Review

Culture

Music

Redemption

2 February 2024

6 min read

Welcome to the revelation, good people

Mumford and Sons team up with Pharrell Williams. Belle Tindall unpacks their new track – Good People.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Two singers peform together. One in a white suit and stetson claps their hands. The other tilts the mic stand.

Pharrell Williams and Marcus Mumford perform Good People.

Listen to Good People

Whenever I bump into the familiar sounds of a Mumford & Sons song, it’s 2013 and they’re headlining the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. I can close my eyes and see the whole scene before me; it’s all trumpets and tweed. But when I take a moment, and home in on the lyrics, it’s a different scene that I see. There’s a story in the Bible where a man, Jacob, spends a night physically wrestling with God, it’s all dirt and elbows, the created grappling with the creator. And, occasionally, when listening to Mumford & Sons’ catalogue, I feel as though I’m watching that scene play out. I’m listening to souls laid bare, I’m witnessing people gripping the divine in the dirt. I get the sense that their lyrics have been born of a wrestling match, not a writing session; they’re crafted by people who are limping out of a tussle with truth.

Mumford & Sons – Marcus Mumford, Ben Lovett and Ted Dwane - seem to have largely grown out of their 2013 selves. But, if their new single is anything to go by, they haven’t grown out of wrestling their lyrics into existence.

From the first line until its last, this song has but one message to proclaim: change, the redemptive kind, is at hand.

Good People is the first track that they’ve released in five long years, and offered up in partnership with the mighty Pharrell Williams, it has been lorded as the collaboration that nobody saw coming. Speaking of the collaborative process, the band wrote that,

‘...this song came together fast. Like, in a day. We haven’t relied on immediate instincts like that, really, since the very early days of our band. It has felt fast and loose and really, really fun.’

The additional presence of Native Vocalists, a six-piece choir hailing from Native American Tribes within the northern Great Plains, makes this track a mosaic of musical influences. But we should have expected this, Pharrell’s insatiable creative curiosity has taken him to some unexpected places, an alternative-folk song is merely his latest destination. What’s more, it is a destination that he has come to by way of gospel music, and it shows, both in style and lyrical substance.

Of course, the song is peppered with the band’s signature religious language – there’s plenty of references to night and day, light and dark – all of which could have slid off a page of the Bible. Plus, Jesus is outright quoted in the second verse. It’s pretty obvious that the Biblical authors have their fingerprints all over this intriguing song.

But that’s still not what has caught my eye. Not quite.

Rather, it’s the message that this song is announcing, and where such a message might just derive from. Because, from the first line until its last, this song has but one message to proclaim: change, the redemptive kind, is at hand. Things are about to get better.

The chorus goes like this:

good people been down for so long
(Welcome to the revelation)

and now it's like the sun is rising
(Welcome to the revelation)

good people been down for so long
(Welcome to the revelation)

and now I see the sun is rising

It is the inevitability of this change, which is emphasised over and over again, that has me so intrigued. This change, the details of which are masterfully omitted (meaning this song can exist as a hopeful meta-anthem, free from the confines of prescriptive context), is as unavoidable as the sunrise. This change cannot be hindered, just as the breaking of the dawn cannot be hindered. One can stare at the midnight sky, enveloped by darkness, and still know with complete assurance that the sun will return. Morning will come; it is a certainty, which is an incredibly rare thing.

Subsequently, this song isn’t a call to arms, Pharrell’s backing-vocal response to Marcus Mumford’s words is not ‘welcome to the revolution’, but ‘welcome to the revelation’. It is a call, not to make the change happen, but to witness it happen – pointing its audience not toward action, but toward hope. Hope in a redemption that is inevitable and a prevailing goodness that is written into the fabric of reality. It will come, it will be. And this subtle, yet salient, detail places this song in a very specific category of hopeful anthems. It sits with the likes of:

Sam Cooke, who in 1964, declared that:

‘it’s been a long time coming, but I know that a change is gonna’ come. Oh, yes it will.’

Or Lauryn Hill, who wrote in 1998 that,

‘everything is everything. What is meant to be, will be. After winter, must come spring. Change, it comes eventually’.

These songs, written in the middle of the night, speak of the coming dawn.

