I Want To Live In The Music: Jon Bellion, Blue, and the need to be Beautiful Now
"Fall into your Blue..."
Those who know my taste in music know, I LOVE JON BELLION!!! I can't explain how he manages to successfully blow my categories away. I can only describe his style as "technologically natural". Using his synth, he rarely sounds synthetic, fellow fans understand this, it's a special brand of digital sounds and human vocal ingenuity and talent. When I found out he was behind the chorus of Jason Derulo's trumpets, I immediately knew why I loved that song. In hindsight, it reeks of Jon.
Listening to him today, I remembered how some have described the life of the Godhead as "music" and creation itself as "music" [1], to be caught up into the life of the Trinitarian Godhead is to be caught up into the eternal dance and musical Bliss of God's existence. We are "sung" into existence to be united to the musical harmony of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Tolkien when writing the origin of the world of middle Earth, describes creation as a song which various other "gods" participate in, evil is then described as a "disharmony" that disrupts the song [2].
But enough of the intro, what does this have to do with Jon specifically? Blu, a song from his most recent album, Glory Sound Prep, speaks about Love, in particular, his wife and how he decided that letting go of his need for control in order to fall into deeper love with her, using her (most likely) blue eyes as a metaphor:
Messing with my pride, thinking anytime You could just get up and go Then I realize, what the hell is love If you're in complete control?
... Fighting it is hopeless, sinking in your ocean Just like He designed me to do Fall into your blue [3]
Jon is making use of a very old metaphor, the metaphor of "letting go", of trust, of faith. Everyone who's ever had a romantic relationship knows the importance of trust and vulnerability, we let go to hold her/him more. We "stand outside ourselves" in the ecstasy of love [4], we can almost call it "worship". This is what music does, it induces "ecstasy", we are lifted out of ourselves into a world we can't really explain, a world where there is only an "eternal moment" of Bliss, a moment that is at the same time a "future" we move toward, a world that sounds very much like what the theology of the "musical Godhead" describes. Fortuitously, there's another song that describes something similar, when Jon features in Zedd's track "Beautiful now":
We might not know why, we might not know how But baby, tonight, we're beautiful now We'll light up the sky, we'll open the clouds 'Cause baby, tonight, we're beautiful now [5]
Their future is ever brighter in and from their present, therefore do not despair. It tells of a hope, beyond mere materiality, for materiality is dead in itself, there is something, someone it seems, as it is a profoundly personal experience, beyond materiality, yet also embedded in materiality, giving it purpose, fulfilling it towards himself, and in it's fulfillment is our Bliss.
[1] Michael Peppard wrote on how Ignatius of Loyola thought of the Musical Triad as an analogy of the Trinity in Ignatius of Loyola: The Music of the Trinity
[2] Ainulindalë
[3] Genius Lyrics: Jon Bellion, Blu
[4] ...from the Ancient Greek ἔκστασις ekstasis, "to be or stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere"