Longtime readers may recall that I wrote about Mike Warnke a few years back—a post that has, inexplicably, become our leading traffic generator over the past month. But as large as Warnke loomed in my early adolescence, another Christian entertainer loomed larger: the man known as Carman. Carman remains to this day a CCM juggernaut and has not, as far as I know, suffered any Warnke-style backlash, probably thanks to the fact that he never pretended to be a Satanist high priest. But, although I can still sing every word of his big hit “The Champion” (in which Jesus dukes it out with Satan in the boxing ring and quotes Dirty Harry), I haven’t actually thought about Carman in years—that is, until Contessa came home from the thrift store with a copy of Carman Presents: Satan, Bite the Dust! A Storybook for Kids. The cover:
It seems that Satan, Bite the Dust! is an adaptation of a Carman song of the same name, but not the only one: There’s also a popular music video. I believe comparing these two adaptations of the source text will be instructive. Here’s the video:
Now, my first thought upon watching that video is that mom was right: All those fantasy novels and Buffy episodes and Star Wars movies must have warped my moral judgment, because doesn’t it seem like the demons in the saloon are kind of minding their own business, not bothering anybody, until Carman bursts in, literally shooting first and asking questions later? Actually, I’m not sure he actually asks any questions, period. Doesn’t Carman kind of come off as a jerk? I mean, nobody likes demons, sure, but all things considered, minding a saloon in some remote village is not the absolute worst thing Satan could be doing. Maybe I’m just getting a Mos Eisley/Caritas vibe from the mise en scene here that’s playing hob with my moral compass. But I remind myself: You can’t think the demons are like people just because they’re wearing clothes, drinking beer, enjoying conversation, and flirting!
Fortunately, this is one area that the book does address: on the first page of the book, we see that Carman has a warrant:
So this puts my mind at ease a bit. Obviously, the music video is a medium of compression and needs to move quickly to the drama, but a book, with which we are expected to linger, can afford to take the time to put what seems to be an almost random act of violence on Carman’s part into context, clarifying that he is not some kind of rogue demon-killer but is in fact acting on the orders of a higher power.
The book’s introductory sequence deepens and complicates the simplistic manichean logic of the video in other ways as well. For instance, it adds a preface not included in the lyrics to the song, “An evil presence filled the air as Carman rode up to the saloon,” and illustrates it thus:
The syntax of this sentence is striking; though the obvious reading would be that it describes Carman riding into a reeking, sulfurous miasma that surrounds the saloon, it could also be taken to mean that the “evil presence” fills the air is somehow caused by Carman’s approaching the saloon—that he is bringing it with him. This interpretation is made more credible by the illustration, which depicts his horse’s exhalation spilling beyond the loose panel borders and “filling” the rest of the page. Though the first reading is no doubt the accurate one, it is nonetheless significant that the text allows for the possibility of human evil, thus deepening the characterization of Carman’s cowboy and raising the metaphysical stakes of the coming confrontation.
This richness and complexity might lead one to believe that the book’s depiction of the demon of “false religion”—in the video depicted as the worst kind of orientalized pulp fiction stereotype—would be similarly multi-layered.
Clearly, one would believe wrong.
The video does have an advantage in that it is presumably not aimed at children, as the book proclaims itself to be. This means that the video can count on its viewers to understand metaphor and analogy in a way that very young children cannot. The book, however, is forced to spell out some necessary but awkward clarifications for its audience that take the reader, of any age, out of the story. Take, for instance, the delicate issue of Lawman Carman spreading Jesus’s message of love by shooting people (okay, okay, people-esque demons) with a gun. You and I understand that the gun isn’t really a gun, but kids? So the book handles it like so:
(I bet if Cormac McCarthy ever writes a children’s book, it’s going to look exactly like this.)
Well, I hope this little formal exercise on the ins and outs of adaptation has been instructive for everyone. Though I would not wish to draw sweeping conclusions from such a small sample, I think we can conclude that Carman’s people are probably hard at work on a cellphone-novel adaptation of “Lazarus, Come Forth” for the Japanese market. . . . I’ll probably buy it. I can’t promise that writing this post hasn’t totally gotten me back into Carman.
Past music video ruminations:
Some Observations on Watching Country Music Videos with the Sound Off
“Oh-for-thirty-seven”: Gorjus on “Girls in their Summer Clothes.”
Gorjus on “Return to Waterloo.”
Gorjus on “Sixty Minutes of MTV, 2002”
Oh man, I love the shout-out in panel 20 to Quickdraw McGraw’s alter-ego El Kabong, who wielded the sword of cartoon justice in the form of an acoustic guitar.
Well spotted sir! I did not know that!
I think we have talked, possibly at length, about my Carman fanhood as a young teen—culminating in see him at a large Pell City church in the late 80’s/early 90’s. I sure didn’t know he was going strong in ‘96.
I actually gotta say—I think the art in this book is of a much higher quality than I would have ever expected! Also high quality: a companion who brings this home from the thrift store!
No, I don’t think we have talked about this! But now I think we need to hear much more about it. I saw him at the MS Coliseum somewhere around 91, 92.
This is a fabulous find. I’d say it is historic, but, you failed to give us a publication date. Does it fall somewhere in the era of Chick tracts? I’d love to hear you do an analysis of those!
I only have one question, that perhaps one of the panels between 4 and 19 may have explained. Why is our demonic guitar player wearing pj’s, a nightcap, and slippers?
Satan, Bite the Dust is coming at you from the year of 1996. For thoughts on Chick tracts, you might be interested in this or this (that second one more for the cartoon than the commentary).
Wow, hilarious.