It's June 21st
Liberation Theology is the natural endpoint of 3rd wave ska. It's possible I have that backwards.
This is another essay, kind of like this one, that I had originally written for another project and scrapped. It's very weird compared to my other stuff and who the hell knows if it works, but I am publishing it for two reasons: one, it’s June 21st. And two, I used to joke that if G.O.T.H.S. ever hit a certain absurd number of subscribers, I would pivot the newsletter into talking about 3rd-wave ska, and unfortunately for all of you we appear to have hit that number of subscribers.
When I was in high school I bought an album by this ska band called The Arrogant Sons of Bitches. This was a period in my life when, after years of playing trombone in various music groups and hearing early-2000s pop-punk on the radio, I would listen to basically any third-wave ska album you gave me. I don't remember how I found ASOB, but I do remember that their album on iTunes was really cheap, like very cheap given the number of tracks, so it seemed like a good value, so I bought it sight unseen. They had a lot of catchy songs with funny titles like "RSTLNE" and "Kill The President", and the songs were about feeling lonely and alienated and constantly pressurized, ready to explode, from the weight of your job and your obligations and your relationships and never having all the resources you need and never having anything around you ever fucking work even though it’s supposed to work, you know?
"How can I be so self-important in the world today?
My disease of choice will be arriving soon anyway.
We justify our selfishness in every pointless fight.
And I hate to quote this song all wrong but "It Doesn't Make It Right".
Fuck the world.
Everything is breaking and changing and
Everything inside of me is breaking and changing.
Why can't I ever let it go?"
The liner notes to this album, Three Cheers for Disappointment, talked more about what it meant to have everything around you and everything inside of you breaking and changing:
“...when I wrote this album it was less a series of complaints and a stream of anger than it was a story about something I feel we all go through when we finally get out of high school and we are inundated with the feeling that we're free from rules. We don't have the teacher forcing us to go to class anymore. We are not a part of the system we all hated. Years later, I am still having trouble dealing with the fact that I am still part of the system that we all hated. The truth is the minute you feel you're breaking free of the big thing that is holding you down, you're already locked up again. Advertising. Finances. Friendship. Love. Life is business.”
As you might expect, the band called Arrogant Sons of Bitches who wrote a song called “Kill The President” and sold their albums for dirt cheap and were part of a widely derided wave in a widely derided genre were not a commercial success. After the band dissolved, the frontman, Jeff Rosenstock of Long Island, created a new project with a much more market-friendly name: Bomb The Music Industry! And BTMI! had much more market-friendly song titles; their first album from 2006 featured tracks like “Blow Your Brains Out On Live TV!!!” and “It Ceases to be ‘Whining’ if You’re Still ‘Shitting’ Blood”. Jeff is very direct when he has something he wants to say.
"Someone the other day was telling me about marketing
And how it's so important for a band to sell a t-shirt
I told him that the money goes right back into the same thing
And now we're just a breeding ground for more and more consumers
Sellout, shmellout, it's not about that
But all my problems seem to stem from cash
I got my beliefs and I don't care if they're right
But if we don't meet our quota, man, we're gonna get into another fight.”
BTMI! was Jeff by himself sometimes, and Jeff with his friends other times, and Jeff with a horn section sometimes, and Jeff with synths sometimes. The songs were still loud and angry and about feeling lonely and alienated and constantly pressurized, ready to explode. They were about the unrelenting pressure of life, the feeling that you were born on the one piece of rock three inches above the flood but who knows how long that’s going to last because it’s raining pretty fucking hard. They were about trying to bike to the post office but getting hit by a car on the way there and just kind of dealing with it because your health insurance was shit and you had other stuff you needed to take care of today. They were about being ten years into adulthood and realizing that there was never going to be any point where it felt like you actually understood what the fuck was going on anywhere. And they were also about Jeff’s life as a musician, about driving yourself to clubs and listening to drunk idiots yell “Freebird!” at you and not really getting paid enough to feel any good about it:
"Drink a free beer
Maybe smoke with the waiter
(It's) the illusion that they all give a shit
And some drunk guys yelling
"Free Bird!" and "Show us your boobs!"
And I'll smile and I'll key their truck
And it sucks so bad
But I made one Benjamin
How can I be mad?
