May 9th, 2008
Jesus Is Da Bomb
Need some help with the gospel. A while back, some friends and I were going on a road trip that ended at an airport in a borrowed car. About halfway through, we ended up fighting and not talking to each other. In an effort to ease the mood, someone threw in a cassette that just said "gospel." AVC staff, I tell you, it was a fine mix-tape, but one song has stuck with me, and I'd like to know more. All I can tell you is a snatch of lyric: "Mmm, everybody's worried about that atom bomb / But nobody is worried about the day my Lord will come / 'Cause when my Jesus gets here, he's going to hit like an atom bomb." There might be a cute sermon in the middle, and the rest of the lyrics all sort of juxtapose imagery of Jesus/savior and a-bomb/God's wrath.
Orson
Rev. Donna Bowman is here to deliver the word:
I have no doubt you need some help with the gospel, Orson, along with all those other lost souls out in A.V. Club-land. The song is called "Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb," and as you might imagine, it's a gospel number from the post-World War II era. It was recorded by many gospel groups around 1950, most notably the Pilgrim Travelers, the Soul Stirrers, the Famous Blue Jay Singers, and Lowell Blanchard And His Valley Trio. Blanchard's version is the soundtrack for this homemade apocalyptic concoction:
The premise of the song is that, as recounted in Genesis 9:11-17, God promised Noah after the Flood that he would never again destroy the world with water. Many gospel songs subscribed to a particular theological conclusion derived from that pledge—that the next world-destroying event would be fire. (The title of James Baldwin's essay collection The Fire Next Time is a reference to this belief.) After the introduction of the atomic bomb to warfare at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the prospect of the world ending in a blaze of atomic fire seemed close at hand, and with the discovery of Soviet weaponry a few years later, the fears got deeper: "Nineteen hundred and forty-nine / The USA got very wise / They found that a country across the line / Had an atom bomb of the very same kind." Americans should worry less about nuclear holocaust than the day of judgment, cautions the lyric, but if they "trust King Jesus," they'll be safe from the terror God demonstrated to the priests of Baal when he rained down fire from the sky on the altar in answer to Elijah's prayer (I Kings 18:19-40).
The title "Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb" re-entered the public's musical consciousness as the name of Tripping Daisy's 1998 album. (The song doesn't appear on the album.) One of the more recent gospel recordings of the tune is by John Alexander's Sterling Jubilee Singers in 1997, on an album of the same name.
"Jesus Hits Like The Atom Bomb" is far from the only gospel tune that uses current events as metaphors for matters spiritual. On the same theme in 1950, the Swan Silvertone Singers produced "Jesus Is God's Atom Bomb": "Have you heard about the blast in Japan / How it killed so many people and scorched the land? / Oh, it can kill your natural body / But the Lord can kill your soul." The Pilgrim Travelers returned to their Cold War sermonizing in 1951's "Jesus Is The First Line Of Defense": "If all the people, every day would get down on their knees and pray / Then make the H-bomb and atom too / Tell the Reds we'll turn them loose / Our boys will stop dying, the land'll be free / 'Cause God said 'I'm the Prince of Peace.'"
Of course, the use of trains, automobiles, airplanes, and other technological features of 20th-century life as hooks for blues, country, and gospel lyrics has always been widespread. We haven't had to wade over Jordan for a long time—all kinds of modern conveyances are ready to take us to the promised land. An atomic bomb is just another kind of fiery chariot, swingin' low, isn't it?
The First Question On This Subject
Do you have any idea what compels people to be the first to reply to a bulletin board or blog post with "First!" or "Firsties" (or other variations?)
When did this begin, and why do we find it so annoying?
Steve
Tasha Robinson was the first to respond to this post:
I can't tell you where it started, Steve, though I suspect it was some busy, busy comment board like Fark or Slashdot, where anyone who actually arrives at a thread in time to be the first person to post feels as awed and giddy as Neil Armstrong putting that initial footprint on the moon. I've seen it on any number of other sites, too—including sites with a lot less comment traffic, where "Firsties!" might as well be "Onlysies!"
Why do people do it? People do things for a lot of reasons, and I'm betting even the people who do it here don't all have the same motives, if they have any coherent motives at all. Here are a couple of the ones I'm betting are most prevalent:
a) It's about marking territory, like a dog. Any scene belongs to the first person who can get there.
b) It's about showing off what a dedicated Club fan you are. Only the people refreshing their web pages endlessly and mechanically actually get to be first to new content. (Alternately, it's about crowing over a little bit of random, fortuitous luck.)
c) It's about showing off. One of the great motivators in life is the need to stand out from the crowd by accomplishing something no one else can do, and there can only be one actually first post on any article. Which is beyond miniscule in the fame game, but so is writing your name on a bathroom stall, carving it on a tree, or spray-painting it on an underpass, and people constantly do all those things, too. It's just one more tiny way of saying "Hey! I exist!"
d) It's about following the crowd. Some posters report that they've seen so many firsties that they can't resist joining in on the fun, even if they hate other people's firsties. At this point, "Firsties" is like any other in-joke that comes up over and over on the boards; people throw it out there just to be joiners.
e) It's about irony. Even people who seem to think everyone else's firsties are moronic somehow seem to think their own firsties are heaped with sarcastic "See, isn't this stupid?" commentary.
f) It's just plain about pissing other people off. Remember, to your basic troll, even angry, ranting attention is better than the usual no attention. Maybe the ranting attention is better, because it shows you've gotten under someone's skin in a meaningful way.
"Why do we find it so annoying?" Well, I have no idea why you find it annoying, or why anyone else you're putting under your "we" blanket would find it annoying. Again, different people no doubt find it annoying for different reasons: because it's repetitive, because it's childish, because they didn't get there first to do it themselves, dammit. And some people don't find it annoying at all—even some of our staffers think it's cute, or at worst, meaningless and harmless. So don't assume firsties irk everyone.
Personally, I find them annoying because I mostly read the comment boards in hope of some sort of cogent discussion, and "OMG, first!" is about as far from that as you can get. Firsties tend to drag down the whole tone of a comment thread, by guaranteeing that the initial 20 posts on any piece of content here will be people arguing and insulting each other for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the content itself. It's vaguely insulting to spend hours reading or watching something and attempting to craft a meaningful analysis, and then having any resultant discussion derailed by people who clearly haven't read the content and don't care about it at all—kind of like pouring your heart into carefully crafting a sculpture, and then finding out that the locals only care about whether it's fun to climb on. It seems to me like the "Firsts!" and the subsequent firstie-hater vs. firstie-lover wars that always break out discourage the commentators who might have something substantiative to say. But that's just me.
And yes, we're working on a new comments system, one that will let logged-in users help mod out the trolls and the imbeciles and everyone else they hate. At which point maybe we'll finally find out for sure whether a majority of people really do hate firsties enough to mod them down into invisibility, or if the firsties army is bigger and stronger and more determined than we think.
Next week: Stumped! returns. Send your questions to asktheavclub@theonion.com.
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