Cosmic Pop Is All AKA Don't Call Me Hippie, Hippie

Whoever it was that wrote the Dusty Springfield classic "Son of a Preacher Man" deserves a whole heap of extra credit for weaving two ostensibly unreconcilable worlds–the ministerial and the conjugal–into one of the sexiest songs known to mankind.

See, for a long time the puritanical suggestion that "cleanliness is next to godliness" dominated the American psyche. It wasn't until the birth of teen culture in the '50s and '60s that this perception started to change. Rock 'n' roll was the new pornography, but the real reason the establishment got so bent out of shape when Lennon notoriously claimed that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus was that it also threatened society as an upstart religion. Tunes like "Preacher Man," the Dixie Cups' "Chapel of Love" and later Marvin Gaye's "God is Love" spliced the carnal and spiritual in ways that either directly or subtly defied the old order by re-conceptualizing its outdated and faulty morality (where it concerned intimate human relationships).

This trend wasn't merely coincidental, either. In retrospect, it now seems clear that one of pop music's greatest achievements came with its announcement that romantic love was, in fact, a thing to be revered: a shameless, transcendent phenomenon possessed of the power to momentarily elevate the species from its more common ugliness and greed. Through pop music, it seemed, mere mortals were able to dwell momentarily within a sacristy of mutual compassion and honesty.

Furthermore, there were a select few that could bring us to this place on a regular basis. One of these blessed mediums is the Reverend Al Green. While it can be said with near absolute surety that his falsetto has soundtracked the conception of untold thousands, equally worthy of note is his music's tacit acknowledgment that the gift of expression connects us all to a higher power. Call it God or Allah, call it Brahma or the flying spaghetti monster. The point is, listening to some pop music is like mainlining the latent energy of the universe. It's the most efficient individual power source ever developed. Crazy, right? I don't mean to sound like a drunk hippie, and frankly there's little that I despise more than a bunch of irresponsible new-age low lives who spend their days making hemp rope in repugnant little rural communes, but there's this seriously amazing current in our pop culture that I'm fundamentally unwilling to attribute to science.

So, listen below as the Reverend tears up the Bee Gees' "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?"

Al Green - How Can You Mend A Broken Heart -

From the liner notes of Hi Records' 2003 reissue of Let's Stay Together (1972):

Al Green knew he had created a masterpiece [with "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?"]. "The Gibb boys might just have well given it over to me and saved themselves the trouble," he said later. "I'm not a bragging man, but I owned that song. They'd written a masterpiece, and I made it immortal." Immodest perhaps, but, as Dizzy Dean once said, "It ain't bragging if you did it."

Here's a clip of Al doing a shorter version of the song on the Jools Holland show a couple years ago:




You catch that last word?