'One of Us' Pop lyrics often express notions about spiritual longing Can they be trusted?
Moses, Paul
Paul Moses 'ONE OF US9 Dad listens to daughter I was surprised one morning to find that my twelve-year-old daughter wanted me to listen to her radio station. Normally my reaction to the program...
...I called Donohue and told him that I thought the song was pretty good...
...With that proviso, I played the song for my class and found that the combination of its lyrics and polished sound helped open up discussions about the nature of God...
...Bazilian, who was raised Jewish and attended Quaker schools, penned it, and he's at a loss to explain where it came from...
...Donohue especially objected to one line in the song's chorus, which asked what it would be like if God became one of us, "just a slob like one of us...
...Within the church, too, there's been a retreat from an engagement with what is good in popular culture...
...Greeley cites Bruce Springsteen as a prime example of how images and even an outlook absorbed during a Catholic upbringing can stay with an artist later in life...
...I just take credit for being the scribe," he said in an interview in the Washington Post...
...Enya ponders the angels...
...But, bubbling with enthusiasm, Caitlin insisted she had found the perfect song for the eighth-grade religious education class I teach...
...In useful ways, "One of Us" raised the basic issues I wanted my students, who were preparing for Confirmation, to think about...
...He has had a number of hits...
...In fact, I later discovered, a youth commission in my home diocese of Brooklyn used it for a program with teen-agers...
...Normally my reaction to the program being aired ranges from making a face to ordering it shut off...
...And how would I be changed by that encounter...
...Another song, "Let's Just Get Naked," established that much...
...Unfortunately, the spiritual aspect of contemporary pop music often is overlooked by music critics...
...Osborne, it turned out, is a lapsed Catholic and her music is sprinkled with references to saints and sinners...
...We don't feel it would be a good move on our part to say nothing...
...After listening to the album, I decided that Osborne exhibits what Andrew Greeley has described as "the Catholic imagination...
...The cultural pattern, I believe, is that longing for spirituality is so strong in our society that it is finding its way even into the very secular world of the pop charts...
...In the years immediately after the Second Vatican Council, folk Mass groups in many parishes and schools borrowed contemporary music or lyrics for worship, a practice that has since faded (okay, maybe for the better in many cases...
...In "One of Us," the God-among-us is a lonely stranger on a bus, with "nobody calling on the phone, 'cept for the pope, maybe, in Rome...
...But I can't find anything in this particular song that dances close to Catholic-baiting...
...Her CD made it clear that she was no Christian rocker...
...For this was truly a rare event: Someone was singing about God on the crassest of drive-time formats...
...Like many other people, I reacted to Joan Osborne's rendition of "One of Us" by buying her new album, "Relish...
...For Jesus Christ is God with us...
...Billy Joel, once castigated for singing that "Catholic girls start much too late," has become a spiritual seeker in middle age in his "River of Dreams" album...
...In other words, only organized religion has tried to keep in touch with God...
...Van Morrison's album "Hymns to the Silence" is, as the title indicates, filled with hymns...
...The Irish rock band U-2's work expresses a strong spiritual dimension...
...This was done in a grand way at Pope John Paul II's Mass in Baltimore, when he entered to the unlikely sound of the group Boyz II Men...
...What would it be like to encounter God...
...In the meantime, I tried to learn more about Osborne...
...One song she co-wrote, "Saint Teresa," speaks of a streetwalker who is "higher than the moon...
...Sting's new album has a song with the chorus, "Let your soul guide you...
...As Entertainment Weekly put it, the song "filled a God-sized hole in the Top Ten...
...Here is a new rising star who is dancing close to the edge...
...A solicitation for donations to Rock for Choice and other prochoice groups on the CD made it unlikely that she would sing at a the next papal Mass in Central Park...
...I thought, This song knows what it's saying even though I don't.'" Bazilian has written a song about longing, pop music's overarching theme...
...The song carried Osborne, a previous unknown, to five Grammy nominations, including Record of the Year, Album of the Year, and Best New Artist...
...Osborne's work "is not the worst thing I've seen," he said...
...He explained that the Catholic League was taking "kind of a prophylactic approach...
...Another important bit of information on the album jacket was that Osborne did not write "One of Us...
...A group called Crash Test Dummies deliberates on the existence of God and the afterlife in a number of songs...
...And sure enough, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights had issued a release quoting its president, William Donohue, as saying that Osborne's songs "dance awfully close to the line of Catholic baiting...
...How would we react...
...And Osborne, who has said in a letter to fans that "the church's attitudes toward women and gays make the pope look far more ridiculous than any pop song could," did not write the song, which speaks of the pope only with respect...
...One of Us " is not a religious song...
...Like the recent songs by Billy Joel and Crash Test Dummies, it is about alienation from God...
...Pop music is not only about "losing my religion...
...The enormous popularity of "One of Us," it seems to me, reveals that Americans, if given the opportunity, will flock to buy music that awakens or perhaps satisfies their spiritual hunger...
...Clearly, the sentiments expressed by the song were also something the public wanted...
...The connection with Saint Teresa was more than a bit strained to say the least...
...Sure enough, a woman was singing, "Yeah, yeah, God is great, yeah, yeah, God is good...
...It was not exactly a new idea: "Lord, when was it we saw you hungry and gave you food...
...But this looked to me like a miss...
...But there is still some good popular music to be found, and it should be pointed out...
...Was Osborne calling God a slob...
...Cultures are changed as a result of patterns...
...This was a tortured reading of a song that simply asked how we would react to God if God was just an average person encountered in our everyday lives...
...Now, I do not oppose Donohue's concern about anti-Catholic prejudice in the news and entertainment media...
...So I was disappointed to read one morning in the New York Post that the song "One of Us" was being described as anti-Catholic...
...But, he continued, "Cultures aren't changed as a result of one incident...
...She didn't win...
...Without quite realizing it, he tapped into America's longing for God...
...It was penned by Eric Bazilian, a member of the Hooters...
...The singer wondered what it would be like to see the face of God, and if seeing God's face would make her believe in heaven, in Jesus, the saints, and the prophets...
...It is, arguably, also about seeking it...
...I was concerned about a theological point, the qualifying "what if" in the key line, "what if God was one of us...
...And what, she asked, if God were one of us, a stranger encountered on the bus...
Vol. 123 • June 1996 • No. 12
