“Holding Onto You” by Jonezetta, Friday, April 23, 2021

 

Cruel to Be Young was one of my college albums. I wrote a bit about the two Jonezetta albums back in January.  Rather than being an '80s/Killers sounding album, the band went '70s/laid back, hippy sounding music. According to Randy Torres episode of Labeled, the inspiration behind this album was The Shins, which was another college favorite of mine. While Aaron Sprinkle and Randy Torres may have had a great time making this record, it may have been the demise of Jonezetta as fans were expecting something catchy and dancy. Interestingly my college friends liked this album, but not their debut, but my hometown friends, loved Popularity and couldn't get into Cruel to Be Young. Jonezetta's follow up album reminds me of my youth--being 21 years old at its release, and how cruel it was to be a young Seventh-day Adventist.

ALL THE DIFFERENT REASONS WHY YOU SLEEP ALONE. I’ve railed on purity culture so much without giving any person anecdotes. I speak from experience when I speak about how dangerous the teaching is. The opening line of this song when I heard it back in 2008 made me think about “all the different reasons why [I slept] alone. I was 21, in a Christian college, and trying to take my faith very seriously. I was pretty introverted and didn’t know a lot of people. I had insecurities about being a transfer student, about not being Adventist or too Adventist. I found myself studying in a major that was about 70% women. I saw my friends dating, and I thought I wanted that too. But every time I asked a girl out...it was like she would say that i was more like a friend. Or we would go out and the chemistry was nonexistent. I imagined myself 30 with a beautiful wife and 2.5 kids, but i never tell you HOW I got there. How we would have “Christian dated” and fulfilled God’s plan for our lives. The closer I got to it, the more frightening it seemed. The solution until 2014 was keep faithful and wait for God to keep working on my heart.

EVERYONE IS CATCHING ON, I'M BEARLY HANGING ON. Purity culture tells us to examine our hearts and look for the broken pieces within ourselves. If we find those broken pieces, that is obviously the flaw. For so long I blamed my loneliness on those broken pieces. I would hear teaching, like “if you aren’t meeting the right person, take time to work on your relationship with God. Then he will send the right person.” How many times I tried that. It only led to bitterness. At those times I could lay my broken pieces on my dorm room bunkbed. There was the trauma of my parents marriage. The yelling, the coldness, the being away for weeks on end, the toxic bickering. Then there was the fact that all the girls God had in mind were not attractive to me, and the ones that were were out of my league. There was the fact that I would be in serious debt for ten years after graduating college. But of course there was the fact that I had been ruining God’s plan for my life with pornography. I had perverted my taste, I thought. Then there was the one piece I was afraid to admit. Ultimately, I believed, I was in control of my destiny--follow God's plan for my life or follow my own desires. The problem with "God's plan" (as interpreted by Evangelical, True Love Waits, Adventist, add any flavor to the mix) was that it made no account for sexual urges. So you've got young men either 1) getting married far too early or 2) living in constant shame, barely hanging on. Barely hanging on.

Read “Holding Onto You” by Jonezetta on Genius