Culture

Like a method actor, Waits immersed himself in booze and cigarettes and slouched like a lifelong alcoholic. He told author David McGee, “I was sick through that whole period. It started to wear on me, all the touring… living in hotels, eating bad food, drinking too much. There’s a lifestyle that’s there before you arrive and you’re introduced to it. It’s unavoidable.”

Waits’ newfound drinking buddies included author Charles Bukowski and fellow singer Chuck E. Weiss (inspiration for Rickie Lee Jones’ “Chuck E.’s in Love”). While acting in the film Paradise Alley (1978), Waits met screenwriter Kathleen Brennan. The two fell in love and married in 1980. Brennan encouraged Waits to ditch his poet lounge singer act and embrace a more experimental, avant-garde approach. The couple wrote songs together and left Los Angeles for Sonoma County where they had three children.

Brennan inspired Waits to join AA and he became sober in 1992. Waits’ famously said, “One is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own. At a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That’s one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober, they’re afraid to find out it was the liquor talking all along.”

Fortunately, the quality of Waits’ music improved with sobriety. His voice became raspier as well. When music critic Daniel Durchholz told Waits his voice sounded like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon and then taken outside and run over with a car, Waits responded, “flattery will get you nowhere with me.”

From a theological perspective, Lamar’s approach is compelling but deeply unsettling. He affirms biblical themes of sin and divine justice paired with moral responsibility, concepts that clearly align with traditional Christian doctrine. Yet he simultaneously embraces aspects of liberation theology, condemning systemic injustice and calling for accountability from both religious and political leaders. He is, in a sense, both the prophet and the skeptic, the confessor and the judge.

Perhaps the most significant theological tension in Lamar’s work lies not in his invocation of suffering, but in the nature of that suffering. The biblical category of the “suffering servant,” most explicitly articulated in Isaiah 52–53, is profoundly substitutionary. The servant suffers for others, bearing their iniquities and accomplishing their reconciliation with God. “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). This distinction is the theological axis upon which Christianity turns.

The central question remains: Does Lamar’s vision of justice and mercy align with a biblical perspective, particularly from an Old Testament standpoint? The Hebrew Scriptures depict justice (mishpat) as more than a reaction to wrongdoing. It is, fundamentally, the establishment of righteousness in society (Isaiah 1:17, Micah 6:8). Mercy (hesed), often paired with justice, is an active covenantal love that calls for repentance and restoration within a community (Exodus 34:6-7). The Old Testament refuses to separate justice from divine holiness; rather, it demands that righteousness be upheld while mercy is extended within the bounds of God’s covenant.

Lamar echoes the prophetic tradition in calling for justice but often lacks the full biblical view of divine holiness that frames it. The prophets condemned oppression (Amos 5:24) but always tied justice to a return to God’s law and not systemic reform. His vision, while powerful, sometimes veers toward a justice divorced from divine standards, making it susceptible to cultural reinterpretation. Likewise, his pleas for mercy often emphasize human struggle over divine grace, missing the foundational biblical truth that true mercy flows from God’s character rather than human effort (Psalm 103:8-12). While he critiques corruption and personal sin, his solutions lean toward self-actualization and personal throes rather than the transformative work of Christ.

By collapsing the distance between personal suffering and salvific suffering, Lamar’s vision risks conflating empathy with atonement. The result is a theology in which awareness substitutes for redemption, and articulation becomes a stand-in for transformation. The cross, in this framework, becomes more of a symbol of shared human pain.

The popularity of home taping exploded in 1979, with the introduction of the Sony Walkman. At last, you could listen to what you wanted when you were on the move.

The music industry wasn’t pleased with this development, blaming it for a pronounced drop in the sales of vinyl records. The British Phonographic Institute, a trade association in London, mounted a campaign with a reproachful slogan: “Home taping is killing music. And it’s illegal.” In the United States, music executives pressed lawmakers to place a fee on blank cassettes and home recording equipment. George David Weiss, the president of the Songwriters Guild, likened home taping to theft.

None of it stopped youthful Gen X-ers from turning themselves into amateur curators of sound. While this new pastime gave them the chance to to hear their favorite songs in the order of their choosing, it served other purposes, too. “I am what I play,” David Bowie sang on the 1979 song “D.J.,” and the living-room D.J.s of the early 1980s used the medium of the mix tape to claim their identities, introduce themselves to others, flex their musical knowledge, telegraph messages and even flirt.

Forty years after I started making and exchanging mix tapes, I can still remember which friend introduced me to which artist. Mix tapes had a way of casting an indelible imprint on our musical taste, fashion sense — even our worldview.