Generator

*Generator, from the album of the same name (released in 1992) by Bad Religion, is one of my favorite Bad Religion songs. Of course, if you were to ask me what my favorite Bad Religion song was when I was in high school, I would have said, "Whichever one I'm listening to right now." Honest, sure, but a pointless answer. 

If I'm going to talk about the most influential band in my life, then I have to find a starting point. 

I was in an accident during my junior year of high school. While coming back from pheasant hunting with my brother, I slid off an icy road after applying my brakes. My brother Jon wasn't wearing a seatbelt. I was. My little Honda turned sideways and went off the road on the opposite side. If there had been an oncoming car, we would have been toast. Fortunately, we simply rolled onto our top in a ditch. I was suspended upside-down in my seat, flailing about (like a bat, Jon said) trying to "eject" myself. Once I found my seatbelt button, I, of course, hit my head with the full force of my body coming down. I exited a broken window in the rear of the car. My brother and I were somehow unharmed. The car was totaled. 

My mom said I changed after that accident. I had broken up with a girlfriend around the same time. Actually, I don't know if we were even really dating. I'm pretty sure we were just talking and sending letters. We never said we were dating, but we definitely knew when we were not dating. We "broke up" a few times before she got mad at me one last time and I didn't bother trying to make amends. 

I don't know why, but I threw my mattress on the floor of my room and slept down there for quite some time. Something in me broke. I was talking to girls on IRC a lot more than girls in real life, which didn't sit right with me. A few months earlier I had come down with a bad case of pneumonia which ended my high school sports involvement. I had become adrift. At the age of 17. One of my passions was snowboarding. I had my own board. I subscribed to not one, but two, snowboarding magazines. In one of those early issues, I came across an article about a festival in the mountains where Bad Religion played. The writer briefly mentioned the band and their importance to the hardcore scene, even putting the lyrics to, I believe, "Modern Man" in there. How had I overlooked this band? 

So, I made a note of it and made a special trip to Kearney, Nebraska, a little college town about an hour's drive from my house. In one of their music stores (it could have been in the mall), I bought a cassette of Bad Religion's "All Ages," which was a greatest-hits album released curiously fairly early in their careers. 

On the way home, I released the cacophonous sounds and blistering beats of a band that quite possibly changed my life. Or, at least, my perception of the world. I had never heard a voice like Greg Graffin's. I had never heard lyrics so intelligent, songs so tight, such vitriol for the messed up world I was rapidly being spat out into. So it began, my love affair with a band that lasted nearly two decades. 

My love affair picked up steam when I entered college. I bought more of their cassettes and played them loudly on the Blaupunkt receiver in my little Honda. I routinely hung out on Bad Religion chatrooms on Undernet IRC (#badreligion, #bad+religion). I frequently chatted with Jay Bently, the BR bassist. Other members of the band were known to get on and talk to fans. It was strange to talk music or whatever with a band member of your favorite band. In later years, my girlfriend (who I met on #badreligion my freshman year of college) would chat with the singer of the band on IRC. It was widely reported that he said inappropriate things to fans and even had dick pictures in circulation. I knew he was a man like any other, but this too didn't sit well with me. 

I saw Bad Religion for the first time in a small bar in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called The Blind Pig. They were doing smaller venues at that time to capture the feel of their earlier shows. It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. It was the No Substance tour of 1998. I saw them play many more times over the years. Honestly, I don't remember the last time I saw them. It could have been at the venue in Pontiac, Michigan, that had once been a church. The whole thing felt sacrilegious, watching this band that purported there was no God playing punk rock in an old church in a dead town. 

How could a Christian listen to a band that questioned the existence of God? I chose to overlook it because they had so many valid observations and raised so many good questions about society and human behavior. I fast-forwarded everytime I played the album Against the Grain and knew the song "Operation Rescue" was up next. Something in me groaned. But I just turned up the music. For a band that stood steadfastly against any form of "prescriptive thought," calling such things bad religions, they had become their own bad religion. It's one thing to challenge people to think, which is what I surely thought they were doing. But, Bad Religion stuck around so long and had such an influence on so many people and subsequent musicians who wanted to sound just like BR, that Bad Religion became its own bad religion. 

I knew I wouldn't listen to a band that made my conscience bleed forever. I don't know why it was ever okay. I guess because it felt like God was so far away, like He forgot about me somewhere along the way ("Along the Way" is a BR song, by the way). When God humbled me and broke the grip of so many things in my life, Bad Religion was one of the last to go; that's how ensconced it was in my life. 

The song "Generator" is about God, which is why I chose it for this post. The idea, as described by Brett, the songwriter, is that God is like a turbine. He's always there in the background like the hum of a generator. It's only when the generator stops do you take note of the absence of the sound. Brett is agnostic (and Jewish, which accounts for some of the imagery in the song). Other members of the band like Jay believed in God. Greg, the singer, who is also one of the leading index fossil scientists in the world, does not believe in God. When a fan threw a French Bible on stage in a far-flung venue across the pond, he responded with, "I speak French, but I don't speak Bible." In science, there is no room for faith, "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

This song speaks of the trouble I've had accepting God's place in my life. It was only when I had run out of myself that I returned to Him. Unfortunately, it took me a long time to get there. My life has not been easy, and I know I am mostly to blame for that. I tried to do things my way. When I was 15, I dedicated my life to God. Fortunately for me, He didn't forget about that promise. He chose me, He sought me, He bought me. And when I ran away from Him, He came looking for me. 

I'm not trying to sell an ideology. I'm simply telling my story. And I will tell my story to whoever wants to listen. I thought I was pretty special because I was smart enough to listen to a band that had such challenging lyrics that I felt I understood. But, what really made me special was the fact that I was chosen by a benevolent God to live at this time in history and to make an impact on the world by following Him.

If I were an apologist (I'm not), then I would say that Bad Religion uses religion as a foil to sell albums. They're just making a living. They are correct about many aspects of religion, of course. And we all need to make a living. After nearly 40 years of them selling the same old shtick, though, I encourage them to rest on their laurels with either their last album or whatever they have in the works. I think the world has heard enough from Bad Religion. Unfortunately, they are just another bad religion.*

Like a rock,

Like a planet,
Like a fucking atom bomb,
I'll remain unperturbed by the joy and the madness

That I encounter everywhere I turn
I've seen it all before
In book and magazines
Like a twitch before dying
Like a pornographic sea
There's a flower behind the window

There's an ugly laughing man
Like a hummingbird in silence
Like the blood on the door
It's the generator
Oh yeah, oh yeah, like the blood on my door

Wash me clean and I will run
Until I reach the shore
I've known it all along
Like the bone under my skin
Like actors in a photograph
Like paper in the wind

There's a hammer by the window
There's a knife on the floor
Like turbines in darkness
Like the blood on my door
It's the generator