God is a DJ: A Hypothesis
In church we sing a song called “Kingdom Days,” which appears to be an adaptation of an older hymn, though I can’t figure out which one. The reason I mention it is there’s a bit that goes like this (minus the repetitions):
When around thy throne we sing / There no tongue shall silent be / All shall join in harmony / In those blessed kingdom days
It made me think (I have a hard time concentrating in church) about the idea of “harmony.” Harmony is a great thing; melodies are nice, but harmonies take it to the next level. ”Kingdom Days” is probably using the term in a slightly different sense of the word. It probably means that one day all humanity will sing and praise God together, as “one voice.”
But I thought: Whose harmony?
Music is as old as human culture. It started with the human voice and the human body, then we got percussion and horns and stringed instruments and a couple thousand years later we wind up here. Um, maybe that’s a bad example. Point is, between the first aboriginal drum circle on the African savannah and Justin Bieber, a lot’s happened.
There’s a ton of music in the Bible, from Moses’ song of victory after the crossing of the Red Sea, to the Song Around the Throne in John’s Apocalypse. You may have also heard of the Psalms.
But if every nation and tribe will one day praise God in their own tongue, is it too much to say that they’ll also have their own music? And who’s to say one culture’s music is better suited to praising God than another’s? Sure, we European-Americans love us some Handel, but why should we expect baroque to take precedence over, say, Chinese opera? Or Chinese Opera over a didgeridoo?
So we have a potential problem. Every culture, from every place, from every time, singing in harmony . . . but which harmony is it going to be?
Maybe it’ll sound something like this:
It’s a great song and a great video, but I don’t think it’s going to do it. Yeah, you have people from different places and different cultures playing and singing together, but they’re singing one song (an American soul/R&B song) in one language (English). That’s not going to cut it, not with the standard we have in Revelation. But if that won’t suffice, what will?
The mashup.
Sure, the genre originates from one particular culture (the West) in one particular time period (our generation), but there’s a difference. Mashup isn’t actually a genre of music. It’s an approach to making music. It’s about taking existing cultural artifacts and combining them in a way that produces something more than the sum of its individual parts. It’s about “transformative” art — not creation ex nihilo, but ex omnibus – creation from everything. Like so:
But again, your average mash-up, which usually combines one vocal track with one music track, isn’t going to cut it.
Enter Girl Talk.
By my count, that’s twenty-six songs sampled in a track that goes for 5:23. It’s part of a continuous mixtape that runs for 71 minutes, including 372 different songs. If you want to count them all for yourself, go here. (You can download the mixtape for free, as a single track or divided into twelve parts for convenience).
Even this particular instance of supercharged mashup falls short of the universality we see in Revelation; Girl Talk samples mostly Western artists and the whole mixtape leans heavily on rap and hip-hop. But again, it’s the concept that’s instructive. If one guy can take 372 different songs and make a coherent whole out of them that stands on its own as a legitimate work of art, who’s to say that the Creator of the Universe can’t take an instrument from every tribe or a style from every culture or a verse from every language and mash it up into a beautiful work that sings God’s praise through the contributions of creation?
Whose harmony? Ours — and God’s. When heaven and earth collide, our song will be transformative, the music of every time and place brought woven together by God into something that none of us could imagine on our own.
And that will only be the beginning.
