Moving in Stereo: The Cars and the Omega Point
I recently wrote that I am leaving journalism. I also noted that I have several pieces in the pipeline that have been contracted for, or that I promised editors. Many are reviews of forthcoming books.
Looking at some of the book titles, I detected a theme that can bring many of them together. That theme is the transformative power of art and how it fits into the evolutionary power of God, who is love.
Stick with me. It’s my last summer as a journalist so I’m swinging for the fences.
Two of the books I’ll write about are No Sense in Wishing, a forthcoming essay collection by Lawrence Burney, and The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told, a history of the great 1980s band by Bill Janovitz. In No Sense in Wishing, Burney explores those moments in life when we encounter art that transform us. “In this life,” Burney writes, “we endure an infinite series of experiences that change us at the molecular level. The first song that had a lasting impression on you isn’t likely the first memory you have of a song, but something about the one you do remember changes you in considerable ways. Just like your first fight did. Or the first time you sat with a book that made you say to yourself, ‘I have to change the course of my life after reading this.’”
Such a moment happened for me in 1978, when my sister took me to my first concert. It was the Cars. It wasn’t just that the music was great; the Cars represented a break from the hippie and heavy rock that was pervasive at the time and that our older brothers and sisters listened to. Instead of the grittiness of the Stones, the anarchic mysticism of Who, or the occult symbols of Led Zeppelin, the Cars were about sleekness and cool. Their second album, Candy-O, featured a cover painting by Alberto Vargas, who did paintings of pin-up girls that appeared in Esquire and Playboy magazines in the 1940s through the 1960s.
In The Cars: Let the Story Be Told, Bill Janovitz describes being a young teenager in 1978 and holding that first Cars record: ”There are no hirsute hippies or crusty southern-rock dudes in hats and denim on the cover of this album. No, there is something far more appealing: the close-up of a hot model with high cheekbones and glossy ruby-red lips that look like they inspired the Rolling Stones’ logo. Her long fingers with matching red polished fingernails are loosely draped around a translucent steering wheel. She’s illuminated in comic-book colors, blue and red, like from a cop car. She’s got her other forearm up to her forehead, her palm turned outward like a silent-movie starlet in a melodramatic display of duress. But she’s smiling, maybe even laughing, possibly singing; her tongue is visible in her open mouth, the tip up on the roof, as if she is about to sing the word ‘la’ or ‘love.’ We sit on the shag carpet in Jeff’s wood-paneled bedroom as he opens the shrink-wrap and puts the record on the turntable. The needle drops.”
The Cars announced the New Wave, which was also a return to modernism in the arts. In his book Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds has explored how the post-punk years from 1978 to 1984 "saw the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature.” The post-punk period was “an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music. Cabaret Voltaire borrowed their name from Dada. Pere Ubu took theirs from Alfred Jarry. Talking Heads turned a Hugo Ball sound poem into a tribal-disco dance track. Gang of Four, inspired by Brecht and Godard’s alienation effects, tried to deconstruct rock even as they rocked hard. Lyricists absorbed the radical science fiction of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick, and techniques of collage and cut-up were transplanted into the music.”
The record cover artwork of the post punk period “matched the neo-modernist aspirations of the words and music, with graphic designers like Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville and labels like Factory and Fast Product drawing from constructivism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, John Heartfield and Die Neue Typograhie.”
Pop music modernism was at the same time about the mysticism and life-altering dynamic of love. In his book about Roxy Music’s 1982 album Avalon, Simon Morrison explores how Roxy leader Bryan Ferry went from modernism experimentation to love, covering songs like “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and “Don’t Worry Baby.” Morrison posits that Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new,” which was the cry of so many New Wave musicians in the 1980s, became “over the course of Ferry’s career, an impulse to make it beautiful, sensual.” Ferry’s “creative impulse appears to involve stripping away the intellectual dressings of modernism and exposing its beating heart, knowing the body holds its own mysteries.”
Most of the songs of the Cars were about love. Same with the Pet Shop Boys. “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer, a groundbreaking record that, as Simon Reynolds notes in Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow's Music Today, heralded electronic dance music and the New Wave, was an immersion in love. "Love Comes Quickly" by the Pet Shop Boys is arguably the greatest song of the 1980s.
With the arrival of the Cars in 1978 it was like the pagan festivals like Woodstock and occult symbolism in bands like Led Zeppelin were swept away. We were moving forwards. We were evolving.
Yet what about my Catholic faith? St. Augustine said God is “every ancient, ever new.” As Catholics we had the ancient part, with the mass and the Bible and the Church Fathers. Yet I was in love with modernism and dance clubs and the Cars and Roxy Music.
I wrestled with this for years—how to connect my love of modernism in art and music with Christianity. Was there a way to have both Jesus and Bryan Ferry? I got my answer when I came across the writings of Ilia Delio, a Franciscan sister. Delio preaches evolution, but not in the Darwinian sense. In books like The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love and The Emergent Christ: Exploring the Meaning of Catholic in an Evolutionary Universe, Sister Delio argues that evolution is a fact, but it’s based on and driven by love.
This “love-energized evolution… empowers life toward greater unity and wholeness.” At the end of it all is the Omega Point, where everything converges into partakes in the life of God: “It is the most intensely personal centre that makes every being personal and centred in the process of evolution,” Delio writes in The Primacy of Love. “While Omega is in all things, it is also distinct from all things; it is within evolution and beyond evolution. It is operative from the beginning, acting on pre-living cosmic elements by setting them in motion, a single impulse of energy. Omega is God and God is in evolution. The New Testament reveals that God is love. We find this revelation explicitly in the Letter of John where the author writes: ‘Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love’ (1 John 4:7-8).”
Heartbeat City here we come.