‘Cathy Don’t Go’: A Religious Cult’s Lost New-Wave Gem
One other thing the digital music industry has unleashed on the world are tons of secretly Christian pop bands that crept into the rock and alternative categories. Here is one of the precursors to the current Christian Music scene…
While Owens’s roots in the Children of God—now known as the Family International, a failed bit of rebranding that didn’t improve its creepy image—are well documented, the Children’s own musical proclivities as a whole aren’t as widely known. The other day the Internet culture blog the Daily Dot posted a video that suggests the group actually used pop music as a recruiting device, a strategy that they may have picked up from the Jesus Movement members who founded the Christian rock industry. (The CoG also used something called “flirty fishing,” which consisted of women from the cult seducing strange men in order to entice them to join up.) A strange amalgam of apocalyptic Christian eschatology and power-pop-influenced new wave, “Cathy Don’t Go” is jangly, up-tempo number about a woman in peril of losing her soul to Satan by making a transaction at the grocery store using bar codes, which the singer contends are the Mark of the Beast foretold in Revelation. It’s also surprisingly catchy.
Check out the video, featuring bar-coded zombies, soldiers representing what might be the New World Order, and an impressive bit of shopping-cart choreography, after the jump.