"Everything's gonna to get lighter, even if it doesn't get better."* That's a big promise Mates of State are making in their new single "Get Better" which was just released today. And it all begins with the line "forget your politics for a while." Not an easy thing to do in presidential election year.

 

And how could anything get "lighter" if nothing gets "better." This seems like a strange contradiction. I assume that when things are getting lighter that they are getting better. In the same vein Jesus said that he was the light of the world (Jn 8:12), but also said there would always be poverty (Mk 14:7). How could someone claim to be just what the world needed and also claim that poverty was still going to exist?

 

The author Dallas Willard writes, "We are becoming who we will be forever." I wonder if what Jesus is saying, and what Mates of State are saying is that what we do might just affect the inside more than it affects the outside. Willard's quote deals with the idea that our hearts are affected and changed over time (for better or worse) in relation to our actions and feelings. And maybe that is why Jesus tells us to love our enemies, because he knows the consequences for us if we do not. And maybe that is why Mates of State and Steve Choo made the video for this song.

Ever lament that no one would notice if you just disappeared? After watching The Human Footprint on the National Geographic Channel it's hard to believe that could be true, considering the average American eats the weight of a family car in hamburgers in a lifetime. It seems like we hear statistic everyday about our effects on our world, and while those statistics can be shocking in some regards, numbers are easy to forget and difficult to translate into real images. That's what is so amazing about The Human Footprint. The producers and crew of this show actually laid out an average American's lifetime usage of a variety of products, including milk, soap, toothpaste, shampoo, bread, diapers, clothes, showers, bananas and eggs... No computer generated images here. (Click the image above to see some of these items.)

 

Recently Eric Kuiper and I were discussing the possibility of not creating any physical waste (i.e. not throwing anything away) for an entire week (Eric and his wife Kate at one point aspired to do this). But the longer we talked the larger this task seemed to become. Just think for a second what that would mean: no fast food, being only able to buy very select things at the grocery store, and almost nothing at any other store since almost everything we buy comes heavily packaged (even just a tag on a new shirt would negate the experiment).

Counting Crows, in their latest release Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings walk the razor line between reinvention and recapturing the past. The album, built on the theme of frenetic Saturday nights and restoration -- or lack thereof -- on quiet Sunday mornings, is their first studio recording since Hard Candy in 2002.

The six years off have proved useful to the band: they return to the themes present on their first two albums, August and Everything After and Recovering the Satellites. Essentially, in terms of sound this is a conglomeration, and it carries the rock of Satellites for the first half, while resolving into the relaxed rhythms that were present on August. For long time Crows lovers, then, this album offers a return to what drew us to the band in the beginning; for new listeners it recollects the band while it was at its height of popularity in the mid-1990's.

Shopping. What image is forefront when you contemplate the act of shopping? For me, it's the Galleria in Dallas, TX - a large 4 story, glass laden shopping center in the heart of downtown Dallas. I did not grow up in Dallas, but my family regularly vacationed there at summer's end - during those dreadful "back to school" weeks.

Well, I found myself back in the Galleria this past week with my own kids. (My parents now live there and we took our girls ice skating... and yes, the Galleria has an ice skating rink.) And though the mall scene seems to be dying in much of the country, the Galleria was for the most part the same. Still 4 stories. Still lots of glass. Still buy this, buy that.

Having been doing a little "wondering about consumerism" recently - my entrance into the Galleria was unique this go around. My ears had perked when I witnessed a seemingly normal interaction between a seemingly normal mother and daughter. As the two passed, the young girl tugged at her mom's shirt while pleading to go ice skating instead of the Macy's threshold the two were about to encounter.

The mom's response?

Walking into see the newest big-budget animated movie, Horton Hears a Who, I was expecting my 2.5 laughs out loud and waiting for the inevitable scene where animated animals dance in unison to some mid 90’s classic from Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. The obligatory dance scene didn’t show up, but the more unexpected surprise was watching the way in which the filmmakers found a way to give such significance to a seemingly innocuous plot. And while Dr. Suess’ book continually repeats “a person is a person, no matter how small”, I was left walking away from the film asking myself, “how do I really know something is real?”

It usually takes me several listens to an album before I feel like I have even begun to process it. Considering that R.E.M.’s Accelerate just hit the market this Tuesday, I’m not sure where I am yet in the process of processing. But we here at rednoW have never been about processing things for you. We’re much more interested in inviting you to do it for yourself. So let me try and whet your appetite for a great album.

What seems unmissable (I don’t think that is a word) in the early listenings of Accelerate is that the religion R.E.M. sang about losing in the early 90’s must have been found again. Accelerate is full of wonderings about faith, religion, God and the meaning of life. But that is not all. Dreaming of telling Chris Matthews-types what to do with themselves and expressions of being tired of getting jacked around by politicians and power-holders fills up much of the space on this, their fourteenth album. R.E.M. sounds pissed. R.E.M sounds great.

I've long defended Kanye, Jay-Z, The Roots, Nas, etc. when people said that all hip-hop is just junk, a glorification of all that is wrong with our world. Obviously those people haven't listen to the whole catalogs of the above artists. But it's hard to defend the majority of hip-hop, even the majority of the above artists' catalogs. That's why when Lupe Fiasco put out his latest album, "The Cool," I was intrigued by the name. I wasn't sure how to take name of the album at first; Lupe's been known to employ some heavy satire at points, like on his previous album when he questions what hip-hop is all about: "Now come on everybody, let's make cocaine cool. We need a few more half naked women up in the pool."

 

So after listening to "The Cool" I was shocked at how Lupe went after not only the heart of what hip-hop seems to be, but also at the individual, rapper and listener alike. In a country that holds up individuality and the competitive spirit as the unstated national religion Lupe's album is quite a statement. He's not about to back-off though, as one of the tracks on the album, titled "Dumb It Down," admits that Lupe'd sell more albums if he'd dumb it down. But don't think that Lupe's just throwing stones from his glass house; he seems to know that this is his own personal problem as well.

The economy. Two words that once-upon-a-time simply described the system in which goods and services are consumed or exchanged within a particular people group. Today, these two words embody a world of emotions, questions, and fears.  Today, they are generally perceived to be "bad" news: Dollar at record lows against the Euro. Unemployment high. Record foreclosures. Blah blah blah blah... You can't watch CNN, listen to NPR, or read the news without hearing about it.

In the midst of this unavoidable subject matter, an interesting subplot has received its fair share of attention: the inequality of wealth distribution, also known as "the wealth gap."

The UN released a report a little over a year ago that claimed that the wealthiest 1% own 40% of the world's wealth - the top 2% owning half. On the flip side, the poorer half barely makes up 1% of the world's wealth. And the gap continues to be on the rise... inevitably leading to the "rich get richer" and the "poor get poorer" conundrum.

The brilliance of the images that Sam Beam (aka Iron &Wine) creates is found in the subtly. It isn't exactly easy to create images that reflect pure joy or pure tragedy, but it might be even more difficult to create images that reflect the ambiguity that encompasses most days of the week. This seems to be Beam's specialty.

 

In the song "Boy With a Coin" Beam puts together three images, each a verse. Each verse describes an image of a world left to itself and worn down through minor tragedies and simple entropy. The final line of each verse speaks of God's absence: "When God left the ground to circle the world."