It was just over a year ago that Jack Johnson released his eight studio album Meet the Moonlight. It didn’t do well. It was his first LP since his 2001 debut Brushfire Fairytales to not even break the Billboard Top 10, and remains in no danger of ever threatening his debut’s eventual platinum sales. Though he will doubtless be able to keep touring behind the hits before throngs of aging millennials for years to come, his recording career appears to have at last run its course.
Yet there’s been a curious lack of, well, anything, about it–no reviews, retrospectives, articles, promotions, nada. Jack Johnson is simply one of those things that’s always around now, in the background. It’s not like he’s ever going to release some psychedelic prog-rock masterpiece, so he’s nothing to get worked up about–or even backlash against, apparently.
Not that I don’t get the collective shrug that has greeted every new Jack Johnson release for well nigh a decade now: you can only hear so many High School guitar students strum out “Flake,” or hear “Bubble Toes” in so many Starbucks, before you start to roll your eyes and tune him out–as the vast majority of music-listeners appear to have done long ago. “All his songs sound the same!” is a common complaint. And it’s true, he doesn’t stray very far from his laid-back beach-vibe (as though that were necessarily a bad thing…).
And it’s not like I listen to him much anymore myself; at some point he just sort of became the background music of my college years. But then, I guess that’s exactly why I feel this need to defend a musician who probably doesn’t need defending (it’s not like anyone’s attacking): he’s always been there for me. Brushfire Fairytales came out my freshman year of college; On and On during my mission; In Between Dreams during my BA (it was popular date-night music at the BYUs); Sleep Through the Static start of my MA; To The Sea end of my MA; and I like to think it’s not coincidental that From Here To Now To You came out start of my PhD, and All The Light Above It Too at the end of my PhD–always in the nick of time, to calm me as he always has at times of great upheaval in my life.
But he doesn’t just calm me, you see: I maintain that his music is genuinely meditative, and not in that cheap stoner “we’re all just drops in the ocean Man” sort of way (though he did indeed use that metaphor on 2008’s “Monsoon,” admittedly). He’s not only quiet, he’s nuanced, coloring his music with subtle shades of meaning and affectation that require a calm mind to even notice, let alone appreciate (which is perhaps why it “all sounds the same” to some busy people).
Moreover, there is an intense undercurrent of melancholy that runs throughout his music–whether or not you’re a fan, you’re missing the whole point if you just treat him as acoustic pop for a frat party or a mid-brow coffee garden or weed-filled music festival or whatever. Chillaxing escapism his music is not. Quite the contrary.
Take for example the aforementioned “Flake” and “Bubble Toes”, songs that really do get overplayed, such that you’ve perhaps forgotten that “Flake” is about an irresponsible young man burdened by the shame of letting down his lover yet again; or that the sprightliness of “Bubble Toes” is based on “feet infested with tar balls and scars.” That is, there is a dark history behind every upbeat Jack Johnson melody. Any good vibe he delivers is hard-earned. His beautiful women all have scarred feet.
And those are just the hits from his debut Brushfire Fairytales. “Fortunate Fools”, “F-Stop Blues” and “Losing Hope” dominate the track listing; “Posters” narrates an unloved drunk who “has the nerve to say he needs a decent girl”; a million people die on “The News” tonight, and his Mother’s only comfort is to lie and say the news ain’t real; “Mudfootball” is upbeat, “but only because we thought/that everything good always would remain”; and album-closer “It’s All Understood” features haunting ghosts, religious doubt and loss of faith.
Brushfire‘s intro “Inaudible Melodies” has the deeply cynical lines “Dust off your thinking caps” and “We are only what we hate.” This UC Santa Barbara film student pleads with everyone to “slow down” so that film frames can catch you, and insists that “silent films are full of sound”; maybe I studied too much Post-Structuralism and New Media theory in grad school, but this idea that meaning and sense lies within the absences and silences (where the Holy Spirit is also to be found, incidentally), between notes, between frames, is deeply Wittgensteinian, even Derridian, and suggest that Johnson is more than just another faux-profound surf-bum.
