Diving into the spirit of ’70s and ’80s music

For all of you ’70s and ’80s hipsters, I’ve got one for you. In his new book, acclaimed author Paul Elie (“The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025, 464 pages) takes a deep dive into the music and arts scene of the 1970s and 80s.

If you were coming of age during those years, or even if you weren’t, you’ll learn a lot from Elie’s knowledge of that era. 

“The Last Supper” focuses on artists like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, U2, The Neville Brothers, REM, Philip Glass, David Bowie, Daniel Berrigan, Martin Scorsese, The Talking Heads and artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison and Seamus Heaney, to name but a few. “The Last Supper” (yes, that’s a deliberate reference to the biblical last supper of Christ) focuses on their lives and music and dovetails that with their spiritual heritage, allegiances and beliefs. You’ll be transported back to that time, that music, those artists and authors and their more transcendental aspects in a kind of illuminating déja vu.

Not only will you get song lyrics and live concert “footage,” but also what goes on in the lives of such icons as Bono, Cohen and Warhol. As Elie writes in his prologue: “At its strongest, the secret chord that resounds in the arts of the 1980s is akin to the crypto-religious theater of voices — and the stories of the work and the people who made it trace a kind of secret history.”

So, off we go into the wild blue yonder at the end of the 20th century following in the footsteps of important artists, some of whom are still in vogue today. During a time of the Moral Majority, televangelists and the AIDS epidemic, along with a time of some of the most salient political and cultural clashes of our day, artists such as Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen and Sinead O’Connor emerge as leaders and activist voices for the times, not to mention books, like Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” or films like Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Elie uses the term crypto-religious, meaning “art that incorporates religious words and images and motifs, but expresses something other than conventional belief. As you see it, hear it, read it, listen to it, you wind up reflecting on your own beliefs.”

Some of the most fascinating sections of the book are lengthy introspections into the lives of artists like Cohen, where we get biographic detail on both his alternative semi-vagrant and monastic lifestyle and to his eventual globally celebrated concert tours and acclaim. “In ‘Hallelujah’ Cohen creates a Whitmanesque cry of a man in his fullness. In it he goes to the outer rim of transcendence where devotion and desire meet and consort together,’” Elie writes. Then he goes on to dive even deeper into the religious implications, saying “[Cohen] sees classical mythology, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Buddhist precepts as all of a piece — as a many-roomed house of the spirits.” Elie makes such comparisons for each of his subjects in this book, giving us information that we may or may not want to know, but that conforms to and confirms the existence of spiritual presence in their work and in the arts in general.

I found that this book is not only an education, it is also a revelation into the lives and creative work of artists arriving in the pre-21st century world. It is fun. If you were a fan of FM radio and a concert-goer during these years, you might find yourself doing a mental dance as you read this book, as Elie rips apart the lyrics of hit songs to give us their origins and implications.

“I will speak no more/I shall abide until/I am spoken for/If it be your will,” are words Cohen recites in the song “If It Be Your Will,” a song that reflects his “belief in songwriting as a sacred calling, and the faith that the singer is a figure bidden to give voice to the song despite the limitations of his particular voice.” Or in Aaron Neville’s song where he sings “Lovely lady dressed in blue/Teach me how to pray/If God was just your little boy/then you know the way.” There are many more similar examples of this liaison of language and crypto-religious artistic atmosphere in “The Last Supper.” And let’s not forget Bob Dylans, religious conversion during this time produced albums such as “Saved” and “Shot of Love” with songs like “Saved” and “In the Garden” that were overtly religious and “trumpeted the gospel message,” which ultimately resulted in the breakup of his band and with Dylan defensively replying that “these new songs weren’t about religion, they were about Jesus, just Jesus.” 

Toward the end of the book, we get references and stories about Madonna and Prince at the time of the breakup of the Soviet empire. We also get discussion on Bruce Chatwin’s book, “The Songlines,” about the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and also details on the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, front and center in portraying “the carnal aspects of Christianity that were frankly and vividly being embodied.” And not to forget the theatrical arts and Tony Kushner’s musical, “Angels in America,” became a big box-office hit predicting a hopeful future with the lines, “Fifteen years til the third millennium. Maybe Christ will come again.” 

(Thomas Rain Crowe is the author of more than 30 books and is a recording artist who is the lyricist and frontman for the poetry and music band, The Boatrockers. newnativepress@hotmail.com.)