Mormons who don't return CDs - On the Way to the Bus

As music finally returns to Kabul this week, I remind myself that two Mormons have yet to return my Low CD. Well over a month ago these suited lads with the Church of Latter-day Saints-tags came knocking on my apartment door. Armed with my new post-Sept. 11 pluralism, I promised to talk with them, though not until "some other time."

Thanks to their persistence, two weeks ago they made some progress. We talked amicably about God and prophets. They gave their side, I gave mine. I said that, sure, I'd be interested in reading the Book of Mormon. They said they'd bring me a free copy. In return, I had them borrow Things We Lost in the Fire, the Low album that came out last winter.

It all felt like some kind of alien encounter. Nation-states with the luxury to spend resources on such exchanges call it "Cultural Diplomacy." I figured if I couldn't convert them to sybaritism, I could at least share my enthusiasm for indie rock.

Now it's mid-November and I'm still waiting to get my Low CD back. Where have you gone, Mormons? Maybe, as tactful dates do, they're just giving sufficient time to mull it over. Or maybe the album's slow, methodic and lyrically-minimalist, sometimes hymn-like approach to rock music has put them in a hypnotic spell. Oh, the possibilities!

When Low came to Baltimore in October their audience - which included John Waters - was still reeling, mentally if not verbally, from the disasters of September. Low performed at the George Peabody Library in the center of the neo-Renaissance stack room that rises up past six iron balconied tiers. Described in its early history as a "cathedral of books," the interior both resembles the sacred and still fits along with philanthropist George Peabody's interest in keeping all of his donated facilities secular. Over a hundred years later, the three-piece band, lighted in somber blues and reds, was situated on a stage in front of the lowest balcony's spiraling Egyptian meanders. As Low began to play, they emanated both their shadows and their music onto the walls, sculpting the open space of the library's hallowed, book-filled hall.

Low didn't mention catastrophe or war once at the show, or elsewhere, because they didn't have to. As the nation's most clueless celebrities were embarking on garish tribute tours in the effort to "heal" and "console," Low was just going about its business. As practicing Mormons, Low has certainly been influenced by their faith, but the music is anything but pedantic. Still, the title Things We Lost in the Fire and many of the song lyrics - you can find these on their website http://www.chairkickers.com - weren't just suffering from a case of bad timing. They could have been made for the times.

"There's a lot of death on the record," said guitarist and vocalist Alan Sparhawk in an interview for a Minneapolis/St. Paul newspaper earlier this year, long before September. "There's a lot of bodies, a lot of death, a lot of people being buried, and resurrection. Someday, you'll sit by the side of someone who's having a baby and you'll realize how close the two things are - birth and death."

As Low continue to play their music, they seem, at least from my perspective, to recognize that there is a place for good music and there is a place for bereavement, politics, opinions and everything else, and these two sides don't mix well. As David Patrick Stearns wrote in Andante, "What's needed isn't validation of sadness and rage - that's available through the news media - but something that aids in the adjustment to and acceptance of a world that's forever changed." I would even argue that trying to have music aid in "adjustment" and "acceptance" is an equally unproductive way of looking at what music does for individuals. Music elicits reactions that are purely suited to the medium, reactions that can only be created by music. Applying it to a function outside music's intrinsic possibilities within the boundaries of its medium is both damaging to the actual function, which can surely be dealt with in better ways than through music, and insulting to the music itself, assuming it was any good in the first place.

There was a stunning photo this week in the Washington Post depicting a group of people in a recently liberated Afghan city joyously surrounding a very advanced-looking tape recorder. Despite the fact that it reminded a little too much of the current TV commercial trend of juxtaposing American consumer products with entranced indigenous peoples, it was nevertheless a powerful image.

Maybe it is possible to concede that music does have a potential role, albeit limited, in adjustment, acceptance, even winning wars. As I learned from Tim Burton's very underrated film Mars Attacks: when diplomacy and hawkish gun-toting don't work, start belting out the Slim Whitman.