“Times Like These,” the opener for his 2003 album On and On, I think captures the deep malaise of post-9/11 America better than the Foo Fighters song of the same name and time. In one throw-away lyric, “God bless these ones/not those ones/but these ones,” Jack Johnson contains the entire weary rhetoric of Arab-Muslim and American-Christian extremists shouting at and bombing each other. When everyone is screaming, Jack Johnson intuitively understands that a hushed whisper can be the most cutting of all.
The rest of the album is no cheerier: he lambasts environmental destruction at the hands of corporate-imperialists (as only a native Hawaiian would understand) in “The Horizon Has Been Defeated” (which was far from the last time he would sing about environmental destruction; in this, he was raising a warning voice long before the Maui wildfires of this last summer), and the equally eco-critical “Traffic in the Sky;” he traces the webs of blame in a school-shooting in “Cookie Jar”, and recounts a child prostitute in “Taylor.” He further laments the loss of religious faith–even a naive one–when he sings that “Things were so much simpler when/stars were still just the holes to heaven.” In the deceptively low-key album closer “Symbol in my Driveway,” he cautions “I have a light-bulb full of anger/and I can switch it off and on,” as he wonders “how pathetic” and “how destructive” we can be, for “They’ve got us fooled.” Johnson in 2003 was years ahead of much of America in comprehending the psychological malaise of the Iraq War.
He cheers up on In Between Dreams, but not completely: on the single “Sitting, Waiting, Wishing,” he casually articulates what every young person in love hates to learn, “That just because you love someone/don’t make them love you.” He openly asks what we’ve all been thinking: “where’d all the good people go” (“And we thought this was low…”). He “needs this old train/to break down.” The doctors give his friend “two weeks to live/I’d give him more/if I could,” but he can’t. Even in the sappy love song “Do You Remember,” he mentions a childhood tree house that burned down, of which he’s got a photo “that I don’t like to look at.” (In retrospect, it was really only the album opener “Banana Pancakes” that made good date-night music at the BYUs.)
What’s more, his cheerier mood doesn’t last: on Sleep Through the Static, released near the end of the grinding drag that was the Bush administration, he croons, “All at once/the world can overwhelm me/there’s almost nothing that you can tell me/that could ease my mind.” He delivers the saddest money line of all: “Sometimes it feels like a heart is no place to be singing from at all.” That tone of dread pervades the entire album, even at its most loveliest. Again, Johnson nailed the zeitgeist without even trying.
To The Sea cheers back up…somewhat…for again, the opener sounds like a happy surf song, until the lyrics declare: “You and your heart/shouldn’t feel so far apart,” asking “Why you gotta break it and make it feel so hard,” deriding this “broken king” who “Lays in the sun/like pieces of broken glass” and “loses the fingernails in your hand.” It’s only a happy song if you’re not paying attention; same goes for almost every other song on this album. Jack Johnson understands, as every Ocean child does, that going to the sea isn’t an escape, but a confrontation–a therapeutic one yes, but still a confrontation. “You don’t love,” he sings to the sea, “But oh, you don’t hate.”
I could go on, but I won’t bore you–these sample lyrics will suffice. I will only note for now that, although so many of his lyrics are drenched with religious doubt (thus making it a touch ironic that he was so popular among BYU millennials), all these same defenses I’ve offered of Jack Johnson can also be said of our faith generally.
For however sappy and “uplifting” and “inspirational” our Church media strives to be, we are also the faith of the Book of Mormon–the narrative of two ancient civilizations that genocidely self-destructed. Ours is of the religious tradition of Abraham and Isaac, of Christ crucified, of Liberty and Carthage Jails, of the Willy Martin Handcart Company, of “They must all needs be tried as Abraham.” As Thomas S. Monson was fond of quoting, God had only one child without sin, but none without suffering. All of our “uplift” and “inspiration” is hard-earned, too. We seek after a still small voice that afflicts the comfortable as often as it comforts the afflicted. Even a gospel of hope is drenched in melancholy and pain–our feet are all covered with scars, too. Perhaps, on second thought, it’s not so strange that Johnson was so popular at the BYUs after all.