The publisher offers this one sentence description of Mark Anderson's memoir Jesus Sound Explosion: "A preacher's kid looks back on a childhood bounded by Godspell and the Moral Majority." While that is an accurate and catchy sentence, it is difficult to unpack exactly what it means. Explosion is not really a simple chronological narrative about the author's childhood but neither is it simply an examination of the cultural and spiritual issues he wrestled with growing up. The story combines Anderson's memories and emotional reflections to create a sort of commentary on a unique subculture of American life.
I won't try to outline the basic story because it isn't very complicated. It simply follows Anderson's life from childhood and the teenage years to college and eventually adulthood and marriage. The form is largely chronological but its structure is more snapshot and vignette then linear history. The focus is on the emotional and cultural rather than the historical.
In its basic form Explosion is about the struggle to come to terms with the values and ideas your parents hand down to you - especially when they clash with your own developing feelings and beliefs. In this way it is a universal story about becoming your own person within a family and a community. The tension comes from the interaction of two unique cultures that impacted Anderson's life: evangelical Christianity and rock music.
From the very beginning Anderson portrays this tension as a clash between conformity and fundamentalism on one hand and exploration and open-mindedness on the other. Mark feels the pressure of the close knit church community; the pressure to conform to the spiritual and social values preached to him in church and at home. But as he grows older he also feels the pressure of his peers and of the larger world. He wants to listen to popular music, he becomes interested in girls, he wants to be like everyone else. As a teenager this means rock music, parties, alcohol, and sex. His parents are a sort of pivot point: evangelical but liberal, concerned about the impact of culture but unwilling to enforce strict rules, not interested in "jazzy music" but not paranoid about it either. They are at the center of a dichotomy Anderson highlights between those who are "of the world" and those who are not.
Article comments
1 - kevin
Good review overall, though I'd point out that the lack of a conclusion really summarizes where Mark appears to be at. He's embraced a complex and confusing faith that doesn't give him a lot of solid ground. He believes in God's unconditional love, but he's not sure about much else. So when it comes to giving a lesson to walk away with, there's not much Mark can give.
While that doesn't make for a great ending of a book, it's at least consistent.