What if God Was One of Us? A philosophy essay by Joan Osborne

What if God Was One of Us?

Final Essay, PHIL590

Submitted by Joan Osborne

March 21, 1995

Dear Ms. Osborne,

I have finished grading your essay and unfortunately it does not fulfill the assignment guidelines, nor does it meet the broader standards of graduate-level philosophy.  My in-text comments are denoted by a dash (-) and written in italics.  You will find a more sustained critique of your work at the end.  

My first comment, regarding your title page, is that the assignment did not require a visual aide.  While you display a great deal of singing and filmmaking talent, your time would have been much better spent formulating a sound philosophical argument.

If God had a name, what would it be?

-"God" is already a proper name.  If you would would like to undertake a philological study of the various words for God appearing throughout scripture, I suggest doing that in a Biblical Studies course

And would you call it to his face,

If you were faced with him in all his glory?

-Now I am unclear which question you are addressing.  What is your central thesis?

What would you ask if you had just one question?

-I do hope you would be more concise than you have been in the writing of this essay.

And yeah, yeah,

-Here you come off as bored with the question.  Are you slipping into satire?  If so, I missed the joke.

God is great.

Yeah, yeah,

God is good.

-So far you've told me God is "great," "good," and "glorious," when the word "God" already entails omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence.  Your added description is unnecessary.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

-PLEASE PROOFREAD

What if God was one of us?

-Finally, you have arrived at the question proposed in your essay's title, and it is buried too far in your text.

Just a slob like one of us?

-Be careful when using the universal "us."  You may be a slob, but that does not mean all of us are (or that I am).

Just a stranger on the bus,

Trying to make his way home?

-What is the purpose of this image?  It does not address the question at all.

If God had a face, what would it look like?

-Isn't your essay trying to prove God would have a human face?  

And would you want to see it,

If seeing meant that you would have to believe,

-You need to prove that seeing necessarily entails believing.  Warning - this will be EXTREMELY difficult.

In things like heaven and and in Jesus and the saints and all the prophets?

-The Christian religion is MUCH more complex than this.

And yeah, yeah,

God is great.

Yeah, yeah,

God is good.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

-Here you are repeating your second paragraph.  Did you just copy and paste it?

What if God was one of us?

Just a slob like one of us?

Just a stranger on the bus,

Trying to make his way home?

-I take it this essay comes in fugues?  

Back up to heaven all alone,

Just trying to make his way home.

Nobody would call him on the phone,

Except for the Pope maybe in Rome.

-This is waffle.  You should not introduce new information in your concluding paragraph, especially when it does not support your thesis in any way.

While you are clearly a talented verse writer, there are numerous problems with your essay.   Most importantly, you do not provide an argument or even address a central question.  Instead you ask a total of eight (8) questions and do not provide any answers for any of them.  More generally, I am unsure how you could even answer the question, "What if God was one of us?" since it is predicated on a problematic definition of the word "us."  You are essentially asking, "What if God were a human?" and comparing God with a human fundamentally undermines the definition of "God."  Either you need to propose a new definition of "God," or a new definition of "human."  The question could just as easily be, "What if a human were god?" This question could be more fun - I would refer you to the first Ghostbusters film for research.  Next time please pay closer attention to the assignment guidelines.

Final Mark: D-

Inner Circle

Contributed by James Phelan

As an older child, I watched The Hit List with Tarzan Dan most Saturday afternoons. Tarzan Dan was given a show on YTV when there was still real and sincere confusion about what sorts of TV personalities children should be encouraged -- or could, at least, be expected -- to identify with. He was an FM radio DJ in the grand old style: loud guy, loud clothes, lots of shtick. Everything in his manner showed overeagerness to please. He always sounded like he was giving away free t-shirts. His show was a Top 30 video countdown, and the chart had that diversity TV charts had in the early to mid- 90s, before the media used to promote popular music caught up with the fragmentation of the market for it. And though the chart clearly privileged kid acts like Joey Lawrence and TBTBT, there was (rightly, if incorrectly) no assumption that music with a mostly older audience wouldn't appeal to children.The videos were mostly terrible but the show was pretty great. My favorite Hit List hits were, in no special order: "I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" by Meat Loaf, "Great Big Love" by Bruce Cockburn, "Enid" by the Barenaked Ladies, and "Sweat (A La La La La Long)" by Inner Circle.

Greg has already written well about "I Would Do Anything for Love." "Great Big Love" is, on reconsideration, kind of a dud, though my memory of listening to it gives Cockburn's better records ("Tokyo," "The Trouble with Normal," "Lovers in a Dangerous Time," "Peggy's Kitchen Wall," "How I Spent My Fall Vacation," etc.) a nice nostalgic aura. "Enid" is probably the Barenaked Ladies' finest moment -- their best shot at credible-pop-band success before turning into Canadian joke rock Jimmy Buffett times five. (Even the video for the song shows that, alas, that's where they're headed.)

This is about Inner Circle -- about "Sweat."

Inner Circle is an institutional band, like The Drifters or Menudo. They have recorded some twenty-five albums since 1974, with four different front men and regularly changing personnel, in a variety of reggae genres. Their biggest international hit to date has been "Bad Boys," the theme song to the official organ of bad PR for the American poor, COPS. "Sweat," like "Bad Boys," was recorded by the line-up fronted by Calton Coffie, which turned the band away from radical rasta politics and a hard-edged sound, towards pop universalism.

