Belmondo: Move(s) Like Jagger
I’ve got a three-year-old nephew living a few floors below me. Goes by the name Bongo. Ever since he could move, Bongo has been shaking his ass. He hangs out with us upstairs on the reg, and when he does it is always a very Perez Prado good time. Bongo likes to congo, as in line, and Perez Prado unlocks unknown or lost Latin hips like no one else ever has or will sorry Ricky Martin. The idea that busting moves and beating bongos is what’s going to make you break bad would be funny if so many people all over the world didn’t, in their hearts, still sort of believe it for real.
You can tell music must be powerful as all fuck just on account of how many institutions and ideologies seek to harness it for their own good and in their own image. The Christians told me—even had me halfway convinced—that music that did not contain explicit lyrics praising the Christ child was of Satan. Regular readers will recall that, during one of the five childhood years I was resident there, the authorities of the Alliance Academy dormitory in Quito, Ecuador held a ritualistic record-burning bonfire. Probably the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen done to music—unless you count [please insert your favourite Nickelback joke here]. Unfortunately, far from the most outrageous thing I’ve seen done in the name of ‘ol JtheC, but up there you’d have to say, an honest effort. An actual nighttime bonfire of vinyl records, at which attendance was mandatory, and justified by many prayers? —sure, I’ll go ahead and put that in the Top 5.
But it’s not just Christians who fucked up bigleaguelongtime on music. And it’s not just pastors who noticed that music, in its essence, connected with humans so powerfully that, unless it were harnessed in service of the doctrinaire, it might, almost on its own, render the need for doctrine itself obsolete.
I taught courses on popular music several times during my ten-year professorial career. What bothers me still—enough that I attempt to expiate the demons here once and for all—and most about trying to teach rock ‘n’ roll was that I found myself lecturing on the evils of the Rolling Stones. Once, I accused Jagger of sexism. A second time of racism through cultural appropriation. I don’t recall any discussion of the musical merits or the cultural importance of the band. In a music class, the music of the Rolling Stones—generally regarded as one of the most important cultural creators of the past century—was off-limits. We were teaching—I was teaching—cultural cancellation. Any artist found guilty of abusing their cultural platform to expose already imperilled minorities to further harm was no longer listenable. You could mention bands like the Stones, but only to acknowledge regret that they had turned out to be such Bad Men from London. Obviously, they were not a band anyone with a conscience would intentionally listen to for pleasure. #notyourbeastofburden
The about-face that contemporary Christianity pulled with popular music in the 1990s—when Christian worship services were utterly routed by electric guitar and Paistie cymbals playing the devil’s beat—is the same one the Arts and Humanities pulled when it decided rock needed studying. If you can’t beat rock, join rock? Right, that doesn’t make sense, but I’ll let you sort it out while I keep going.
No one should pay (through tuition or tithe) a large institution to teach them the right way to listen to music or the right (and wrong) music to dance to. There is no right or wrong music. Yet most of the orthodoxy around popular music, whether delivered in lecture- or sermon-form, teaches otherwise. Even though pastors and professors alike know that there is no accounting for taste (de gustibus non est disputandum), the urge to attempt to establish hierarchies of taste as a means of controlling what your audience is and isn’t allowed to like—and how much—proves irresistible to many.
Rock is Awesome! But only when played by bonafidebornagain Christian musicians in our church. Otherwise, better check to see if your soul’s still there, cuz chances are Satan’s already snatched it. Rock is Awesome! But only when it’s not sexist or racist by prevailing contemporary moral standards and no groupies were fucked during the touring of the album.
Institutions should not attempt—should not want to attempt—to shape or alter our own natural instincts regarding the most primal and powerful forces at our disposal. Pleasure is not there to be institutionally regulated. Institutions which charge money to correct the pleasure of individuals, by teaching individuals to mistrust their own sensory perception of art in deference to theory or dogma wielded in the most obfuscating manner possible, are in the business of social control. If they can get you to stop dancing—at least to stop dancing to the music that you actually most want to dance to—they can get you to do—or stop doing—just about anything.
Institutions that attempt to insert themselves as a required social mediator between art and individual are, therefore, and in the words of the late great Jean Paul Belmondo, “Past it. Honteuse-ass past it.”
As it turned out, Léon Morin, Priest (Melville, 1961) was the last Belmondo film I saw before he died. Belmondo’s Morin kept telling his parishioners, even desperate people who sought him out in the midnight hour, that they were all good, no need for despair. “You don’t need to come to church. You are one hundred percent going to heaven already no matter what.” Must have driven his bishops crazy to see the way Belmondo told self-admitted sinners to just take it easy. Doucement, my child! Take this Sunday off. Take all the Sundays off! Do not worry so much all the time about all the things you might be doing wrong without your conscious self even knowing it.
Belmondo tells an anguished parishioner that she is more Christian than she knows. The Greater Church, he tells her, is most of France. Of course, she is Christian. Everything about the life she’s already lived has been Christian whether she admits it, whether she accepts the label or rejects and denounces it and all the priests who teach it. Priestly Belmondo tells her that she is a fundamentally good person raised in a culture so deeply steeped in Christianity that she no longer equates the docile commonality of her everyday life with a deep and reverent manifestation of pervasive Christianity—even though it is. Do you kill?—Belmondo asks her, do you know that killing is wrong? Do you try and show kindness to others? Would you even consider stealing if not driven to do so as a last and measure caused by extreme physical deprivation? There is an inner church, Belmondo says, available to the devout: but God neither expects nor needs every human in existence to go the whole Holy hog.
I try and think what a priestly Belmondo might do with a second-year Arts student who comes during office hours and is clearly agitated and when JP asks her what’s wrong says, “I caure n’t stop dancing to 2LiveCrew’s “We Want Some Pussy!” It’s possibly the most offensive song ever written! I wrote about how wrong it is for your class last term, remember? I hate that fucking song. But why does dancing to it feel so right, please Priest Professor Belmondo, why?”
Back to Belmondo in a jiffy.
The first music video I remember seeing was this one:
I don’t know if you watched it, but our team here performed a rigorous content analysis on the music video for “She’s So Cold” by the Rolling Stones and I can personally assure you that exactly 97 percent of the video is just Jagger shaking ass.
In scifi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020), a fictional Mick Jagger appears at a Davos conference in the near future. He is the only non-evil person there. How do we know? While all of the other rich Trudeauites pretend to care about the planet while fucking it over in pursuit of their own fame and fortune, Mick Jagger is spotted dancing alone in a bar to a jukebox. In the future, Mick Jagger is the only person left who still remembers how to have a good time.
Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz recalls in his recent autobiography Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina (2020) running into Mick Jagger at a jazz club in the Bowery. Real-life Jagger was seated alone at the bar “high as a kite. The jukebox was playing Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” and Mick was singing along at full volume but changing the lyrics to “blowing me softly with his lips. Blowing me softly . . . with his lips.” Mick Jagger was born knowing how to have a good time.
We all were.
Imaginary Belmondo’s advice to his not-at-all real student-parishioner? Move like Jagger. Dance vigorously, and sing along loudly, and incorrectly, to whatever music you’re into. No matter what the song. Music is yours to enjoy however you want to—guilt-free for life. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.