I get addicted to songs.
I wanna hear them on a loop until I get tired of it. Which is why I don’t like the radio because they overplay a song until it gets… overplayed. I want to outwear the welcome– don’t want the radio to do it for me.

Current kicks include: Multiplied by Needtobreathe; Fancy by Iggy Azalea; I Am by David Crowder; John Mayer’s cover of Beyonce’s XO. And leading the pack is “Headlights” by Eminem. Some will raise an eyebrow and ask, why would a self-respecting pastor listen to such an artist?

The answer is simple: I’m not very self-respecting. (ha-ha).

Hip-hop always resonated with me. It’s not like I grew up a troubled or grew up in the projects or anything like that. I had a very normal and loving childhood. The beats at first spoke to me then the lyrics, as I grew older. Tupac Shakur still has a big part in my playlists and when songs like “Changes” come up where he laments, although it seems heaven sent/we ain’t ready for a black president I always think, “Man, If you were still alive…”

Forgiveness is such a prickly thing. A lot of us don’t quite get the grasp of it. We think that when we forgive all the lingering feelings should be gone. But sometimes they remain. Sometimes we confuse forgiving with forgetting. Or forgiving with condoning.

And at the center of the song “Headlights” Eminem is the idea of forgiveness. Him working out his issues with his mother; regretting airing a lot of dirty laundry in public regarding his mom like “Cleaning Out My Closet.” He ends the song with “I’ll always love you from a far because you’re my Ma” which gets me because it goes against the sappy ending we Christians seemling always go for in our “safe” and “pure” brand of media (the ever happy ending because our confession of faith solves ALL problems). He’s working through his issues with his mother and he loves her and he’s over a lot of the anger and resentment he held on, but perhaps too much pain and still too real to bring himself to go back to the way things were decades ago.

Or, I’m just reading way too much into the lyrics of a pop song.

But here’s the music video for this song that was directed by Spike Lee. And know that it has a lot of language that’ll make you frown with disapproval.