For my first cultural artifact, I
chose to look at Bruno Mars’s music video for his hit single “Locked out of
Heaven,” which is from his second studio album entitled Unorthodox Jukebox. Bruno’s
smooth vocals croon about a marvelous relationship in this pop-reggae
track. The concept of this vintage-style
music video is simple: Bruno Mars having a good time with his friends—drinking,
hanging out, and partying.
This music video captures the
essence of what a lot of today’s popular culture embraces: sex, alcohol, and
just a good time. Some of the lyrics of
this song bluntly state that “your sex takes me to paradise.” This particular phrase corrupts something
that God intended for a man and a woman to enjoy in the confines of marriage;
it takes something God created as good and perverts it into something foul and
loathsome.
This particular element of culture,
in essence, “numbs us for the empire.”
It fosters in us the idea that our ultimate goal in life is just to have
a good time and, partially, that finding that certain someone is of the utmost
importance. However, reality will prove
that going out with friends and having a significant other will not generate
eternal happiness. Humans were made to
worship; humans were made to worship God. Worshipping anything other than God—even if
they are “good things” such as friends or family—will not satisfy us for more
than a short while.
Neo, in The Matrix, was looking for something more than the life he was
living. With the help of others, he
found out the world he thought was real was actually just a façade. The truth was cold and harsh, but the truth
ultimately set him free. Similarly, we,
as Christians, have to remember that the world in which we live is not truly
where we belong. Although we are immersed
in a culture that completely and totally contradicts Christianity, we must
remember the truth: only belief in Jesus Christ will set us free.
1.
Why does this music video have nothing to do
with the lyrics of the song?
2.
Would the lyrics of this Billboard 100 song have
the same success in, say, the 1950’s? Or
would the brazen lyrics about sex be considered offensive?
3.
What does the success of this extremely catchy
song say about our current pop culture?
Thanks for your post, Alison. It's interesting--Bruno Mars is not the first pop artist to mix the themes of sex and religion (see Madonna's "Like a Prayer" video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fzeNUqQbQ). What Bruno Mars gets right is that sex can be a powerful experience of union with another person--an experience that God created good--although you're right to point out that it should take place within a committed relationship, not for its own sake.
ReplyDeleteI would disagree with your statement that "we are immersed in a culture that completely and totally contradicts Christianity." Humans were created good and bear the image of God, and nothing we do can completely erase the mark of that image, meaning that the culture we create always reflects our created goodness in some way. The trick is sorting out the light from the dark, the good from the bad.