Satire
IMAGE from: The First Jaws, ©1985 by Jack T. Chick LLC
And when he came into the house,
he suffered no man to go in,
save Peter, and James, and John,
and the father and the mother of the maiden.
And all wept, and bewailed her:
but he said: Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth.
And they laughed him to scorn, knowing that she was dead.
And he put them all out, and took her by the hand,
and called, saying: Maid, arise.
And her spirit came again, and she arose straightway…
Why I like this text:
This song plays with themes of Snow White/Sleeping Beauty and enchantment but it can be taken further – to ideas of eternal recurrence, resurrection from the dead and the power of sublimated desire searching for the eternal feminine… all happening in the virtual discotheque of your mind.
I love Ace of Base. There is haunting melancholy in their lyrics, and depth to their songs under a seemingly superficial techno surface. It is conducive to a Nietzschean reading – but also lends itself to a Christian interpretation… in a disco sort of way.
It makes one wonder.
How beautiful was Lucifer when he used music to rally the angels to join his movement? What gimmicks did Nero use to produce a tyrannic spectacle? How powerful was the fervor of a Nazi rally? What drives people to lose their individuality in mass events like pop concerts or New-Age cult celebrations?
I am not saying that Ace of Base are sinister or evil—in fact I like this song for it’s message, and I love this band for their music. I especially enjoy the beauty of the singers. But if you step back and analyze the use of light, color, rhythm and media spectacle to enhance the crowd’s collective hysteria, you begin to appreciate these frightful words from the prophet Ezekiel:
Meanwhile impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses. The techniques of manipulation will be discussed in later chapters. For the moment let us confine our attention to those impersonal forces which are now making the world so extremely unsafe for democracy, so very inhospitable to individual freedom. What are these forces?
