You can tell we’re getting near the end of this playlist since we’re looping all the way back around to the Velvet Underground, who’s “Sunday Morning” helped kick it off in the first place. I do have to make a confession though: as undeniably influential as their legendary debut The Velvet Underground and Nico has been on the development of Punk, Indie, Drone, Noise-Rock, Art-Rock, and just about every other alternative genre you could possibly name, I only like, maybe, 4 songs on it^[1]Sunday Morning, Waiting For My Man, Venus in Furs, and Heroin, for the record.. The legend of it being so completely underrated at the time of its 1967 release has grown so gargantuan that it is now officially over-rated, in my opinion. It actually took me awhile to finally check out their other 3 albums because of how underwhelmed I was by their first LP–which is my loss, because their later stuff is where things get really interesting.

Take for example “Jesus,” from their 1969 self-titled third album^[2]The dirty little secret of the Velvet Underground is that their name was a misnomer: they didn’t actually want to be underground at all, they really did want to be popular! Lou Reed had even … Continue reading and long-standing anchor of my Sunday Morning playlist.

When I first gave The Velvet Underground a spin back in the day, I initially feared that “Jesus” would just be some blasphemous rendition from the same folks who brought you “Heroin.”  But instead, I heard this genuine, authentic, unironic, pleading to Jesus Christ to “help me find my proper place,” to “help me in my weakness,” to return to grace.  Consider this, all you maudlin and unremarkable “Christian Rock” groups: a drug-addled alternative band from New York fronted by an agnostic Jew wrote a better Christian rock song than you ever will! 

But then, a heroin addict would understand better than anyone the need for redemption, wouldn’t he.

Indeed, recall that when the Savior was asked by the Pharisees why he hung out with drunkards, prostitutes, and publicans, he shot back, “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick”^[3]Matthew 9:12; Mark 2:17; Luke 5:31. The obvious implication of course is that we are the sick as well–or at least, that is who we should be identifying with. Christ indicates as much in his parable from Luke 18:9-14:

¹¹ The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.

¹² I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.

¹³ And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.

¹⁴ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

Joseph Smith once taught that when Christ left behind the 99 sheep to seek after the 1, it is because the 99 “are too righteous to repent; they will be damned anyhow; you cannot save them.”^[4]Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Ed. Joseph Fielding Smith, 1976, pp. 277-278. Oof. At this point it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever been a junkie or not–you best recognize that in the eyes of God, you are much closer to the druggie, and better start behaving and repenting as though you are one yourself if you are to have any hope of redemption. (Perhaps this is why I still listen to the Velvet’s “Jesus” on my Sunday playlist so much).

The affinity of the Savior for the drugged out and broken is also present on The Replacement’s 1987 single “Can’t Hardly Wait,” the closer to their fifth album Pleased to Meet Me.^[5]Though their true masterpiece is their 1984 Beatles-thumbing title (and I love the Beatles) Let It Be.

The Replacements were no strangers to self-destructive behaviors themselves. Among a certain subset of ‘Mats fans, they could’ve been one of the biggest bands of the ’80s if only they’d stopped sabotaging themselves–if they hadn’t, say, performed visibly drunk on Saturday Night Live, or fired their lead-guitarist for drug-abuse despite all being raging alcoholics themselves, or released a deliberately anti-commercial music video for “Bastards of Young“–which, by the way, is one of the most affecting and criminally underrated anthems in Rock history, a song I often listen to when I’m heading up to the community college to remind myself what kind of student body I’m serving^[6]for that matter, it’s a reminder of how I often felt when I was still an adjunct.

But it’s not “Bastards of Young” that’s on my Sunday Morning playlist, but the much more deceptively upbeat “Can’t Hardly Wait”^[7]which even gave the title to a silly little late-90s teen comedy, on the strength of the line “Jesus rides beside me/he never buys any smokes.” For an LDS kid reared on the Word of Wisdom, it of course always made perfect sense to me why Christ would never buy cigarettes; less often noted, however, is that although the Savior doesn’t smoke, he is still riding beside the smoker. Because of course he is: as we just read in Luke, Christ is always hanging with the drunks, the prostitutes, the low-lifes, the forsaken and forgotten. These are the ones most in need of help; these are also the ones most likely to be humbled, and therefore the most likely to repent (as Alma 32 in the Book of Mormon reminds us, these are the only ones who can be saved). It is not the self-righteous pharisees we are to emulate, but the Bastards of Young, if we are to have any hope of the Kingdom.

The song lyrics to “Can’t Hardly Wait” are appropriately vague, functioning mostly as a peon to getting excited in general–whether that be a hot date, or a concert, or the first day of school, or the last day of school, or a marriage, or a reunion, or even the Second Coming itself, when we will not only see the face of Christ again “and see him as he is,”^[8]Moroni 7:48 but realize that he has been riding beside us all along.