Playing around with a pistol with bad trigger discipline makes me very uncomfortable, but the song isn't awful. I was wondering if the title was performing blasphemy (as is common to the point of banality among musicians and artists), but no, he put out a fairly straightforward explanation of his intent:
Jesus wasn’t the only crucified son. There were 2 others with him. Some say there were 4. The soldiers gambled for the clothes of these so called thieves on the ground right in front of Jesus and then watched him up there a while. In the Third Servile War the Romans crucified Spartacus and 6,000 of his followers along the Appian Road. All because the empire feared a slave. It’s estimated as many as six hundred thousand were crucified during the Roman Empire alone. Some folks have let me know they don’ think my song is in good taste. Most recently I was accused of comparing myself to Jesus. Well I know a lot of people who bare the cross that never learned a thing from the trials of Jesus. Handing out scripture and verse like they wrote it themselves. The first time I ever got sold out it was by my own kin. Then I got in the music business. lol. If they crucified a man like Jesus just imagine what they’ll do to you.
Fair enough, I suppose. The point of the incarnation was to be like us, and as he points out, a whole lot of us were crucified too. Every time but one it was just some regular men doing it to another.
3 comments:
So, by "crucified" he means he got to become an entertainer? Not really clear on that.
A reasonable enough explanation for using 'crucified.' The Good Thief is one of my favorite people in Scripture. That said, I think his last line is a bit confused: "If they crucified a man like Jesus just imagine what they’ll do to you."
It implies that Jesus was good and they still crucified him, so they'll do worse to someone who's not that good. But it seems to me that Jesus was crucified because he was good, so I'm probably in no real danger.
Complaints about the sacrificial demands on entertainers do seem odd given the perks and their own clear desire to succeed at it. Yet I notice that they are nearly universal in early music of successful artists. It was also the basis of the Outlaw movement and its rejection of Nashville as soon as Willie and Waylon got free of their recording contracts.
Artists really do seem to suffer from the Procrustean bed process of being lopped off or stretched out to better fit their management’s ideas of the market. Perhaps the bed of Procrustes is a better mythical metaphor than crucifixion; but if you’re from a family that reads the Bible rather than Greek mythology, it might not be available to you.
That's a good point. It would seem a more apt metaphor.
All that said, I do like the music.
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