Secular Music and Theology Part 5: “White Noise”
Will Wood has long been one of if not my favorite indie musicians, certainly among my favorite song writers in general. While he is skilled in vocal and instrumental music, I am most drawn to his work for the lyrical content, which I think is some of the most compelling of any musician I have ever listened to. Many of his songs move at a frantic, even chaotic pace, as if an entire library of mental health disorders were tangled into one anxiety inducing three minute musical mess. And I must admit that many of his songs would be inappropriate for church, so if you decide to explore, browse cautiously but with an open mind. It really is interesting music.
Because of the nature of his music, I have avoided talking about it in this loosely ordered series about secular music and theology, even though some of his songs have been the inspiration for me to talk about secular musical theologically; however, as this is probably my last blog post on this site, I ask you to indulge this interest of mine for a moment.
Will Wood is currently on an indefinite hiatus from writing music, but his last studio album was largely written during the pandemic. He was turning 27 during this time, and was afraid that he would be joining the “27 Club,” a list of artists who died at the age of 27. With that and the dangers caused by the global pandemic, both from the illness itself and the painful isolation that came with attempts at containment, he initially titled the album “In Case I Die.” These were supposed to be the songs that would be left behind, his legacy should he not survive the pandemic. However, when he managed to survive, he retitled the album to “In Case I Make It.” Right there, that is an interesting story, but I want to focus on the last song on this album, “White Noise.” Though he has come out with a live album that parallels “In Case I Make It,” this was the studio-quality song that WIll Wood seems to have intended to leave us on.
The tone of the song is much less frantic than his other work, using a slow ukulele strum rather than his usually rapid piano work. It almost sounds forgettable, no lick that really stands out from other music with similar instrumentation, and that is almost certainly intentional. The lyrics of the song talk about how forgettable the world around us is. So much seems meant to be overlooked. The world is full of sound and color that “you’re not meant to notice.” The world is saturated with infinite, meaningless distractions: white noise.
If you haven’t noticed this before, you will once you try, and the horrifying reality is that to some extent, all this is part of the fuel of the endless consumerist machine that is our modern western economy. It would be weird to walk around the stores of the mall in utter silence, so they need to play some sort of music so you don’t feel uncomfortable, but they don’t want to distract you from your shopping, so they make sure the music is something you won’t think about. Supermarkets want their walls to have just enough color so you won’t feel like you’re in a warehouse, but they don’t want you to be distracted by free works of art. All focus should be on the product. And it is quite possible that this has a numbing effect over time. We stop looking around. We stop listening. Everything we need is on the shelf right in front of us. It’s easy, and the white noise simply directs us to embrace that ease. The background isn’t there to entertain or enlighten, it is there to direct you to what you are supposed to be doing.
At the end of the song, he takes it away from music and color to talk about thoughts themselves. Our minds are full of thoughts that seem to have been put there by the world around us, not that we have intentionally absorbed through productive conversation with wise friends, nor have we read them in enlightening books by some of the best thinkers in history. Sometimes, we don’t know how these thoughts got into our heads. They seem to have always been there. And I want to be clear, this isn’t necessarily a problem. Socialization is something that happens slowly over time through interactions we can hardly remember that teaches us how to live with the norms and mores of our society. However, the question then becomes, to what extent has socialization become artificial? Are we still learning from the people around us, or are we having social ideas foisted upon us by the all-consuming machine of social media, advertisements, and other numbing programming that fills our TV time slots and streaming services without actually making us think about anything? What are the thoughts that are really mine, and what is the background noise of a world that is too frightened of silence to listen to something other than white noise?
I must be honest, I also don’t like listening to silence. If I am walking around my house, I am listening to music or a YouTube video. If I’m not, I’m probably talking to myself. And I suspect this is true for many of us. There is something eerie about sitting in silence for a while, to let go of music, breaking news, and fun, mind numbing content on our phones. We don’t want to miss out on things. We want to be part of the conversation. We continue to endlessly scroll Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok because we need to do something. We can’t listen to nothing.
