Chinese Satellite
Chinese Satellite
When Judee Still introduced her song “Enchanted Sky Machines” at a 1971 concert in Boston as “a religious song about flying saucers coming at the end of the world to take all of the deserving people away till the holocaust is over,” a brief, muted round of applause breaks out before she finishes explaining the song and begins playing it. I think about the people who applauded there quite a bit. There were maybe ten? Twenty? Forty? who applauded in a crowd of, presumably, a couple hundred. Who were these people? Why did they applaud? Elsewhere, Sill said of the song, “When I wrote it, I think I believed it more literally than I do now, although I still believe poetically that deserving people will be spared.”
I see a clear line from this song to Phoebe Bridgers’ “Chinese Satellite,” from her 2020 masterpiece of an album, Punisher. Over a soaring string section, Bridgers sings:
Took a tour to see the stars
But they weren’t out tonight
So I wished hard on a Chinese satellite
I want to believe
Instead I look at the sky and I feel nothing
You know I hate to be alone
I want to be wrong
The second chorus changes the lyrics to be even more sci-fi, and more resonant with Sill’s song (which ends “we’ll be on enchanted sky machines, the gentle are going home”):
Sometimes when I can’t sleep
It’s just a matter of time before I’m hearing things
Swore I could feel you through the walls
But that’s impossible
I want to believe
That if I go outside I’ll see a tractor beam
Coming to take me to where I’m from
I want to go home
Note how Sill’s song – even if she wishes to metaphorize her eschatological vision – ends with certainty: where we will be, where we are going. Sill wrote from a culture in the thick of both the Jesus Freak and New Age movements – her music was cryptically obsessed with Christ, her funeral was held at a place called the Self-Realization Fellowship in LA. She writes from a place of mysticism, otherworldliness, and spirituality.
Bridgers, however, appears to write solidly from what Charles Taylor calls “the immanent frame” – I have not read A Secular Age (it’s a thousand pages, give me a break), but I take this to mean the sense that a secular, materialist understanding of existence is basically now the default for “Western” society. Religious “belief” is no longer taken for granted; it now has to be something one “wants” rather than one’s default mode of being.
When I was an Evangelical Teen ™ this would have bothered me, or it would have bothered the Christian rock magazines I read in the 90s. But as a dispatch from a world that strains toward the divine, I absolutely love it, and I love that the song does not end with “it’s impossible” – that sentiment is overshadowed by “I want to believe,” and “I want to go home.”
Bridgers, in an interview with Pitchfork, talked about the influence of a piece a former bandmate of hers, Haley Dahl, wrote, which includes the line: “God existing is way more interesting than God not existing. Be a Good Man. Try to go to Heaven. Find meaning in everything because Nihilism is so, so boring.”
What I love about “Chinese Satellite” and the whole album it’s from, is, as Lindsay Zoladz wrote in the New York Times last year – despite everything, despite the lack of feeling, despite the immanent frame – “For a fleeting moment, she looks up and she believes.”
I hope you are well and listening to music that pushes back against the immanent frame – almost all music does, anyway.
JHH