It is of course no mystery why two entirely different songs entitled “Times Like These” came out independent of each other in Our Year of Grace 2002. That same calendar year, after all, debuted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the dawn of the multi-decade Afghanistan war and global War on Terror, and already we were getting propagandized into the looming Invasion of Iraq. The laid-back, low-stakes vibes of the ’90s—that post-Cold War victory lap and so-called “End of History” when we Americans briefly and foolishly worried that things were perhaps going too well for our spiritual welfare—had been shattered for good, and we all collectively re-learned for the umpteenth why “May you live in interesting times” is a curse.
What is of mild interest here, however, is how the two song titles here featured–by the Modern Rock-radio mainstays Foo Fighters and the “chill” Hawaiian singer-songwriter Jack Johnson–is how much they go against their respective types. Foo Fighters are famously a hard rock band fronted by the former drummer for Nirvana, who started the band in the mid-’90s as a way to process his grief at Kurt Cobain’s suicide–yet theirs is the version that is all triumphant optimism and stirring silver-linings. “I, I’m a new day rising/I’m a brand-new sky to hang the stars upon tonight”, Dave Grohl belts out in the second verse, seeing this new era as just as much one of potential renewal and re-creation as for destruction and disillusion. “In times like these, you learn to love again,” Dave Grohl repeatedly shouts out in the anthemic chorus, recognizing the possibility to love instead of to fear—for perfect love casts out all fear, “It’s times like these you give and give again.” This is achingly-sincere music for rising to the occasion of our times, not feeling crushed beneath them; there is not even a hint of Gen X apathy or Grunge-era irony anywhere on this track.
No, that task falls to Jack Johnson, who has often (albeit unfairly, as I’ve argued previously) been classified as some sort of stoner-light bubble-gum pop for background music at Starbucks coffee shops–this, despite how even in his early Pop hit “Bubble Toes,” he still notes of his crush that “her feet are covered with tar-balls, and scars”—or how his other early high-school-hallway-guitarist standard “Flake” is about being depressed by how often he’s let down his lover. There was always a strong melancholic undercurrent threading its way through his music, one often lost on the casual listener–though his melancholy and resignation is fully foregrounded on his sophomore album On and On, and especially on that opening track. “Times like these, and times like those,” intones that native Hawaiian with world-weary resignation, “Whatever will be will be/and so it goes.” This is a post-colonial track, written by an indigenous singer who knows full well that all times of peace and prosperity are transitory, of how ridiculous it is for all the white-Americans in his life to feign shock and surprise when genuinely awful things happen as though such were a rare thing, that anxiety and anguish have been the rule and not the exception throughout human history.
Nor does Johnson let you get away with reading the lyrics abstractly or generally, as he calls out his specific moment in history directly with: “There will always be…/Those for peace and those for war/And god bless these ones, not those ones, but these ones made/Times like these…” As a native of annexed Hawaii, he always fully intuited what the dark side to “God Bless America” meant, that it was never all that different from the “Allah’hu Akbar” of the terrorists—and that all war is terrorism. The global War on Terror had only just barely begun and the invasion of Iraq hadn’t even been formally announced yet, but Jack Johnson already knew exactly where this was all headed. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we all did. “Somehow I know/it won’t be the same,” he accurately concludes the song, “Yeah, somehow I know/never be the same.” There is not even a hint of trying to lighten up the mood anywhere on this song, nor anywhere else on this album. He never once tries to distract from the mood of his time, but rather broods in it directly.
None of this is to insinuate, by the way, that one approach to the title “Times Like These” was somehow better or worse than the other. Both reactions are valid. Our own Alma 62:41 informs us that in a time of prolonged warfare “many had become hardened,” while others “were softened because of their afflictions.” There is perhaps a mild irony here in that it was the Modern Rock band that was the one to become more softened (“you learn to love again/you give and give again), while the laid-back acoustic singer was the one to become more hardened (“Sticks and stones and broken bones”); but I also think it worth emphasizing that, despite how this verse usually gets taught in various and sundry Sunday School, Seminary, and Institute lessons, the Book of Mormon does not actually indicate whether one response was superior to the other, I argue. To become hardened is a completely understandable trauma response; to become softened is an understandable one too, frankly. Nor are they mutually exclusive: they often occur in the same person, often at the same time. And I think the Book of Mormon understands this.
Indeed, I wonder sometimes if maybe both the hardened and the softened are who “did humble themselves before God, even in the depth of humility” in Alma 62:41. Maybe that’s just a speculative reading on my part. But at a bare minimum, it is a gentle reminder to me to judge not, and remember that all hearts can become hardened and softened simultaneously in Times Like These, and so not to get too hard on other people’s hardened responses. Besides, it’s not like our own era of prolonged warfare since 9/11 has alleviated or abated in the slightest since these two tracks were released nearly a quarter century ago. [Update: Just ask Venezuela.] We are still living in Times Like These, into yet another new year and counting.