Musical Murmurings about God

Daniel Johnston is as much a product as he is a producer of American popular culture. While holding on to a remnant of his faith, he grew up generally dismissing the heroic characters and tales of the Bible that were imposed on him by his fundamentalist upbringing. He found refuge instead in the vast emerging mythology of pop culture. Johnston’s songs recall a childhood filled with science fiction fantasies, comic book heroes, the Beatles, and ice cream and soda-pop. He was, and is, a true example of an American pop culture "replacement theology" in the wake of a shattered American Dream historically linked with Christianity.

But Daniel Johnston has swallowed the bubble-gum of pop culture, and has turned it inside out by regurgitating idyllic childhood fantasies and producing fritty and unvarnished tales of anguish and loss, while still retaining a typical pop style. He strips the polish and glitter off from the usual mass produced music by serving up catchy tunes with gleeful naïveté, yet with a dark twist.

Daniel Johnston exemplifies our current frazzled and schizoid culture. His fragmented and tortured soul reflects that of America, coming through in vivid iconography and mythology. Johnston picks up splintered pieces of pop culture and clumsily fuses them together to arrive at a mixture of music, comic book art, short films, and spoken word poetry. He unabashedly combats demons inside and out with a potent pop-cocktail that he constantly reworks and experiments with. Surrounded by pop culture trinkets, Daniel Johnston defines and makes sense of his world just as awkwardly as the world defines him.

In all of his messy and haphazard ways, primarily through his music, Daniel Johnston gives us murmurings about God. In a modern society that discourages pandering to the unknown and the supernatural, we have forgotten how important it is to have an integrated scheme of reality that accounts for mystery, and doesn’t simply ignore or discount it as unrational. Our modern world has so hastily discarded the supernatural and mysterious that it has forced many of our religiously repressed poets to scour the fringes and often disorganized pit of human creativity for nuggets of truth. We find these nuggets of truth deep in the recesses of our estranged and dissociated human condition. As the Church, let’s learn to translate these murmurings about God into rightful expressions of a God who is crying out to us, even as we are crying to Him, from the shadows of the perfect image of Christ and in scrambled codes based on God’s perfect Word.