Way Over Yonder in a Minor Key

There ain't nobody that can sing like me,

Way over yonder in the minor key.

-Billy Bragg and Wilco, Mermaid Avenue songs by Woody Guthrie

I've noticed a peculiar thing: sad things catch on.  It's not really a surprise.  People are always more honest in hospital rooms and funeral parlors.  I suppose there's something in me, with my Scotch-Welsh ancestry that gets rainy days and funeral dirges.  I know that some of my best work has been at funerals.  Maybe I'm just one of those people that sings best in a minor key.

It's not the worst talent in the world to have.  It may not get you invited to many gala cocktail parties, but it does get you into some very vulnerable places in the lives of people who are sometimes complete strangers.

Just out of curiosity, I looked back over the page view statistics for my blog over the past three years, every one of those blogs that has a high count is about something tragic.  Random observations about church and kids do fair to middling and no one pays much attention the ones where I get all theological, unless there's an emotional punch to it somewhere.

It would appear that y'all out there on the old interweb, like a good gut-punch.

Truth be told, I do too.  I want to read about things that have gravitas, things that make you feel something.

Glib observations are easier, but they just don't do much but bubble over the tongue like diet soda.

Angry tirades can be entertaining too, but chances are the things that make you mad and the things that make me mad are just a little too different.  And anger tends to make folks communicate poorly.

But I just can't stay that deep all the time.  Sometimes you have to write about normal things so that you don't become one of those cliches, the writer who just can't deal with actual life.

The hunger is out there though.  Maybe it's because so much of what we deal with in life is trying to keep us shallow and focused on things, instead of on relationships and the inevitable pain that comes with being vulnerable enough to care about other people.

It's been years since I enjoyed a mindless comedy of the variety that Hollywood turns out en mass.  Why?  Well they're mostly vulgar and they consist of people having misadventures.  Even if I don't give a hoot about the character, especially if I don't particularly like them, I have a hard time laughing at their mishaps.  It's actually made worse by the way that most of these pieces of so-called cinema, have incredibly predictable, formulaic endings, where everyone learns how not to be such a big jerk.

I appreciate more and more the honesty of the old comics, like the Marx Brothers or Abbot and Costello, they were telling you a joke, they did not require your empathy, in fact they would prefer if you didn't feel their pain, just laugh at their jokes.

The fact that people consume the sort of entertainment that they do these days is, I think, related to the hunger for significance, and also to the fact that it often requires a tragedy to produce that significance.  You can watch a lot of TV and many movies without once ever running across something that really stirs the soul.  When things do get deep, the work is touted as profound, even if it says very little of coherent value or even slight novelty.

I guess the value of the minor key, is the slight shift off of what is expected.  I suppose it is supposed to be salt and leaven, and maybe that's why works so well in the church.  Maybe we have been competing with an entertainment industry that has mastered shallow.

Perhaps we should try going deeper, going minor, going slightly off the rails.

Maybe that's the itch that needs scratched right now.