“The Beautiful Letdown" by Switchfoot, Saturday, March 16, 2024
Jon Foreman became the liberal long-haired surfboard philosopher to millions of youth group kids in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. The San Diego-based band Switchfoot, firmly based in the West Coast faith-based music tradition, often challenged the ideas of capitalism in Christianity and the over-politicization of Christianity, while never seeming to have found all parts of the solution in organized religion. And yet, lead singer Jonathan Foreman, offered that while the “faith of our fathers” isn’t perfect, he has not found a better solution. The Beautiful Letdown was the band’s thesis statement--
Foreman had been rewriting this thesis statement for three albums, and after their fourth record, he would expound upon that statement.
I WILL CARRY MY CROSS TO WHERE I DON’T BELONG. Whereas my mom could tell me every track on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors or The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, many youth group kids my age know every track on Switchfoot’s Beautiful Letdown. Five of the 12 songs from Letdown were released as singles on Christian radio stations. The title track wasn’t a radio hit and given its track position and that it is a slow song that’s not the most memorable track on the album. However, the lyrics express discontentment with a failed American dream. The song always reminded me of “Amazing Grace.” Both the John Newton-penned hymn and the Jon Foreman-penned ballad express a shift in perspective. “Lost” and “blind” become “found” and sighted. The “Beautiful Letdown” is about realizing that all the world claimed to offer is not as good as it was promised, allowing the speaker to realize: “I don’t belong here.”
EASY LIVING. Foreman is iconoclastic to the American religion of capitalism. Switchfoot’s earlier albums were influenced by punk--a then trio of surf rockers. Adding a fourth member to the band, keyboardist Jerome Fontamillas, and signing to a major label arguably made them less punk-rock and much more refined in sound. But socially, Foreman keeps the punk rock lyrics, waging war against capitalism. Today, the message to the Christian right might be a spicy jalapeno to choke on, but the occasional Switchfoot song between Newsboys worship track and Chris Tomlin didn’t make liberal voices on Christian radio too exorbitant. And after all, everyone is the agonist in their own story, so unlike the lyrics of “Ammunition,” passive Switchfoot listeners wouldn’t necessarily feel that “we’re the issue.” But for some of us who listened, twenty years later, thinking back “when the world was younger,” the systems we were born into--Christian-centered capitalistic nationalism, often white and heteronormative--gave us an identity and a goal. We, too, Switchfoot listeners have discovered that the proprietors of this belief were corralling us into a future that was just as broken as the ‘90s/ ‘00s get first-world rich American dream. We all must carry our crosses to a place where we don’t belong.
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