Zugunruhe
The Revelations—Take Care of Us (1967? / Garage Gospel)
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re asking for a little help from above with an obscure gospel single from the 60s.
CHAPTER I
I’m driving.
It’s early morning, the sun still rising and changing the sky from dark night to orange. I’ve just dropped my young nephew off at school, something I do every morning to help my busy sister.
I’m driving through a neighborhood of a wealthy suburb outside of Houston. Median home prices here are $500k. The homes on the street I’m driving are well into the millions, which is kind of high if you understand the majority of Texas outside of Austin. I think. I’ve never really owned a home, or anything else.
The homes are huge, brown and a mashup of faux elegance: think Mediterranean meets Tudor. Roofs with multiple unnecessary trusses. Unexplainable battlements. Herringbone brick for no reason. Loads of fake window shutters. Palm trees. All very gauche. The front yards are sprawling testaments to landscaping. I’ve driven this road near daily for the past year and the only people I ever see are crews of brown men, covered up in long sleeves and floppy hats to protect them from the searing Texas sun. They whack weeds, they drive mowers. They wrap their mouths because of all the gasoline fumes from their tools, I presume.
And I take notice of all the Trump flags I see.
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Life is a nightmare, Jukeboy Bonner sang.
When I started Sermons!, I had just returned to the US after almost a decade living in Canada. Being back shocked me. The country felt so openly hostile. In the first week, I had to go renew my drivers license and had a meltdown at the Department of Motor Vehicles Supercenter. People were asleep on the ground, waiting hours to have their number called, just to get to a kiosk to get another number. It felt so dystopian—I couldn’t handle it and I left, shaken. A few weeks later, I attempted again and while standing outside in the Texas summer heat for an hour, a man burst out the building yelling, “Everyone working in there needs to be shot”. Everyone in line started looking at each other with silent wide eyes until someone broke the silence:
Do you think he’s coming back?
I moved back to Canada as soon as I could.
CHAPTER II
Zugunruhe is a German word that translates to English as: migration anxiety1. I understand the feeling. I experience it when I drive down that road, seeing all of those flags and thinking about what is up around the bend in November. It won’t be good, I’m certain. And so the urge to migrate returns, and so do the stressful questions of how and when.
But where to go, really? The assholes are everywhere. And it’s hard to not feel like the assholes are winning. To quote a favorite meme about the muppet Ms. Piggy:
I hate them with my life
CHAPTER III
A thought I had this morning, while driving through the faux elegance and immigrant yard workers and flags for that one presidential candidate is that what unifies this period of chaos is a lack of humanity. I watched a documentary the other night called Kiss the Future. It’s about the people of Sarajevo during The Balkan Wars and the salvation of music. It also revolves around the band U2, but I can look past that because of how profound was the connection between life and music. It’s worth your viewing time, if you believe in the power of music.
I believe in the power of music. I believe in it down to the very last cell in my body. Hence, the slogan I wrote on June 28, 2020 in the very first SERMONS! post:
Music is the answer. Music is our savior.
It’s horrifying to read the news. I can’t even type words about it anymore. I don’t understand the world around me. I have a tiny machine that fits in my back pocket and it reflects a strange, terrifying world back at me. Where is our collective humanity? I can’t imagine a giant concert bringing people together these days; in the US, in Europe, in the Middle East…
CHAPTER IV
I’ve left the song until the end. I didn’t intend to do that. But my thoughts about life in 2024 are too much to handle. They take over. And this morning, they were shaped by this song.
I was driving my nephew to his private Lutheran school. I’m not religious. I’ve even posted here that the only thing I believe in is math. But I grew up in Texas and so I may not believe in God but I believe in salvation. It’s ingrained. I grew up with church. I have family who have sought to be Born Again™ when falling on hard times. I’ve always loved Gospel Music.
He’s admitted to me that music isn’t very important to him. So I try and get him to think about what we’re listening to on those drives to and from school. This morning I broke my own protocol and discussed salvation and the power of faith and how important that was to seek during hard times. And after I dropped him off, I played this song three more times.
We need help. We need someone to see our plight and help us get through the dark. For some people that light is Jesus and that’s just fine by me. More than anything we need something to remind us of our humanity, because I’m having a harder time seeing it around me.
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I have learned to appreciate the literalness of the German language, even if it is still rough on my ears.
Love this post, Jamie.
Other than math, there's another thing you do believe in: "Music is our Savior."
And, like you, I turn to music to help me find some calm amongst the chaos. Timothy Leary's words of "tuning out" couldn't be more appropriate. There is so much I can't control that all I can do is control what I can control, and sometimes tuning out the doom and gloom is beneficial to my mental health.
America is a deeply violent country. We profit from war; we fight for the rights to own weapons of war; we make sickening horror films like 'Terrifyer' and disgusting first-person shooter games for our entertainment. We scream obscenities at players on the violent American football field and cheer when the opponent's star is injured. We also use words like "it looks like a war zone" to describe a natural disaster. The insensitivity of that phrase never fails to irritate me. Don't get me wrong, the recent horrible path of destruction from hurricanes is awful—but a "war zone?" Really? A natural disaster is out of our control. War is completely in our control and leaves human caused pain and death in its path. We also have no clue what it would be like to live through the Balkans of the 1990s, or Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Rwanda, or Europe in 1940.
We have a charcoal drawing of a nude framed in our bathroom. I remember when we first moved back to the States, a parent of one of our daughter's friends complained about it (WTF? Who is this gatekeeper of our house?). Yet their son was obsessed with 'Call of Duty.' I quickly remembered that American parents feel more comfortable with their kids watching or engaging in graphic violence and want to shield them from a drawing of the human body. I don't get it.
Up here in Portland, I live in a political bubble. There are Kamala signs everywhere. In 2016, the lawns throughout the city were for Bernie. But leave the bubble of the "anarchist jurisdiction" and sanctuary city of Portland, and politically most of Oregon becomes West Virginia with a more dramatic landscape. I also grew up in Ohio (albeit Cleveland), so I know that what I may see in Portland doesn't necessarily represent the pulse of the nation.
I too worry about November and beyond.
Returning to music, our savior—Numero are hitting the road and doing a few pop ups on the West Coast. They will be in Portland next weekend. 😎
Great song! Great words, friend. I am right there with you in your thoughts.