Review

Awe and wonder

Culture

Music

20 November 2024

3 min read

Ezra Collective understands the where and how of transcendence

Dance music allows us to encounter what’s ’beyond our ken’.

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

Concert goes stand, bathed in warm light, raising their hands in the air, facing away from the camera to the stage

Like so many, I came across the Ezra Collective after the band won the Mercury Prize for the album "Where I'm Meant To Be". So, I was primed to listen to its new album, 'Dance, No One's Watching' Yet I was not expecting it to impact me so profoundly.

The album is divided into four acts, each depicting a stage of a night out: 'cloakroom link up'; 'in the dance'; 'our element'; and 'lights on'. The night out is given structure as if it were itself a work of art or even a liturgy, the agreed form of words and movement that shapes acts of public worship. And then, at the heart of the album, I heard 'Hear My Cry' and I realised the claim was a stronger one: this wasn't just like worship.

As this track kicked in, I experienced a moment of visceral recognition. I was taken back to a church in Hackney, where those riffs had been accompanied by lyrics of praise. Suddenly I was there again, in the midst of that community, crying out: "When my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I!"

Speaking to Apple Music about this song, bandleader Femi Koleoso said:

“I wanted the record to take us to the church dance floor now. It’s all about how the dance floor can feel bigger than you, it can sweep you up and overcome your feelings of overwhelm.”

As I continued to listen, I was also struck by the beautiful closing track, 'Everybody'. On investigation, I discovered that it was also a reworking of a praise song, 'Everybody Blow Your Trumpet'. The album interprets a night of dancing as culminating in praise to God. The inclusion of those instrumentals, 'Hear My Cry' and 'Everybody' add resonance and heft to the refrain of the album's lead single, 'God Gave Me Feet For Dancing', where the transcendent is touched and named, albeit gently, as God.

In his new book, Cosmic Connections (reviewed for Seen & Unseen by Paul Weston), Charles Taylor argues that poetry "reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deeper reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken." While modern Western societies lack a shared structure of meaning or enchantment around which, traditionally, cultures were organised, poetry offers fragmentary contact with the transcendent through experience.

'Dance, No One's Watching' shows us that what Taylor suggests of poetry is true of dance. It demonstrates the power of music—and of our participation in that music—to lead us into an encounter with something "beyond our ken".

Much of “Dance No One's Watching" proceeds without words. Whereas poetry can name what is encountered, music can struggle to do so, leaving the emotions it generates in need of direction at best and open to manipulation at worst. And yet, by situating their music in the experience and memories of specific communities, including churches, Ezra Collective prevents this encounter becoming a vague experience of transcendence.

There is a hospitality, a pluralism, to the album's understanding of where and how transcendence is encountered but it is not relativism. Even as different genres and contexts are explored, the particularity remains.

Just as the album reminds us that every church should be a dance floor, it raises the possibility that churches can help us all see God as the one who gave us feet for dancing and to find Him on every dance floor.

Watch now

Article

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

18 September 2024

5 min read

US election: the primal stories trumping facts

Projections and polls cannot capture the power of stories shaping identity.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

a map depicts US states coloured red and blue.

538 election prediction map.

ABC News.

Washington D.C. — Election throes in America are intensifying while citizens prepare to cast their votes. The last week alone has been something like a whirlwind, not to mention the entire campaign itself.

Last week, Americans tuned into the first and possibly final Presidential debate between Trump and Harris. On the heels of the debate came a flurry of propaganda leveled by JD Vance (and promoted by Trump) against Haitian migrant communities in Ohio. These claims resulted in bomb threats and school closures.

And to wrap up the week, a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump in nearly as many months. Trump and his campaign, quicker and more direct that the first attempt, quickly cast the blame towards Democrats, specifically for what they see as violent rhetoric in describing Trump as a “threat to democracy.” Trump meanwhile continues to campaign on threats and claims of election fraud, refusing to signal he’d accept the certified results of the election in the event he loses.

That’s just another week in an unpredictable American presidential election.

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle.

And life goes on. For now, in this time, in my small corner of American life, I find there is this mixture of exhausted apathy and existential rage. In view of the spectacle, there’s a general exasperation of “what will happen next?” But more personally, dispersed on social media, is the existential zeal and dread—“we” have to defeat “them!”

The danger of this mixture is twofold. Just as odd as it is potent. It is also combustible. And just as it can lay dormant; it can also be summoned by a mere spark.

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle with predictions and projections. Some offer prayer.

I listen in on conservative Christian talk radio. Prayers offered on air for God to intervene. What follows is a litany of slogans— “secure our borders” and “defend life” and “the economy” — and of course prayers for the salvation of those who think differently.

Then, there’s more daring outrage merchants with deep pockets. Those who try to shift the election through nefarious means. Like the case of Tenet Media, a media network of right-wing American podcasters who were recently indicted by the Justice Department for receiving Russian funds through fronted companies.

It seems to me that the heart of the matter in the midst of this election, deeper than policy and beyond the spectacle, is that none of us are entirely sure what reality another person inhabits.

A new study published last week found that most registered Republicans (at 67 per cent) trust the Trump campaign as their primary source for election information. Trump’s word, for nearly three quarters of his party, is given more authority than government certification, media-based news, or local news.

This raises the possibility that, in 50-some-odd days, if Trump refuses to concede, if he repeats claims of election fraud, his base seems ready and willing to believe it.

Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning.

Alongside the debates about policy, the propaganda that stokes division and dehumanizes migrant communities, is a deeper crisis of source authority. Of not just “facts” but truth, of meaning, of reality.

The study revealed that most Americans signal they tend to trust information that comes from “data” and “facts.” But oddly enough, nothing about that statement seems to accord with the on the ground reality of America’s social fabric.

We should know by now: facts have never been enough.

100 years ago, as novelist Rebecca West reflected on the chaotic series of events that sparked World War I, she admitted, “I shall never be able to understand how it happened. It is not that there are too few facts available, but that there are too many.”

What seems “real” for many Americans is not (and perhaps has never been) rooted entirely in the all-powerful “fact.” Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning. These stories are primal. They’re the kind which create identities and bind communities. They are rich in meaning and so prove entirely immune to fact-checking operations. Source authority has no power apart from primal stories. And though projections and polls tend to focus on the data, they cannot capture the power of stories which create identity and contain community. This is the stuff the vote is made of, too.

This past week, JD Vance defended his propaganda in the form of conspiracy theories of Haitian migrants eating pets by telling CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.”

Ends-justifies-means has always been ascendant in politics. Nobody is arguing that MAGA invented political expediency. But this election is careening towards deep waters which we would do well to avoid.

“Propaganda is a means to an end,” said Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in 1934 before an audience at Nuremberg, “…it provides the background music...[it] miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people.”

I do not know what the next 50 days will hold. I remain deeply concerned that the word of Trump aspires to assume an authority which sees democracy as a meddling imposition in one man’s destiny. But I do know that none of this is fated. As Augustine observed during the throes of Rome’s collapse: “Bad times! Hard times!” this is what they are saying. But let us live well and the times shall be well. We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times.

May it be so.