LOW: “Missouri”

(Secret Name LP, Kranky, 1999)

The café seemed the first local place Sarah and I might claim, a small but not inconsiderable reminder of the college town we’d left only days before—Ithaca, New York—and of our former lives in New England and Toronto. Here in rural central Pennsylvania, where I would begin a teaching job in two months, we felt dislocated and freaked out. The front page of the local paper, the first morning we awoke in our new rental house, was given to photos showing our fellow townspeople, with coolers and lawnchairs, lining the shoulders of US Route 15 to cheer flatbed trailers carrying NASCAR cars south from one racetrack to another. A sidewalk preacher blessed us every time we visited the post office or CVS. In a small park downtown, the reverent congregated for a marathon day of prayer. The local hospital: Evangelical Community Hospital. Amish men drove lopsided single-horse carriages on the roads west of town, and Mennonite families piled out of drab minivans to shop at Wal-Mart. The local religion was religion, along with high school football, pickup trucks, chicken and waffles, and hunting. Sarah and I drove forty minutes, the first weekend, to a nearby town with a small state university so we could see a movie.

On the way back, we noticed the café and decided to stop. Students lounged around a table on the sidewalk. Inside the door, I glanced past a pile of pamphlets (“Support the Zapatistas!” I imagined) to a few shelves of worn books, stereotypically mismatched furniture, and, framed by velvet curtains and covering the entire back wall, an ironic, faux-naïve mural of a haloed Jesus kneeling beside a lamb. Sarah stepped to the counter to order our coffees, and, by habit, I turned to the bookshelf. A few mass-market paperbacks, I now saw, were outnumbered by copies of the New Testament and the Gideons Bible. The pamphlets advertised Bible summer camp and a motorcycle ministry. I looked back to the mural: Jesus held his palms open in a gesture of embrace, and his large brown eyes bored into mine. Sarah handed the cashier some bills, and I took a few wobbly steps toward the counter. “This may be a really stupid question,” I said to the cashier. “Is—is this a Christian café?”

“Sure is!” she said, smiling. “That’s the theme!” She pointed to a ceiling-mounted speaker above us. “We even have Christian rock on the stereo.”

We sat at a corner table in stunned silence, unable even to laugh. I stared at my café au lait as if it might poison me. “We just gave five dollars to the religious right,” I moaned.

I’d dismissed and then scrupulously avoided the band Low—a trio from Duluth, Minnesota, known for playing fragile, repetitive, slow songs that sometimes seemed more concerned with testing their microphones’ ability to pick up the entire decay of a plucked guitar string than with melody—when I learned that two of the band’s three members were practicing Mormons. Religious fervor of any sort has always made me uneasy, and, despite the praise critics and fans lavished on Low’s records, I didn’t want to support a band I imagined as fringe fundamentalist Christians. I based my poorly thought disavowal not on any specific knowledge or principle (my consumer boycotts were half-hearted at best) or, you know, actually listening to the band and determining whether I liked the music—exactly the sort of ignorant snap judgment I derided fundamentalists for making.

But by 1999, stuck in Pennsylvania, I finally included Low’s new album, Secret Name, in a mail-order purchase: everyone raved about this double LP, it was issued on a label I respected, and I figured I should probably hear it. Even before I learned that “Missouri” probably alludes to Mormon settlers in that state and the persecution they faced until their eventual eviction in 1838, I found the song’s brief opening lines evocative: “Oh, speak to me, Adam and Eve / Oh, Missouri.” (Of course, these lines also confirmed my apprehensions about being proselytized to.) Guitarist and vocalist Alan Sparhawk sings in a shaky falsetto, conspicuously pronouncing “Missouri” as “Misery,” and the words suggest the tensions between pre-and post-lapsarian language, the wish to communicate with one’s ancestors, but especially the miseries of separation, the miseries of geography, and the miseries of religion: three sorrows I felt keenly at the cusp of the millennium, when an end-of-days vibe often seemed palpable, and even the dentist’s waiting room was stocked with religious pamphlets.

Still, “Missouri” was—and remains—undeniably beautiful. And if, like much of Low’s music, it captures a sense of dread in its melancholic minimalism, then it may be less spiritual than I think: the second coming is supposed to fill true believers with indescribable joy, but I’ve yet to hear a song by Low I’d regard as joyous. I have no idea what the three members of Low might or might not believe (given a number of the band’s public statements, I suspect their theology is far more liberal than I once assumed), but their music both exhibits and responds to the dread many of us felt from certain events of the 1990s and beyond—L.A. riots and D.C. snipers; Branch Davidians, Aum Shinrikyo, Heaven’s Gate; the Oklahoma City bombing and anti-abortion terrorism; armed militias and white supremacists; a man beaten and dragged behind a truck because he was black; a man beaten and tied to a fence because he was gay. It didn’t require the country’s divisions of belief becoming outlined forever in red and blue, nor religious fanatics flying planes into the World Trade Center, to convince me of the dangers of fundamentalism.

All of which is to say, as Sparhawk once concluded an interview: “This moment is as doomed as the rest.”