I paid one seventh of my rent
And maybe I'll buy a plate of eggs."
During the BTMI! period, Jeff also founded Quote Unquote Records, the label on which he still releases his music, a label which runs entirely on donations. You can download any albums in his back catalog for free. If you buy his albums online from a retailer like Amazon or whatever, he’ll just donate his profits to Food Not Bombs. He doesn’t even copyright the albums, they’re distributed under a Creative Commons license. So Arrogant Sons of Bitches and Bomb The Music Industry! weren’t exactly paths to commercial success, but BTMI! did build up a dedicated following, because listeners and audiences really did identify with the frustration and loneliness in Jeff’s words, the hope that things didn’t have to be like this, and the willingness to scream your head off because, well, things were like this. Jeff was and still is respected in the punk scene for his moving lyrics, unwavering refusal to ever sell out, and position as one of the truest DIY artists working today. Although he does just release albums under the name Jeff Rosenstock now.
But even though the artist’s name changed, the subject matter didn’t. In the liner notes of yet another album, released under his own name, Jeff wrote:
“The majority of this record is about fear and death. These songs are pretty much not about good times, but I actually love good times. I have a lot of really wonderful friends all over who make life worth living, and I am super lucky to have 'em. Fuck yeah! Thanks guys!!!...A special thanks to Laura Stevenson, Mike Campbell and JT Turret for convincing me that it's okay to release songs with lyrics that I may think are too dark and reminding me that those are actually the only lyrics I ever want to listen to.”
So Jeff Rosenstock’s lyrics as Jeff Rosenstock, in 2012’s I Look Like Shit and 2014’s We Cool? were about getting old enough that multiple friends were dying unexpectedly, and being terrified to call your parents because they’d ask how you were doing, and thinking that all of your friends have always hated you and just been too polite to tell you. They weren’t big commercial successes, but people still respected Jeff for what he was doing in the music industry, and they still shouted along with him at his shows, because they still felt the same things he was feeling, and when they all shouted those lyrics together, they all felt less alone, and I do think that helping others feel less alone is one of the most noble things you can do as a human being.
"When your friends are buying starter homes with their accomplishments
Drinking at a house show can feel childish and embarrassing
With people glaring because despite what the advertisements said:
Malt liquor doesn’t make you young...
But we stepped outside and I realize it’s been a while
Since I’ve seen those eyes
And it felt so nice to see you smile
Breathe in deep and debride your life
Stale regrets are a waste of time
Only one thing remains secure
That we all get old together
And we all get old forever."
But after hearing people shout along to all of his lyrics, after building up a dedicated following over a decade and a half, Jeff must have thought, at some point, “wow, we really are all having the same feelings of alienation and anger and regret and anxiety.” He must have thought, at some point, “maybe all of these people hope, just like I do, that it doesn’t have to be like this forever”. He must have thought, at some point, “that fact that we’re all feeling those awful things, maybe that’s not a coincidence.” And he must have thought, at some point, “the fact that we’re all feeling those awful things, maybe that’s somebody’s fault.” Jeff must have thought that at some point, because in 2016, he wrote WORRY.
Peruvian priest and professor Gustavo "Stavvy Dot Biz" Gutiérrez is one of the key thinkers who developed the liberation theology tradition of Latin America. Now, it is really easy to oversimplify liberation theology into something like "the version of Catholicism that leftists use to tell themselves they're right about everything", and that's not what it is - I mean, I wish, but it's not - and Gutiérrez would reject that interpretation explicitly.
At the heart of liberation theology is the idea that the Catholic church has a responsibility to address the material suffering of the world's poor, as well as the causes of that suffering. Maybe that seems blindingly obvious when you see it written out like that - maybe you're wondering what exactly the church is doing if they're not addressing material suffering in the world - but in the pretty recent era when Gutiérrez and his contemporaries were developing liberation theology, this was, believe it or not, a new idea. It wasn't until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s that the church really made "we should care about what's happening to people in the world and try to make it better" a central part of what the Catholic church was about; this was the main thing that the Council accomplished, although depending on who you ask, the Council was also about empowering Satan by letting a guy at your parish play guitar at the 5pm Saturday Mass. Gaudium et Spes, a key Vatican II document on "the church in the modern world" begins with "the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts," and this was not something the church had been regularly saying before. The institutional church, over the centuries, had been interested in converting people, in arguing over its own doctrine, in expanding its own imperial power, and it was really only sixty years ago that the church formally said "maybe we should put more of a focus on 'helping people'."
What Gutiérrez did was take this new focus and charge it with the urgency and reality of contemporary political oppression across Latin America. The content of liberation theology - especially in Gutiérrez's foundational work A Theology of Liberation - is beautiful and riveting and has a strong message for the powerless and an even stronger one for the powerful, but equally interesting to me - and more the focus of this piece - is when and why we got liberation theology at the moment we did. Again, Catholic theology used to be about very different stuff. For a very long time. But that wasn't enough anymore. Material conditions had gotten to the point where the church couldn't ignore them anymore:
"In the current statement of the problem, one fact is evident: the social praxis of contemporary humankind has begun to reach maturity. It is the behavior of a humankind ever more conscious of being an active subject of history, ever more articulate in the face of social injustice and of all repressive forces which stand in the way of its fulfillment; it is ever more determined to participate both in the transformation of social structures and in effective political action."
What the church had done for the past nineteen hundred and so years wasn't going to cut it anymore. In the second half of the twentieth century, the world had gotten too good at exploiting and oppressing people, and Gutiérrez had witnessed that oppression firsthand in a predominantly Christian population who needed their church to meaningfully respond to it. Other people had responded to it, after all:
"Contemporary theology does in fact find itself in direct and fruitful confrontation with Marxism, and it is to a large extent due to Marxism's influence that theological thought, searching for its own sources, has begun to reflect on the meaning of the transformation of this world and human action in history."
While Catholicism had its critiques of Marx, people had been listening to Marx for over a century, because in an era where the world had gotten really good at exploiting and oppressing people, Marx offered the oppressed an idea that underpins every great leftist thinker: "it doesn't have to be like this". And to Gutiérrez, that was a message that the Catholic church urgently had to adopt and share. The church could not stand for their own message - especially that message as articulated after Vatican II - without doing something for the world's poor, without saying "it doesn't have to be like this" and acting on that idea. The church had a responsibility - not just a rhetorical responsibility, an actual political and material one - to help organize the poor and fight for structural change to help people's material conditions, if what the church taught was supposed to mean anything. The Gospel, according to liberation theology, was not going to let the church skate on ignoring the poor anymore. On top of that, as Gutiérrez writes, the poor were not going to let the church skate on ignoring the poor anymore. Oppressing people, or enabling that oppression through inaction, was incompatible with being Catholic, but willingly suffering that oppression without fighting back was also incompatible with being Catholic:
"Behind liberation theology are Christian communities, religious groups, and peoples, who are becoming increasingly conscious that the oppression and neglect from which they suffer are incompatible with their faith in Jesus Christ (or, speaking more generally, with their religious faith)."
What ultimately necessitated this change in Catholic theology was what Gutiérrez calls "the irruption of the poor into our history"; in other words, the poor and oppressed were too numerous, too vocal, and too organized - even in their then-nascent stage of organization - for anyone to ignore anymore, least of all the church preaching the Gospel of Jesus:
"Liberation theology is closely bound up with this new presence of those who in the past were always absent from our history. They have gradually been turning into active agents of their own destiny and beginning a resolute process that is changing the condition of the poor and oppressed of this world."
The poor had suffered, were suffering, and while they had, to some extent, found consolation in their faith, there were enough of these oppressed people now that they could start looking around and wondering if it was just a coincidence that all of them were suffering like this. They must have thought, at some point, “that fact that we’re all feeling those awful things, maybe that’s not a coincidence.” Maybe something was causing it, and maybe, to use a theological term, that something was sin:
"In describing sin as the ultimate cause we do not in any way negate the structural reasons and the objective determinants leading to these situations. It does, however, emphasize the fact that things do not happen by chance and that behind an unjust structure there is a personal or collective will responsible— a willingness to reject God and neighbor."
In other words, “the fact that we’re all feeling those awful things, maybe that’s somebody’s fault.”
