Worth and Currency*

I fear the following might not interest anyone outside my own age group. As a post I recently read on one website from a young person has it, “I never like reading about when my parents were young.”

That this one is also about different kinds of faith may give it even less appeal.

Still, as our economy has continued to show upward motion that mainly helps stock holders, and then sputters because there aren't enough new jobs, and then evens out and goes through the cycle, again helping stock holders, I feel I must write about a song I listened to back in 1972. It’s a Don McLean song called “The More You Pay, the more it’s worth.”

Today, I hear people refer to Don McLean derisively as a “one hit wonder.” They don’t know, of course. And attitudes in popular culture tend to reinforce the idea that “what you don’t know isn’t really important.”

I’ll just say that it’s not that simple with McLean. Today, certainly, he is remembered, if at all, for the songs “American Pie” and “Vincent,” the latter a ballad about Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, a song Simon of American Idol fame once referred to as “pleasing the grandmothers.” But McLean actually made four very good albums “back in the day.” Some of the songs seem a bit dogmatic now, but some still have great insight.

After American Pie and Celebrity

One of them was released after the American Pie album and included a story song about a faded celebrity, a person of “minor talents,” a former Saturday matinee singing cowboy star. Now I was one day to become an English major, and I remember wondering, “Is McLean drawing on this 'Hop-Along Cassidy' type to explain how his own popular work and the work of his peers would one day appear?” 

Deep, I know, but hey, this was the early '70s. And here was a singer-songwriter, whose song “American Pie” had left him struggling with fame and all of the hyperbolic acclaim that brings. While most today would lust after that fame, real questions must eventually come—some of the questions McLean raises in his post-American Pie songs.

Set in this collection of songs about love, nostalgia, faded celebrity, limitations (minor talents), and self-deception, one song called “The More You Pay, the more it's worth” chronicles a horse auction where a horse is practically given away. The song is harsh, with “The more you pay, the more it’s worth” repeated in the chorus. But at the end, a quiet diversion in a different chord sequence almost whispers, “And where was the boy who rode on her back, his arms holding tight around her neck?” Quietly, an after-thought raises the real question: Is payment the only determiner of worth? Where was the boy—now a young man—who could speak to another kind of worth?

After the Romance

This song is the work of a romantic sensibility, of course, and certainly very much part of the early 1970s. It audaciously questions the value system of this world, buttressed as it is (not too thoughtfully, I would imagine Don McLean would think) by money.

But what else is there for us to base our worth on? Where I live in California, cars, expensive clothing, the right neighborhood, the cool neighborhood, all speak to this, because it is very easy to be cynical and value only those people who can help you further your career.

I fit none of this, never have and probably never will, even as the cultural determiners of worth come and go. For young people, it’s friends—I had few growing up. For adults, it's ambition, achievement--I question my “achievements,” wrung from “minor talents,” every day.

Christians argue that God also has a value system. In my twenties, I sometimes thought that Christians themselves weren’t too interested in those values, or perhaps didn't seem to understand them. It seemed--sometimes it still seems--that grace is so free that we can't possibly understand its value. It can't possibly be real or deserved or can't possibly help anyone. So some Christians I know run around doing certain things, as though they are going to earn something more than others have. Others--this is more like me--don't care to allow it to work. 

The main idea seems to be that God has placed our worth—everyone, from the most broken and most self-righteous and most addicted to the most deceived to the most religious—in terms of the life of His Son.

“The more you pay, the more it’s worth.” Whatever our own innate sense of economy or value might be measured by—usually today it’s a matter of money or celebrity, or now, the new measurement, metrics—it seems there is an even deeper bottom line. I can still hear the voice of Don McLean reminding us of some lost, forsaken worth, asking, "And where was the boy...?"

*A slightly different version of this blog was previously posted in "Run the Path in 2010.