred times in a week, and then I’ll delegate it to a playlist, subconsciously assigning to it a feeling, a mood, or a memory that will forever be joined to the song when I play it.

Here’s a quick aside, and disagree with me if you want: most (if not all) songs carry memories or feelings with them, and some carry a combination of several. They range from general to specific, varying in emotional intensity and discernible importance. I’ll rattle off some examples for your entertainment. The Bad Suns’ Cardiac Arrest summons quarantine because that’s when I listened to it first. Same with Trash Panda’s Atlanta Girls, and all of BROCKHAMPTON’s Saturation II (2017) will summon memories of quarantine workouts, sweating in my backyard pool shed. Chance the Rapper’s Eternal will never not remind me of my ex-girlfriend. Trippie Redd’s The Jungle Book makes me think of driving to Best Buy one random time with my little brother. All of Dominic Fike’s Don’t Forget About Me, Demos (2018) will make me think about doing laundry in my undergraduate dorm building, and New Radicals’ You Get What You Give will bring me back to infield-outfield before baseball games in college. The list goes on, you get the point.

I also think everyone has a musical rolodex in their head, like an incredibly detailed catalogue that exists separate from our normal functioning. I imagine our musical brains like a little radio station, or that one scene in Spongebob Squarepants when he’s trying to remember his own name (the office setup, not the whole thing on fire, although if your musical radio station brain exists in a permanent state of disorganized flame, I won’t judge). In this little radio station, there’s a song playing on the air; that’s whatever song you’ve got stuck in your head at the moment. For my roommates and I, it used to be Dua Lipa’s Levitating. One of us would randomly burst out “you want me!” and someone would reply “I want you baby!” in turn, or someone would start rambling the beginning “if you wanna run away with me, I know a galaxy / and I can take you for a ride,” trailing off into mumbling incoherence. These days I’m stuck on WILLOW’s t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l. For the life of me I can’t get this shit out of my head:

I don't fucking know if it's a lie or it's a fact
All your little fake friends will sell your secrets for some cash
Smile in my face, then put your cig' out on my back
If you ever see me, just get to runnin' like The Flash

And while I’m on the topic, I’m convinced that if I remembered normal stuff (read: anything) like I remember music lyrics, I’d be a real life version that guy from Limitless (2010). I’m scatterbrained and absent-minded in my day-to-day, and I surprise myself by how frequently I do incredibly stupid things. I’ll walk out of a room and completely forget the thing that I specifically walked into that room to get; I’ll read a text message, reply to it in my head, and not re-consider it for days; I’ll take something in my hand and (almost) put it somewhere it completely doesn’t belong.* But the entire rap from Uptown off of Drake’s So Far Gone (2009)? I won’t miss a single word. Recognizing that the guitar riff from Rina Sawayama’s XS sounds just like the one in Justin Timberlake’s Like I Love You? From, like, 2002? Done.

(I did this exact thing this morning in my kitchen, alone, with a carton of eggs and a workout supplement. I picked up my carton of eggs, picked up the supplement, and then promptly opened the cabinet and attempted to put the eggs in there. The carton made brief contact with the shelf before I audibly went “Grant, what the fuck are you doing?”, and I proceeded to re-route to the fridge. Is this relatable? Please tell me it’s relatable.)

For as many songs that are simply catchy or remember-able, there are some that are severely beautiful or severely genius. They’re the songs that hit you harder when you listen to them, that approximate that perspective-altering feeling I described earlier. There’s a number of songs that I think do this, but recently I’ve considered one in particular.

I think Mt. Joy’s Astrovan is brilliant, and I’ve been meaning to write about why. Now that I’ve prefaced the music thing a little bit (I could write forever about music and I had to cut it off and transition somewhere), I think I’ll do that. Feel free to listen to Astrovan first, if you’d like to follow along.

Mt. Joy is a folk-rock band comprised of a pair of longtime high school friends from Philadelphia (Matt Quinn and Sam Cooper), alongside another multi-instrumentalist in Michael Byrnes and a producer in Byrnes’ roommate, Caleb Nelson. The song, writes Mt. Joy (via Genius), is supposed to juxtapose “the purity of things like angels and Jesus” with “the struggle that so many artists face in the pursuit of their passions.” It’s supposed to inspire young artists who doubt themselves and their process, and they aim to encourage people “to keep going.”