Say you're like me, a boring white dude in his thirties who has lived in relative comfort most of his life but still likes to think he's a good person. Over the past ten years you've noticed that, well, things seem to be getting worse for a lot of people. It feels like there have been a lot more natural disasters than there had been earlier in your life, more people being displaced, more grids getting shut off, more storms in the parts of the year when we don't normally expect to have storms. Every time the Supreme Court hands down a decision on voting rights - which feels like it's happening a lot lately - it doesn't exactly strike you as something bending the arc of the universe towards justice, and it doesn't strike you as the kind of thing that your high school history teacher told you had already worked itself out. You see that a lot of people are protesting in the streets because of a video showing what is pretty obviously a murder by a police officer, but nobody in power is actually treating it like a murder, and you're also starting to wonder how many murders haven't been captured on video. And you see people running for political office say truly appalling things about immigrants and women and poor people and sick people, things that would get any polite person fired from their job for saying it out loud, but you realize, with horror, that a lot of people, including people around you, seem to be really into it.
So maybe you write a letter to your Congressman, or find a place to volunteer your time, or give money to a cause that's addressing one of these problems. And you try and learn more about what's going on, and especially about what has happened with these issues in the past. But as you learn more and as you try and do things to make the world around you a little better, you start putting together that these problems have been around for a very long time, which means that the people who came before you didn't find a way to solve them. It appears that these problems aren't one-off issues, but have deeply rooted structural causes that you're not able to solve or even really put a dent in by yourself, by your own attempts to be a nice and charitable person. And you are getting concerned that these looming problems are getting worse and affecting more people as more time goes by, and that leaves you with a lot of concerns about the world that you live in now, and the world that the people around you have to experience, and the world that your kids will have to live in someday, and that the things you do, by yourself, out of kindness, may not be enough to change it.
You are beginning, in other words, to worry.
"Laura said to me: this decade's gonna be fucked."
That's one of the first lines on WORRY., the album that changed a lot for Jeff Rosenstock. It was, after years of playing music, his breakout success, and he started selling out bigger rooms and moving more copies of all of his albums. WORRY. was Jeff's first album, under any name, that got reviewed by influential music blog Pitchfork; not only was the review very positive, but Jeff got invited to play at the Pitchfork Music Festival the following year, which is pretty good coming off an album that, among other things, mocks the artistic vacuum and amoral capitalism at the heart of music festivals:
"It feels completely ridiculous that I’m a willing participant, gazing at the purple and pinks in the shadow of a bank-sponsored skyline. 'Unite against the establishment!™ (while drones transmit the images to a server farm in the valley for a culture that will eat its own insides.)' Oh, they wouldn’t be your friend if you weren’t worth something."
Unsurprisingly, given his history of refusing to get along with the industry, Jeff introduced "Festival Song" at the Pitchfork festival by shouting out the amount of money Pitchfork had paid his band to come play (it was $7500).
WORRY., where the lyric sheet is written without line breaks as though the lyrics are paragraphs you're meant to read directly, got rave reviews and built up Jeff's following because, unsurprisingly, it was extremely good. Music taste is subjective, but for my money this is one of the best albums released in my lifetime, and it should be remembered as the Abbey Road of the 2010s. I'm not exaggerating to make a point. WORRY. takes all of Jeff's talent for writing catchy punk hooks and devastating lyrics and, more effectively than any his previous projects, aims it all at the giant fist slowly clenching itself around your life, as your rent goes up, as you get another surprise bill from your doctor, as you get pinged with endless notifications, as the cops beat on you and your friends, as everything beautiful and worthwhile gets paved over so a few people can make a buck and you can't. Jeff's determination to find people he can hold onto to keep him tethered to his life, and his senses of humor and joy are still there, but on this album, the anger and alienation and tension you feel have a cause, and the people causing it all have names and addresses, and that gives Jeff's anger a new immediacy. What the previous albums gave us isn't enough anymore. The human task has reached adulthood, and the poor have irrupted into our history and our music.
The reason I picked Abbey Road as my comparison point for WORRY. is that both albums dedicate their second halves to a massive multi-part medley, which each end with a big statement on love. In Jeff's case, the album slams through 8 connected tracks in about 10 minutes, spanning every shade of punk and ska. The medley’s lyrics cover getting evicted:
"I wanna say I’m just paranoid, but I’m not. There was a bang on the door and we can keep pretending that this isn’t really happening or wait until the noise goes away...I’m tired of the constant fear of building something here when I know for sure they’ll leave us high and dry without thinking twice when we can’t pay more."
