Hashishim
Sticky sweet idology
One night at the end of April 2000, I was lying, sweaty and alone, in a bungalow in Bali, listening to Sting. The album I listened to was Brand New Day , which was released the year before. Perhaps the most famous single from the album is "Desert Rose" which Sting performs in a duet with the Algerian-French Raï artist Cheb Mami. "Desert Rose" is a musical milestone in that it was one of the first collaborations between a Western world artist and an Arab artist. The song, which against a background of a suggestive mystical melody mixes western song with the distinct tones from Raï: pain, searching, longing and loss is in a way both a dithyramb and an elegy; a simultaneous praise to and a lament for both a bygone era and lost love.
In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union it was not only politics that was facing a time of great upheaval. Religion was also affected by the fundamentally changed world. Institutions that were previously considered stable, such as the Catholic Church, came to be seen not as much as a pillar of a stable world, but rather as a conservative and restraining force in an increasingly changing world. Sinead O'Connor tore up a picture live of Pope John Paul II when she appeared on Saturday Night Live, and a few years later Madonna would both criticize, and distance herself from, the Catholic Church. The protests against the church were, of course, more extensive than these two examples, and were also directed at institutions other than the Catholic Church. But here it will be Sinead O'Connor and Madonna who will represent not only the individual's break with "their" religion, but also as examples of how musicians came to be paragons of the new spirituality that moved through popular music in the 1990’s. A spirituality aiming waguely eastwards, with hints of both incense and all-spice. Sinead O'Connor would later convert to Islam and Madonna embraced the modern form of Kabbalah that swept through the American celebrity fauna in the mid-90s.
I ran from my house that can not contain me From the man that I can not keep From my mother who haunts me, even though she's gone From my daughter that never sleeps I ran from the noise and the silence From the traffic on the streets
—Madonna, Mer Girl
If "Desert Rose" was the pinnacle of new spirituality in popular music, its origins can be found a number of decades earlier. In the early 1970s, a modern folk music movement begun, originating in Ireland and on the British Isles. In Ireland, folk music has long had a strong folk and political significance - folk music was synonymous with the opposition to the English and in the 1970’s we also saw how a folk music tradition began to flourish in Brittany and the Basque Country both as part of a resistance to ”the Government", but also as an expression of both culture and linguistic identity. The Irish band Clannad, who from its formation in 1970 primarily sang traditional Irish folk songs, went through a metamorphosis in the 1980’s to become a leading voice in shaping what would become ”New Age” music. With dreamy tunes performed in Irish Gaelic, they came to paint the sound image sound for several TV-series in the 1980s, not least Harry's Game - set in Belfast during the troubles - and Robin of Sherwood , who took the story of Robin Hood and placed it firmly in both the legend of King Arthur and wider Celtic mythology. Clannad counted as a member in the early 1980's one Eithne Ní Bhraonáin, better known under her stage name: Enya.
Enya definitely established herself as a solo artist with the single "Orinoco Flow" from the album Watermark (1988), and with the album Shepherd Moons (1991) and the songs "Caribbean Blue" and "Book of Days" confirmed her dominance over the growing field New Age music. Enya's popular cultural impact was manifested most clearly in music that Karl Jenkins wrote for a commercial for Delta Airlines in 1994. The song, and later the album Adiemus (1995) took the dreamy music from Enya and combined it with an artificial language, created with clear African elements. The result is an equally strange and wonderful mishmash of influences. In 1990, Enigma released their first album MCMXC aD, an album that took the spiritual New Wave quest in a different direction. The theme of the album explores the inherent tension between sexuality and religion. In “Principles of Lust: Sadeness / Find Love / Sadeness” we are exposed to, against a backdrop of Gregorian chanting, topics such as the Marquis de Sade, love and its different forms of expression, and in "Mea Culpa" religion's placing guilt on imagination by the sin of impure thoughts. But, at the same time highlighting the fact that even despite this guilt – these thoughts are something that we engage in daily, if not constantly – implying that the imagination is a human constant, more powerful than any religion.
Where Enya remained fairly consistent in her musical world consisting of equal parts Celtic tones, Vangelis and fairy tales; Enigma moved more freely between different musical themes and influences. On the band's second album, The Cross of changes (1993), they shift back to nature with samples from indigenous people in the USA on "Return to Innocence", whilst on Le Roi Es Mort, Vive Le Roi! (1996) we’re met by a soundscape that combines Gregorian changing with Arabic influences in "The Child In Us". When Madonna released Ray of Light (1998), the spiritual search has found its way into broader popular music as well. ”Shanti/Asthangi” is a direct result of Madonna's personal journey in search of another belief system after the break with Catholicism with the lyrics of the song are inspired by her personal mantra. In the two big hit singles from the album, "Ray of Light" and "Frozen", the Eastern influences are more subtle, but they are there embedded in both text and production. But perhaps the most important song on the album Ray of Light is hidden in plain sight at the end of the album - "More Girl" is a deeply personal song where Madonna describes both the broader existential as well as her personal crisis to which Ray of Light can be seen as a catharsis.
