Fight With Tools 1 comments

By Joel Hartse

My first post for Good Letters celebrated music of consolation—the kind of bittersweet, melancholy songs one sometimes needs to hear just to get through the day—but there are times when what we need is just the opposite: music that seems to spin webs of pure energy, that makes you want to get up out of your chair and do something, anything.

Not long ago I heard a band that does this, though I’m a little ashamed to admit I like them, because they are the kind of band whose fan base is mostly naïvely idealistic neo-hippie college students. (The kind I was not terribly long ago.)

The group is Flobots, from Denver, Colorado, and when I first heard them on a tip from a music journalist friend, I was hooked. Hip-hop with a viola? Why not? I liked the way the song “Handlebars” (their popular first single from the album Fight With Tools) was angry and energetic, but it didn’t attack the obvious targets; it wasn’t angry at me for being who I was, it wasn’t angry at “conservatives” or any certain kind of “bad guy.” It was just pissed at the fact that humanity is in a desperate situation and we have within us the sheer will and ability to do nearly any possible thing in the world, from learning all the words to a Mexican folk song to destroying entire peoples with penstrokes and bomb blasts.

“Handlebars” is about human potential for good and evil, and everyone is implicated. Plus, it rocks.

It turns out Flobots were becoming quite popular at the moment I discovered them (hey, I don’t live in the US, how was I to know I was starting to like a band that had a #1 rock single?), but even more interesting, I discovered that throughout their record, Jesus hovers nearby. The band’s slightly self-important (what great lead singer isn’t?) MC, Johnny 5, describes himself as “more of a Christian than a communist” in his online bio, and references to Jesus keep creeping into what would otherwise play like Rage Against the Machine tracks.

A song about social change that throws in lines like “a freedom fighter bleeding on a cross for you.” A track about a white antiracist’s actions during the civil rights movement says “all are precious in the path of Christ.” A song that starts off as a goofy party jam and ends up name-checking Mumia, Peltier, and legalizing weed places the band’s ethic “between Jesus and Huey P. Newton.”

I don’t know if anyone in Flobots has “a personal relationship with Jesus,” and I can’t tell you that they are doing more work for the kingdom of God than people I have met who work in housing projects and third-world countries, because rocking a mic is something different from providing a house for an abandoned child.

But every once in a while a new breed of rock band arises, one that defies statistical probability: a band that espouses blatantly Christian ideas (I don’t mean Christian like “Butterfly Kisses,” where God wants everyone to have a nice family—I mean stuff like “Jesus is the son of God and the savior of humanity, and we should try to be like Him and give everything to the poor” kind of ideas) while retaining a sense of dangerous beauty.

The Flobots record feels amateurish sometimes, in its simplicity and zeal, but now Fight with Tools might be our last chance to see this band in its natural habitat, before they’re chewed up and spit out by the music industry machine. Right now, this is a band that is fired up, and right now someplace they are waking up a fifteen year-old kid whose parents make her go to church every week, waking her up to the idea that another world is possible and that religion is not only a tool to get her to stay in school or steer clear of boys until she’s older.

There are tools, a band like Flobots reminds us, of faith, hope, love, and justice, tools with which we are equipped to fight the god-damned darkness that too often seems to prevail in this world.