"A Boy Brushed Red Living in Black and White" by Underoath, Friday, July 29, 2022
CAN YOU FEEL YOUR HEARTBEAT RACING? I've written a lot about Underoath, mostly about who they are now and how everything they are doing now is a reaction to who and what they've done. They're Only Chasing Safety is an album about six Christian young men, straight out of youth group, going into ministry--out into the world--without actually living in it. While some of the edginess of the record very well may have come from lived experience, the immaturity in the lyrics on their fourth album seem to come when they superimpose a Christian message on the issues that flood the record. While lead singer Spencer Chamberlain has said that Underoath actually never wrote Christian songs except for the final track "Some Will Seek Forgiveness, Others Escape,"from listening as the other bandmates recalled their experience in Underoath, the band's culture and lyrics align with the 'youth group' culture of the era. Some examples of this youth group culture includes an outward display of piety on Warped Tour, members of Underoath leading worship, drawing other bands to attend. And then there was the accountability--a Christian term for checking in on fellow Christians, often based on a mutual agreement, to keep other Christians from backsliding, or deviating from the path prescribed by one's own understanding of the Bible. Accountability worked for a while, until the band came to often violent realizations that each member had vastly different beliefs. But that's getting ahead of the story.
I NEVER THOUGHT WE'D MAKE IT OUT ALIVE. The second song on They're Only Chasing Safety, "A Boy Brushed Red Living in Black and White" became one of Underoath's biggest songs, despite the fact that 1) they refused to play it in concert for many years and 2) they refused to make a radio edit to reduce the screaming that could have marketed the song to mainstream radio. The song deals with a sexual relationship that is unhealthy for both the speaker and the girl the speaker is sleeping with. It is clear that the unhealthiness of the sexual relationship in this song, though, comes from a deeply rooted belief in purity culture, or the idea that sex outside the confines of marriage is wrong in every case. One management decision that the band did acquiesce to was change the lyric in the bridge. Timothy McTague and Aaron Gillespie talked on the It's All Over Podcast (formerly BadChristian) about how Tooth & Nail Records' A&R manager Chad Johnson strongly suggested changing the lyric from "a sucker for that whore" to "a sucker for that," the pronoun that referring to a lifestyle of promiscuity rather than a particular person, especially because the song was supposedly written about a real person. The band has gone on to sing the song both ways in concert. But I think Johnson was right to encourage the band to cut the word. From the context of the song, it doesn't seem that the girl is doing anything worse than the boy. While 40-something Underoath bandmates certainly will have a different view about sex today--no, sex isn't going to kill you--, too often, both in and out of Christian culture, men make unfair comments on women's sex drive. She wants it too much, she's a whore; not enough, she's a prude. She's either a temptress or the future mother of your children, and inadvertently, "A Boy Brushed Red" seems to play into that Christian narrative. Today's song is a relic of the past, but I hope for a little more responsibility with the band's platform moving forward. In other words, for a band that now chooses to employ the full English language, they should fucking use their words responsibly!
Labeled Podcast episode about They're Only Chasing Safety
Labeled Podcast episode about Underoath's Define the Great Line
Audio:
Acoustic version:
2020 Live from the Observatory:
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