Recently, Larissa and I went kayaking on a lake in northern Nebraska. We were the only ones on the lake for most of the time. Occasionally a car would pass by on the nearby gravel road, and at one point, a man brought a small motor boat to do some fishing, but mostly the lake was quiet. I couldn’t mess around with my phone, not wanting to drop it so close to the water, so I was actually forced to just listen to the world around me. I could hear bullfrogs and birds and dragonflies buzzing around me. I could feel the sun on my skin. I saw fish watching us slowly coast through the lake, and I saw sunlight reflecting off the water onto a tree we sat under, bright waves flashing and dancing on the undersides of leaves swaying gently in the breeze. In the absence of the endless stream of content and music, the white noise I pick out for myself, I experienced the world in a different way. The world breaks through in our moments of silence and reminds us that we don’t need to be afraid without our comforting bubble of noise.
I don’t think WIll Wood is talking about his own music as being white noise, though perhaps that depends on how we listen to it. Rather, I think he is identifying something more nefarious. This isn’t the content we pick for ourselves, this is the content that is manufactured so that we are too full of junk to explore. We are overstimulated, over-exerted, exhausted by simply being in the world. Because there is simply too much to pay attention to, we give up paying attention at all. Thousands of advertisements try to catch our eye every day, nothing can be simple and easy to follow any more. We are overwhelmed intentionally. There are forty different flavors of Oreos not so that we will buy each one, but so that we can’t help but think of them. And how are we going to think about the big questions, when our brains are so occupied by white noise?
It’s a bleak world we live in, so full of meaningless color and sound, serving not art and entertainment, not human enlightenment and peace of mind, but the progress of the market and sweet distraction from the real problems of the day. We are stuck endlessly cycling through a stream of nonsense because the world pushes it on us. So where does God fit in? What does God do with this?
While the world fills us with an endless stream of new garbage, God gives us a line to the very old but ever renewing truth. The Gospel isn’t new, but it doesn’t need to be. The story of God’s work in our lives, in our world, is something that we need to hear again and again. It isn’t something that keeps us mindlessly going along with life as it is, rather, it is something that forms, transforms, and reforms us into a new person every day. It isn’t white noise that is meant to exist in the background, it is something that demands our attention and action. The Gospel stands in stark contrast to the white noise of our lives, but similar to white noise, it is something external to us.
Again, in talking about white noise as thoughts in the final verse, Will Wood assures the listener that the endless noise of these thoughts isn’t really who we are. They are just white noise. They are put into us from outside. However, the same can be said of the Gospel. We don’t give ourselves the good news, we could not imagine something so great by ourselves. It takes the work of the Holy Spirit working upon us to enlighten us to the Gospel. This isn’t a message that we produce ourselves, but it also stands in stark contrast to the white noise of the world around us. The world bombards us with messages: buy, sell, strive to be prettier, lose some weight, gain some muscle, have the nicest car, keep working at your job, there’s no time to enjoy the simple things, get better, do better, ignore the dangers around and plunge forward, endless buying, endless growth, don’t worry, just put on a happy face, only take time to despair when the fun runs out. Meanwhile, the Gospel resounds with one truth over all time: God saves you not because you are worthy of it but simply because God loves you, and you can rest assured in that love. In this good news we face the world with a realistic eye on the troubles of the world, not ignoring the suffering and the threats, but responding to them from a place of firm grounding in the Gospel. God hasn’t given up on us or the world.
Unfortunately, in a world full of white noise, it is hard to find where it ends and we begin. Sometimes, the world even intrudes on our thoughts, and it is hard to find what is really us within the mess of artificially constructed ideas. We probably wouldn’t be able to escape the endless noise of the world, even with these problems being pointed out by artists like Will Wood. However, God’s Word is not easily turned back. God lays claim to us, and we can be certain that God will break through the endless noise of the world around us to speak to us, changing us from the mindless drones of the world to servants of God’s kingdom. It is true that with time taken for silence and prayer, with time dedicated to reading the Bible and worshiping God as a community, time taken to really intentionally listen to the call of the Holy Spirit, we stand a better chance of hearing God call out to us above the noise, but even when we fail to listen, God’s word will certainly break through. We cannot hide from God. The ongoing heavenly chorus, praising God and reminding us of who is really worthy of all glory and honor will someday shatter the walls of static and resound in our hearts in its fullness, and when that day comes, there will be no turning back. White noise will be washed away, and we will join in giving praise not to ourselves, not to what we buy or sell or how we look, but to God alone to whom all praise and honor belong, now and forever.