Which got me thinking, what taught us to do that? What taught us to believe that if it’s not good, it’s not the end? That if it’s not redeemed, it’s not over? What taught Sam Cooke, amid such injustice and violence, to have such a defiantly hope-filled message to declare? What taught Lauryn Hill to simultaneously lament over the struggles faced by black, inner-city, communities in America, and yet affirm that ‘after winter, must come spring’? And what has taught Mumford & Sons, and Pharrell Williams for that matter, to announce that after such a ‘long night’, they can see that 'the sun is rising’?

On what grounds can we possibly believe such a thing to be true?

It's a big question. Perhaps one of the biggest. And while I’m weary of declaring that I have the answer (at least, on anyone’s behalf but my own), I certainly have a theory. And I feel relatively confident putting it forward, considering his words pop up in the second verse of Good People.

My theory, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Jesus; the ‘light that shines in the darkness’, the one that we’re told darkness has not, and cannot, ‘overcome’. The one whose entrance into the world was, as the Biblical story goes, as preventable as the dawn (these themes sound familiar to you?). The one who, for thousands of years, has had communities of people looking into the darkness and declaring ‘I beg to differ’.

My theory is that Jesus taught us to believe redemption to be true. The things he did, the things he said, the things he fulfilled, but more than that – I think it is his death, and ultimately, his re-established life. I sense, in these songs, a hint toward the great story which underpins every other story. I hear the reverberations of Jesus’ resurrection in these lyrics.

I’m just not convinced that we’d be so sure that redemption will get the final say if something, or rather someone, hadn’t shown such to be the case. And so, I suppose what I'm ultimately suggesting is that any 'revelation' that this song intends to welcome us into has a distinctive flavour of Jesus about it.

I wonder whether Marcus, Ben, Ted and Pharrell would really believe that if something isn’t good, it isn’t over, had Jesus not taught them to.

Watch Good People Live

Good People was first performed live at Pharrell Williams' Men’s Fall-Winter 2024 fashion show for Louis Vuitton. Williams is the creative director at the fashion house. Nativist Vocals perform first, followed by Williams and Mumford & Sons.

Explainer

Books

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

17 October 2024

6 min read

Bled dry: some red flags for those who hope to date a vampire

A philosopher's guide to undying love.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A modern vampire stairs at the face of his girlfried.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in Twilight.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s undying passion for all things gothic. In the first of a two-part series, he asks what is so irresistible about vampires, what do we want from them, and what’s the deal with the armadillos?

Historians point to John Polidori’s The Vampyre as that vital moment in Western vampire lore when the grisly undead creature becomes instead a Casanova. London, 1819. Lord Ruthven, the suave vampire in question, seduces young women and orchestrates chaos in the lives of others—all for his own carnal pleasure. Importantly, he does this by way of persuasion, not rote coercion, which illustrates a key aspect of the modern vampires’ modus operandi. They prefer romance to compulsion, seduction to force. They prefer thrall, almost to the end, at which point the monster fully emerges and the victims fully grasp that their good senses have been compromised. But by then it is too late.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,” Goethe once observed. Similarly, none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe themselves to be dating vampires.

To resist, however, is easier said than done. Even Buffy the vampire slayer succumbs to thrall, so much so that she invites Dracula to bite her. And he happily obliges, if “happily” is possible in the mind of a vampire. Later, having sobered up from the ordeal, Buffy stakes the villain, but we are nonetheless left with an uneasy feeling. Despite all her experience, despite all her kung-fu knowhow, Buffy still crumbles in the wake of thrall, at least temporarily, putting herself in grave danger and eliciting from us a pressing set of questions. How could this have happened so easily? Will this happen again? Are women attracted to men in capes?

Much like kryptonite, vampire magic also affects Superman. Two vampires have so far succeeded in hypnotizing him. Crucifer, not fortunate in name, enthralls our protagonist and sends him on several errands, until the Man of Steel has a moment of clarity, as the alcoholics call it, at which point he punches the ancient vampire through the heart. Dracula, too, disguised as an aristocrat named Rominoff, charms our superhero rather easily and then bites him on the neck, only to explode—hilariously—on the premise that Superman’s blood is tinged with sunlight. A moment of dream logic used to subvert the expectation that superblood might somehow benefit the Count.

