That's what makes us strong

In the Republic, Socrates reasons that popular culture is subversive to the state's interests and might be banned except when designed to marshal patriotism. Taken literally, that's a pretty awful statement. Letting go of something as personal as musical taste is puzzling to the fashionable projections of freedom.

Now take the Republic as a spiritual work, in which the state is a metaphor for the soul. What if Socrates is arguing that the popular, ordinary songs are stuck in the shadows of human emotion, and that it's worthwhile to reject them in favor of songs that encourage the soul to reach a place of light?

So much of popular song roots into "woe is me" and "somebody done me wrong" and "I wish things were different." Most lyrics in most songs are doggerel that validate everyday emotional experiences. But the spiritual masters -- Socrates, Buddha, Jesus -- seem to agree that everyday emotional experiences are illusion, and that the trick is to work through their distortions to find the truth underneath, or beside, or above.

I'm not convinced that it's time to throw out most of the songbook, but I am pleased that increasingly there are songwriters who convey a spiritual path in the midst of popular music. Yesterday, two of them hit home live. At Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band opened with We Are Nowhere and It's Now from his most overtly spiritual album, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning.

Then later in the evening, Jesse Winchester was supposed to play at Great American Music Hall, but was sick. So instead Guy Clark sang a couple of his songs and then Elvis Costello, with Buddy Miller and a beautifully restrained and resonant Jerry Douglas, moved the audience through four more. Here's Winchester himself in a song that is its own dialogue on the point that Socrates was making: