Its title is stark, even rude, but it is not a song that tries to convince anyone that there is no God. It assumes that most of us assume that. In that way it is unlike classic anti-God rock songs, such as John Lennon’s “Imagine,” or The Dead Kennedy’s “Religious Vomit,” or the more detailed critiques of Biblical religion which I’m told are present in several songs by The Dave Matthews Band, and which I assume are in those by the explicitly anti-Christian punk band Bad Religion.
In fact, the song seems more directly about another subject than God’s assumed non-existence, namely, the loss of Cate’s grandmother. Le Bon has said in interviews that a number of the songs from Mug Museum, released a year ago, have to do with her death, or at least with how that changed relationships in her close-knit family. Here’s a live version more like the one we hear on the album, and here’s a solo version:
Well, who can know? An artist’s mystifications are all the less transparent to the extent they are truly artful, and the artist herself can get caught in the spell. But in any case, “No God” might be a final disavowal of the spiritual hints raised by this artist’s mystery.
John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which I began exploring in No. 96, declared that mankind’s getting past Biblical religion would pave the way to a happier fraternal future, since it would enable mankind to evolve beyond property, nations, and war, and to concentrate upon livin’ for today.
But notice: in the dialogue between “No God” and “Are You with Me Now?”, a current rock artist has provided us with a description of how the realization of the “no religion” part of Lennon’s dream actually feels. It does not feel so good. And it certainly does not, to push the dialogue back to the key lyric from Cyrk, give us greater inclination or ability to “stick” with a loved place or loved ones for the long-haul, however well we may fly flags for such in song.
Cate’s songs nowhere suggest that we can take much comfort from the idea each one of us can be part of a purported unity of all the people that are livin’ for today. How could we? Particularly when a temporary sense of this, which I suppose one might get at a rock festival, occurs in the midst of continually dislocating change (against which even David Bowie revolted for a moment, saying to the older generation of his time Where’s your shame, you’ve left us up to our necks in it!). What Cate most wants—despite her own admitted wanderlust–is to stay connected to things “real,” to the countryside, family, and loved ones, even in the face of death and separation. She similarly wants to tell little Greta that she belongs here, and has infinite value.
Her politics are likely left-leaning, but I detect no signs that Cate is a dogmatic leftist who would advocate faith in “Imagine’s” program of no property and no nations. I suppose it would nonetheless be fair enough to label her a hippie, for she is one who sings grow your hair longer, and who certainly encourages us to slow down, work the land, attend to the animals, sit with loved ones, etc. My argument here is that her art admits that the “no religion” part of Lennon’s dream coming to seem like the plain fact of the matter makes all of that harder to believe in. So, in “No God,” it is only with a palpable sense of reluctance that she disavows the intimations of immortality she expressed in two other songs, and only with a sense of resigned duty that she affirms the key words of the modern creed.
And so the spirit leads me, once again, to quote Chantal Delsol, the contemporary French philosopher, this time from her “God in Exile” chapter in Icarus Fallen:
…for the peoples deprived of religion experience this deprivation as an absence, even if…they do not wish to call back the gods they have left behind. The confrontation between the feeling of deprivation and the refusal to restore what has been abandoned is one of the defining characteristics…of the contemporary spirit.
…The desire for the absolute, and the expression of the desire to escape death and finitude, no doubt constitutes one of those human categories that is grounded in our very being…
…it is a truncated world indeed that must be content with finitude without being able to name it as such, that is, without even questioning it.
Cate Le Bon looks us in the eye and says “no God,” but like Wordsworth, Syd Barrett, etc., etc. etc., she is pretty obviously not content with the truncated world Delsol describes. If she has poetically toyed with spiritualism-entertaining, pagan-esque, and perhaps pantheistic ways of voicing this discontent, as did her hippie and Romantic forbears, we would be most surprised to find her coming to espouse regular New Age belief i.e., what Ross Douthat describes as the widespread contemporary heresy of “God Within” spirituality. The raw edge of our situation, which so many and especially in America try to deny with the “spirituality not religion” fudge, remains present in her songs.
Her songs thus exemplify what I have admitted from the beginning of my Songbook about what Rock Does Well: it’s best practitioners explore the dark implications and express the unsatisfying realities of “modern rationalism for living,” and, they often seek to provide an aesthetic refuge from such. There are no answers in that activity, no guarantee that questions will be correctly posed, and plenty of temptations towards art-as-religion; but there are, at least, the right discontents.