And getting steamrolled by capitalists living the real American dream:
"Progress reaches down from the sky, dropping bins and couches on the curb outside. We’ll spend the weekend filling the holes and caulking the cracks that stretch across the ceiling while the economic disaster destroys all the color and life as it slowly moves southeast and I’m like a magnet pulling the storm. Oh, where can I move when it always finds me? Where else can I stay?"
And how cruel that dream actually is:
"The ones in power built a dream on guarantees of luxury and sold it like it’s magic to the poor. They trick you into thinking all it takes it just a little bit of effort once your foot is in the door. They brutalize your confidence and drain you of your energy until you’re always tired and unsure. They make a lot of promises but keep on taking everything so you always want more."
And, once again, getting evicted:
"They would pluck us from the lives we’re living with no fucks given and profit from the pain, forcing you and I to feel like children ‘cause if they didn’t we wouldn’t be too scared to say that we don’t wanna live inside a hellhole and waste our energy on all these assholes."
And the feeling that things are finally going to be alright, immediately undermined by the feeling that it might actually be hotter outside than it's ever been before, and that doesn’t seem good:
"Now it’s June 21st and this winter was the worst we’ve ever seen, but we made it through the freeze. Now it’s 84 degrees forever."
And how, if you try to do anything about any of this, there's a good chance armed agents of the state will beat your head in:
"We don’t need to be coddled or to be told life is fair by an omnipresent army with a power to be feared. So as we time out half-assed platforms, as the victims form a line, will the Riot Squad Protection Force ever try to fight for life?"
And as Jeff approaches the end of his medley, he launches into "...While You're Alive", a song where he wants to tell the person he loves that he loves her, where he prays that he can remember to tell her everything while she's still alive, because it's too easy to talk about how great someone is after they’ve died. And he clarifies what, exactly, he means by love at the very end of the song, in the first part of the actual lyric sheet written with line breaks, written to look like actual music, something you're not supposed to read but supposed to yell:
"It’s not like the love that they showed us on TV. It’s a home that can burn. It’s a limb to freeze.
It’s worry.
Love is worry."
On the album, Jeff only says "Love is worry" once. When he performs the song live, he shouts it, over and over, until the whole crowd is screaming it with him, jumping up and down trying to make the floor shake.
"Love is worry" is not a sentence that perfectly sums up all of the rich corpus of liberation theology. But it gets closer than every other sentence.
Love is worry. The tradition of liberation theology, which is only about 50-60 years old, tells us that there is no way to separate Christianity from worry on behalf of the poor, real worry that gets our blood boiling and spurs us to actually do something, to learn what's really causing the suffering in front of us, to find the other people who are worried too, and to work with them to change things.
I have expressed before my feeling that the Christian life should be primarily a response to material suffering. But as I start to respond to that suffering, I should expect to be moved to fight the people and forces causing that suffering. Reading theology should make you mad. Reading about the kingdom of God should frustrate you because of how much we've fallen short, and how stupid the reasons are keeping us from getting there: greed, laziness, spite. As Gutiérrez writes:
"We find ourselves, then, in the presence of a process that locates us at a point at which it is impossible to separate solidarity with the poor and prayer. This means that we are disciples of Christ, who is both God and a human being."
We cannot separate our love from our worry, we cannot separate listening to the music from being angry at this broken world, we cannot separate praying to God from looking at the suffering in front of us and saying "it doesn't have to be like this".
I got to see Jeff Rosenstock perform in 2018. He performed most of WORRY., including the entire back-half medley. But he was touring on another album, 2018's POST-, an album about waking up the morning after Trump's election and trying to piece together what you have to do next, an album about beating your head against the wall so you don't punch someone else in the face, an album about coming home from a protest and not knowing if you'll ever change anything. The final song of that album, and the final song of that concert, lurched forward with grim determination, repeating a refrain that, while also not a perfect summary of liberation theology, still does better than most sentences:
"We're not gonna let them win."