^ That's one interesting thought. Another thought I've always wrestled with has to do with the show's title song. It doesn't make sense within the show. It's sort of like the hit single that then had to be on the album. The song has nothing to do character-wise with the show, other than as a statement of concept, or as another "Sixties" protest song.
The youth movement of the sixties had been about new found spirituality and a rejection of institutionalized religion. Their drug use was not just an escape; it was also a means to help them find the spirituality they believed their parents had lost in the meaningless hypocrisy of organized religion in the 1950s. In 1967, Father James Kavanaugh had published his book
A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church. Looking at their parents and the rest of the "older generation," they saw evidence that mainstream religions had reduced religious experience, the act of living through faith, to nothing more than symbols and metaphors, subverting and short-circuiting the religious experience itself. They believed that mainstream religious traditions and rituals got in the way of true faith and the search for ultimate truths. The language of the King James Bible was as remote from their lives as it could be, full of thees and thous, strange grammar and sentence structure; sure, young people thought, this dusty old relic doesn't relate to my life in the tumultuous 1970s.
Because more young Americans than ever before were attending college in the 1960s and 70s--and while there studying other world religions--they were finding that the Christian creation/Genesis story, the sacrifice/crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the miracles performed by Jesus, and most of the rest of the central stories of Christianity had shown up in other world religions long before the birth of Christianity. Though this did not automatically discount all of Christianity for them, it did throw its claims of absolute and unique truth into question. As a result, many young adults began exploring the older Eastern religions.
"Superstar" as a song is for and about them, comparing Jesus to such other religious figures as Buddha and Mohammed, and asking questions that will never go away, questions like:
* How can so many different religions all claim to have the only truth?
* Why should we believe that the Bible's truth is necessarily more true than the other truths?
* More pointedly, why should we believe in any religion at all?
It's too broad in scope for the show. Kick-ass song, and it fits with the style of the score, but really it makes no sense. That's why I've always had a problem with Judas being the guy to sing the song, a tradition only enforced because Murray Head did the original single and then sang Judas on the album. I liked the tack that the CD version of
JCS: A Resurrection (yes, the Indigo Girls version) took on it in the CD's liner notes by describing the title track as taking place at a recording studio somewhere in Atlanta in 1994. It's modern commentary from an outside narrator that doesn't fit the rest of the show.
ETA: Don't get me wrong (oy, what unintended pun is this?), I can see why Judas sings it. Other than the fact that the single was arbitrarily inserted into the album at that point, Judas has been the voice of doubt throughout the show, so why be any different now, but it doesn't make the song fit in any better.
"There is no problem so big that it cannot be run away from."
~ Charles M. Schulz
Updated On: 8/6/09 at 01:35 PM