Calton Coffie is a big fat goofball who wants the world to be happy. I can tell this from the video for "Sweat." The video's promise of happiness is extravagant -- it's all joyous bad dancing and people about to get laid in paradise -- and the song lives up to it, by being perfect. The song is perfect in that every part of it is irresistible. I just listened to it trying to count the number of hooks, and I couldn't do it. The song never lags, never abates in being excellent in the way it's excellent (which, I'll grant, isn't for everyone). By that last qualification, I don't mean that it's a specialist taste. It so easily overcomes the inherent cornballism of its genre, pop party reggae, and the ambient cornballism of its moment, the early 90s, that it's not really worth talking about. Calton Coffie knows how good a song it is, though he doesn't want to make a big deal about it. He's just going to sing it and dance, fatly, goofily, making the best of his moment of grace on earth by sharing it.

This is fitting, as it's a song about generosity, the song of a generous lover. Pop songwriting is, as much as it's anything else, the art of writing about sexual love in a way that can be sung wholeheartedly and sound true and still get played on the radio. In commercial genres, coded language is the norm, and pop literacy means knowing how to decode lyrics. But machoness and misogyny are mainstays of Caribbean music, so a casual listener can be excused for thinking all the business about making you sweat till you can't sweat no more, and going on making you sweat even after you cry out, is a wolfishly aggressive come-on, or worse. It's not. Clearly, clearly it's a song about wanting to make someone come as much as is physically possible. Proof: he tells her he wants to make her sweat "till she can't sweat no more." If he literally did that -- if he exhausted her body's store of water, leaving it incapable of regulating its temperature -- she would die in dry agony. Serge Gainsbourg might, at his very grimmest, have written an upbeat reggae number about sex-murder by dehydration. I'm quite sure Calton Coffie did not. But substitute "come" for "sweat" and the line not only makes sense, it's idiomatic.

Speaking of Serge Gainsbourg, an indie rock band of a certain type looking for a surefire hit could do worse than to cover "Sweat" in the style of "Je Suis Venu Te Dire Que Je M'en Vais." (When you thank me in the liner notes, remember it's P-h-e-l-a-n: e before a and no F.)

More proof the song is about wanting to give its addressee orgasms: the second time the line comes around -- I only just noticed this -- Coffie changes the phrasing of "My tongue gets tied" so that it sounds like "My tongue gets tired." Of course, there shouldn't be any need to offer that sort of evidence to anyone who enjoys the song. With rare exceptions, the correct interpretation of a beautiful song's meaning is whichever one does it the most credit. To insist on a less generous one, without having a very good reason for favoring it, is to want to diminish the world in a small but definite way. It's barbaric.

That being said, to appreciate the record's greatness, it isn't necessary to think the song is about generosity in bed, or even to know what that might mean. I loved "Sweat" before I knew what sex was and have listened to it with undiminished pleasure ever since. (Though I have, regrettably, gone through long periods of forgetting it or figuring it's not the sort of thing I'd like anymore.) While writing the above I played it at least a dozen times. I have never tired of hearing it.

Sloan and Afternoon Delight

Contributed by Dave Lemay

Full disclosure: I think I still like these guys, which should normally disqualify my entry. But I get slightly ashamed and nauseous as the associated memories spew forth, which seems warrant enough to pursue this confession.

And with no small amount of self-gratification I retraced my love affair with Sloan, those bastions of classic rock hailing from Toronto, Canada: those shameless cataloguers of the original British invasion; those inveterate peddlers of rock and roll nostalgia.

It may come as no surprise that such hard-working respectable Atlantic boys would still be plucking away some twenty years later - and indeed they have been recording and touring consistently right into middle-age. While they seem to be holding up rather well (Chris Murphy still looks and acts like a kid with his mopish hair and his too-big wire-frame glasses) it is not always the case about their music. To their merit they have released 10 albums throughout this period, from Smeared (1992), up to Parallel Play (2008) last June. Though my steadfast devotion ended about 1998 with the release of Navy Blues and Sloan's progression into classic rock, it is fair to say that their prodigious output has always been tempered by an uneven quality. While their musicality is undeniable, many songs fail to stand-out and sometimes sound like an uninspired study in rock-abilia while others seem too contrived to bare any real scrutiny.

Take for example the following lines from "I can feel it" off the album Twice Removed (1994) —  what was for a time my favorite Sloan song but now seems unbearably saccharine and indulgent.

You could tell a million lies


And I'd think they all were true

Trust


That's my trust in you

...or plainly pubescent:

No strings attached


No copy to match


No drift to catch

No plans to hatch

No itch to scratch

Just infatuation

Is all you need

...and just downright questionable value for our ardent youth:

But you've got a thing for me


I can feel it, I can feel it


And I've got a thing for you, too

You can have it, you can have it

Certainly infatuation is not all you need. Venereal disease stalks the brash and heedless and that's something that 'you can have' that can't easily be gotten rid of.

As with every itched scratched, there is the requisite self-loathing and plainly I am not exempt.

As I write this, I am painfully aware that I am not only ridiculing something that I once identified with, but I am also intruding on some very fond moments that I shared with friends: the first mix tape that I ever received, that included "I can feel it"; an aimless weeknight in the back of a Toyota Tercel listening to One Chord to Another (1996) and debating its relative merits to Twice Removed — still my personal favorite, sorry Rob. 

Have I become an asshole? Maybe. Probably — I don't think I was born that way. 

I am in fact one of those people that never really listen to lyrics — to the amusement and consternation of my wife and friends. I only hear the musicality of the song, which makes it really hard to sing along and really easy to mess up words. 

It also leads to the sometimes embarrassing re-interpretation of a song's meaning, not unlike the moment in Arrested Development when Maeby and Michael sing a duet to "Afternoon Delight" by the Starland Vocal Band only to discover its suggestive meaning half-way through the song — or in my case, 15 years later.

I am sufficiently sentimental, I think, that melody is all I need to hear. And besides, I still think Twice Removed is an awesome album.