That much becomes obvious by listening to the song. Quinn sings “it’s alright momma you’re afraid / I’ll be poor along the way” in the chorus, seemingly alluding to a parent’s worry for their child’s pursuit of a creative career. It’s inevitable that artists hit bumps in the road en route to stardom, if they ever get there, and Quinn is trying to reassure both his listener (and perhaps his parents, indirectly) of his acceptance of that reality.

This perspective makes sense, and maintaining it makes for an enjoyable listen. Despite this, I think a different perspective lends the song more brilliance and artistry. Astrovan succeeds in pointing to something much greater, something beyond artists, music, and the like. At its core, I think Astrovan is transcendental, and its treatment of religious imagery makes a statement about people, belief, and, dare I say it, living.

The two verses scaffold the magic. Take another look.

The first:

[Verse 1]
Angels smoking cigarettes on rooftops in fishnets in the morning with the
Moon still glowing
And here comes Jesus in an Astrovan rolling down the strip again
He's stoned while Jerry plays

And the second:

[Verse 2]
And in my heart there's a holy ghost writhing on the floor from an overdose
You know the best ones never come down
So if I love at the tip of my toes reaching out for the great unknown
Every addict has illusions

Verse 1 evinces the juxtaposition described by Quinn in full effect. Angels in fishnets? Seems unholy. Cigarette smoking? Less than redeemable, surely. I mean, Jesus is stoned in a Chevrolet Astro for chrissakes, smoking a roach and listening to the Grateful Dead. There’s certainly a contrast here between vice and virtue, but what is it supposed to mean?

Verse 2 keys us in, and I think it’s bigger than art-creation and the worrisome meandering of an up-and-coming musician. The imagery gets a little darker; Quinn describes “a holy ghost” in his heart that’s “writhing on the floor from an overdose,” and suggests, rather ominously, that “the best ones never come down.” The darkness of the second verse runs counter to the happy-go-lucky, van-road-trip sound of the instrumental. In doubling down on the references to the outcast, vice, and sin, Mt. Joy is glorifying the downtrodden and embracing the stranger.

The brilliance of it all? They’re doing it while flipping traditional conceptions of heaven upside down, and glorifying the beauty of belief. Faith and religion offer a home for the outcast and solace for the lost, but it isn’t uncommon, I think, for an outcast to think there’s no place for him or her in heaven: a destination traditionally described as pure, buttoned-up, and pristine, complete with pearly gates, halos, and harps.

Mt. Joy throws that conception out the window. What if Jesus was a hippy too, man? What if the angels just finished a day-long bender and spent their morning watching the sunrise, woozy and catching a buzz? Astrovan suggests that heaven and belief are what you make it, and that there’s always a place for you on the other side, no matter who you are or what exactly you believe. Impressively, they do it while satirizing traditional depictions of religious figures, all the while subverting that satirization to affirm the value inherent in faith, religion, and belief. Now that’s brilliant.

The final bridge of the song carries it all home:

[Bridge]
And when I see those angels on the roof
I'll know I've made it when my
Doobie smoking Jesus puts my name upon his guestlist
And says son you're famous in heaven
Maybe you're famous in heaven
Andy maybe there is no heaven
Maybe we're all alone together now
But I don't wanna see those tears again
You know Jesus drives an Astrovan

Everyone is famous in heaven because heaven is whatever they believe it to be. If your heaven has a doobie-smoking Jesus in it, all the better dude. There’s a place for everyone out there in the great beyond, if there even is one; in a sonic and lyrical crescendo, Mt. Joy suggests that “maybe there is no heaven,” and “maybe we’re all alone together now.”

That acknowledgement is yet another inverse; it ties the whole song together beautifully. Perhaps there is no heaven after all. Maybe we’ve all been bugging about what happens when we die, and there’s actually nothing out there whatsoever. It’s an unnerving thought, admittedly - but if Astrovan teaches us anything, it’s that if that much is true, we have faith to make sense of the here and now, doobie smoking Jesus or not.

Make no mistake - we might be alone in this all, but at least we’re alone together.

Jesus drives an Astrovan.

[Do you have a special song that you’d like to share, for one reason or another? I’ve not used any of these buttons on this thing yet, so if you feel so inclined, click and let me know. Or just text me. Whatevs.]

Skipping Rocks

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