Lord Ruthven of Polidori fame also wanders into the DC Comic Book Universe and, per usual, charms his way through problems, until he inadvertently skewers himself on a war memorial. Before this happens, however, we get the strong impression that Ruthven could beguile Superman with ease, if given the chance: that pens are mightier than swords and always have been.

On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves.

Psychoanalysts observe that to empathize with sociopaths is to negate the self most dangerously. They are right, I think, and right—too—that self-erasure proves difficult to recognize at times, because it feels like love. Such is the predicament of those who hope to rendezvous with vampires. Perhaps they have a death wish, some will say, or maybe a savior syndrome, as if they are to save the brooding scoundrels. As if they can. Regardless, the monsters have another plan entirely. As an early church father once explained, those who dine with the devils should bring long spoons.

Not that vampires are particularly good at banquets. They inevitably exaggerate, like the Macbeths as they welcome King Duncan to the castle: “All our service,” the lady says, “in every point twice done and then done double.”

Or recall the embroidered hospitality of Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula, caught between silent film and sound: “I bid you welcome,” he says, acting out the part as if the audience must see the motive on his face. A perfect moment when the silent cinema and talking pictures conspire to produce the quintessential vampire ethos, an overstated affectation framed for the modern age. The bow of pretended humility, the elongated gesture, the monumental gravity. The outfit.

Some speculate that if vampires were able to see themselves in mirrors, they would reconsider their wardrobes. We have reason to think otherwise. Of course, the true gothic is not the vampire aesthetic, because the true gothic always points to Heaven, as in Notre Dame Cathedral, for instance, or Westminster Abbey. On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves, incurvatus in se, which signals not grandeur but rather self-apotheosis. In essence, vampires are their own cathedrals, and with this premise proceed accordingly, candelabras in tow.

Longinus, in On the Sublime, uses the term “frigidity” to describe the emotional effect produced by such false grandeur. He means to convey both rhetorical and metaphysical coldness, as does Dante, who places the Devil in a block of ice at the Inferno’s gaudy center. As does Stanley Kubrick, too, who freezes the possessed Jack in the maze at the end of The Shining. And somewhere near the frozen middle of Hell we find the vampires, those who betrayed the strangers in their midst and preyed upon the lonely and the desperate. But now they only devour themselves. We are punished by our sins, not for them.

On a side note, and concerning the vampire’s many choristers, the opening scene of Lugosi’s Dracula features three armadillos. They wander about the castle and mind their own business, it seems, as wolves howl and spiders weave their webs. On how they got there we do not know, but the armadillos further confirm Longinus’s additional point that the ridiculous and the sublime bear a family resemblance.

What, then, are we to make of the vampires who sparkle and the vampires with souls? Or, if not in the direction of the dreamy, then in the theater of the absurd: Count Chocula, the mascot for a popular breakfast cereal, or the puppet Count von Count from the children’s program Sesame Street, who teaches viewers how to add and subtract—hitting all the numbers with his heavy Transylvanian accent. We might deem these manifestations too unserious to be taken seriously, but in fairness to the spirit of Count Chocula, perhaps something else happens here. Namely, we find more variations upon the culture-making effort to rehabilitate the demonic, and the almost demonic, as the case might be.

If the vampire could only find pleasure in chocolate, if he could laugh with children, if he could be loved like Bella loves Edward in The Twilight Saga, then maybe there is hope enough in the world for all of us. Indeed, maybe some vampires have grown tired of being vampires. That said, we do well to heed the old Transylvanian proverb, lest we over-empathize with the villains: the sane would do no good if they made themselves monsters to help the monsters.

A recent meme depicts the real Dracula in the company of Count Chocula, Count von Count, The Twilight Saga’s Edward, and several other less-than-scary princes of darkness, at which point Dracula laments that the vampires have lost their edge.

And, true, I have yet to comment on psychic vampires and flaming extroverts, which is an oversight to be sure. As a corrective, and by way of conclusion, I observe the following: for twenty-seven dollars, one can buy a beaker of psychic vampire repellent from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Store in Beverly Hills, California. The Paper Crane Apothecary makes the product, which—with an essential blend of rosemary, lavender, and juniper—protects against the fiends who corner people at parties. At present, however, shipping will be difficult: the website tells me “This item is sold out.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.