Matisyahu, Trudeau, And Slow Trains Coming

This is about Pierre Elliot Trudeau Park. I was walking there last night. There is a pond and some fountains, and some trees, and adjacent there were two baseball games going on, one kid one adult, and it’s cool that, summer time and baseball games, it makes me nostalgic for a past I didn’t even have. But that’s the park. It used to be called Centennial Park, and I don’t know when they changed it, but I know that the first time I was there it was with my family and it was at a Lag Ba’Omer celebration hosted by the local Chabad organization, and that was about 4 years ago. And one of the reasons we went was to hear Matisyahu.

And that’s what this is about really. It’s about Matisyahu, not about the park at all. That was about 4 years ago, before anyone knew about Matisyahu; he was billed then as a Lubavitcher who played reggae. And my wife, she likes reggae. So do I really. But she was interested in hearing this guy.

But it got late and we couldn’t stay, so she never did get to hear him. Later, though, I got my hands on Live At Stubb’s, mostly for my wife who was interested, but she didn’t like it in the end, and I can’t say I blame her.

But I was thinking about that a bit the other night when I was listening to Slow Train Coming by Bob Dylan. And that’s what this is really about. It’s not about Matisyahu at all. It’s about Dylan being a “born-again Christian.” Of course Dylan couldn’t be a born again Christian because to be born again you have to be born once. And Dylan was born alright, or so I presume, in the complete absence of stories of storks, but he wasn’t born a Christian, not with a name like “Zimmerman” he wasn’t.

This album is 30 years old, well 29 actually – it was release in August, 1979 – so surely others have written about it and done so more elegantly. But thing with me is, that I hate this album, and I hate it because it’s so damned good. Lyrically the album is a pure rant. “Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain't no neutral ground” sings Dylan on “Precious Angel.” And that pretty much sums up the album. Dylan sings of a vengeful God, uncompromising in His demands, and of the massive unrelenting unparalleled corruption of mankind. Not much about love and brotherhood here. But here’s the rub. Dylan had Barry Beckett of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section playing keyboards, he has legendary producer Jerry Wexler, with Beckett, on the console; he has Mark Knopfler playing lead guitar and Pick Withers on drums, and so Dylan delivers his pinhead theology with a force that nails you to the wall. He creates a thing of great beauty out of platitudes and clichéd claptrap. Not just beauty, no, what he creates is riveting, you can’t argue with it, because the lyrics, one dimensional as they are, move in a context of such power and conviction. It’s so beautiful that I hate it.

That’s side one (it used to be vinyl remember?) Side two kind of lapses into “do unto others” platitiudes without quite the musical punch of side one. Let’s leave that for now.

So that’s what I was thinking about as I walked through Pierre Elliot Trudeau Park, formerly known as Centennial Park, and about how we missed Matisyah – Matisyahu with his lyrics like:

Dirt covered earth lays beneath my rib cage

Giving birth to overgrowth invading on to path ways

Burnt out trees cover streets where children once played

Sown seeds decay through sacred stepping stones in disarray

…

Aish tamid eternally

A fire burns continuously

Wondering where you been

Won't you come on home to me?

They are nice words, and different from Dylan, but Matisyahu is no Dylan, and he doesn’t have a Mark Knopfler or Jerry Wexler to bring him home, either. He is a showman, and many like him, but there is no personal dimension to his music, no filtering of meaning through the lense of experience. Ultimately, it’s plastic, nice words notwithstanding.

And it’s a microcosm. And that’s really what this is about. This isn’t about the park, or about Dylan, or about Matisyahu. This is about the meaning that we bring to our experience. This is about those whose words are hidebound, but who bring such meaning and intensity into their lives that no one can argue. This is about people who do and are the opposite. This is about how it’s not always what we say, but it’s how we say it, and what we do with it.

But in the end, it’s not quite true, because while I wouldn’t want to be a Matisyahu with all the superficiality that that entails, I wouldn’t want to be the Dylan of Slow Train either, because notwithstanding the beauty of the delivery, the message is still ugly.

So I’m going to go back to Pierre Elliot Trudeau Park, and maybe stop and watch a game for a while if I’m lucky enough to catch one again, and breathe the air under the trees, and next time I’ll listen to Gordon Lightfoot…