I ran to the treetops, I ran to the sky Out to the lake, into the rain that matted my hair And soaked my shoes and skin Hid my tears, hid my fears —Madonna, Mer Girl
In Sweden in the last years of the 90s, the debate about the position of the Swedish state church increased, and art projects such as Elisabeth Olsson Wallin's Ecce Homo criticized and provoked. And even if it was with a certain delay, the change also came to Sweden when church and state were finally separated in 2000. In Swedish pop music, the spiritually searching tones were masked with a return to saga, folk beliefs and nature. One of the first examples of this was Sofia Källgren's “Längtans vind” [The Wind of Longing] (1989) [a song which is one of this writer's "guilty pleasures”]. And bands like One More Time and Nordman, and artists like Roger Pontare would follow. For those with a little more cultural capital, the 1990s also saw a boom for folk music in a more modern version with the band Hedningarna as a leading example. In a more international style, the music collective Lucky People Center's spiritual and musical documentary Lucky People Center International. The film is a journey around the world and explores different belief systems from Europe to Africa, to India, to Japan, to the United States. Throughout the film, there is a sample of a heartbeat that signify our common humanity and the basic desire to search for something Greater than ourselves.
Hand in hand with the search for a new spirituality went the search for a new existential threat. If we through religion seek meaning in life and hope in the face of the fact of an unwelcome but certain death; politically we need something external towards which to project an existential threat. In the time after the collapse of the Soviet Union the atomic bomb, the treat of a nuclear war, was no longer the absolute constant it once was. Doubt had been inserted into the equation. An example of the manifestation of the decline of nuclear weapons as a constant can be seen today when Russia threat to use nuclear weapons in a response to the ”western” support of Ukraine is met with a global shrug. Nuclear power, and nuclear weapons, are old and dated technology: we know it, and it is all but impossible to fear that which you know. Instead we had to shift the search for something else and more sinister. Anyone who is old enough to remember the prelude to the turn of the millennium will surely remember the worries that existed before the millennium bug. The Millennium Bug - or the Y2K problem as it came to be called internationally - was the concern that computers would not be able to handle the transition from the 20th century to the 21st century and that vital computer systems and social functions would collapse around the world at twelve o'clock on New Year's Eve 1999. The problem received enormous attention in the media and companies all over the world spent huge sums of money on "millennial securing" their systems and production lines around the world. Of course, the world did not go under and the only global backlash was the universal hangover of January 1, 2000.
The 1990s can be defined as the decade or searching. I have touched on the political vacuum in relation to the fall of the Soviet Union in a previous blog post, and it is easy to see that the rootlessness this caused found its way into the popular music of the 1990’s. This was, after all, natural – nowhere is the emotions of a society as visible as in the expressions of popular culture: film, music, television, computer games – they all reflect society, its culture and, more recently, the world order. With the internet, this reflection would become even more immediate and even more malleable. The 90s may be the last decade when it is possible to discern a clear, albeit fragmented, direction in the collective search. There was an openness, and a concern, that came to be felt all over the world. While the alternative to controlling and conservative religion was sought in mysterious and hedonistic new age and natural religions, alternatives to the world's total doom through the nuclear war were sought in the total threat to society's downfall in the millennium bug.
I ran to the forest, I ran to the trees I ran and ran, I was looking for me —Madonna, Mer Girl
In a sense, Sting's "Desert Rose" would become both the culmination of popular music's spiritual flirtation with Middle Eastern mysticism and a form of swan song for the naïveity of the searching 1990’s as both came to an abrupt end on September 11, 2001. However, it is important to note that the fragmentation of the relationship between the individual and the institutions – be they religious, political or societal was such a strong force that not even an attack on the heart ”free democracy” the United States of America was enough to give humanity a new and unifying focal point. In the choice between human violence and ideological violence the human violence is now by far the worst. Before 1992 we stood and died together, after 1992 we stand and die alone (or with a small group of selected friends and family) as individuality has become the norm in western thought. That not meaning that we lack the capacity for communal action, what I am saying is that a collective threat is no longer as efficient at raising emotions such as fear or existential dread – the level of abstraction has shifted with the rise of the internet and the wider world that it has opened for us. The wold has become, in a very real sense, more global for individuals while nations still play the old game of power and geopolitics. And that is the reason why the nuclear threat, as Russia recently learned, is no longer a thing. What causes us grief and existential angst today is on a much more individual and personal level: we are constantly on the look out for new potential threats to our existence as Humans. If before the year 2000 it was the millennium bug that was the threat, then in 2008 it was CERN and the experiments at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) to prove the Higgs boson that would create microscopic black holes that threatened to destroy the planet. In the 2010s, it was instead AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the thought of cloning humans. The destructive power of nuclear weapons is a remnant from a bygone era. For the seeker, a child of the new world, the threat lies in the ever-changing future. A future where everything is potentially a threat, not to the existence of humanity but to something infinitely worse: what it means to be human.
What it means to be I.