"Pope Francis releases prog-rock album" could only be a better punchline if the genre was swapped out with "chillwave," and nonetheless, here we are. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 78-year-old Argentine, is the 266th man to hold papal office; he is the first to directly condemn climate change and revive liberation theology and to have worked as a bouncer, and although past popes have released classical/liturgical compilations, Pope Francis is the first to go straight pop.
Pope John Paul II, for context, released three albums during his papacy. They consisted of classical sacred music, and none inspired fond remembrances by the executives who released them (the Pope's records "shipped gold and returned platinum", one industry insider recently quipped to Billboard). Pope Francis might be different: He is our meme Pope, the Pope of Kim Kardashian tweets and re-Vines. Just this week, he found himself the subject of a #Popebars hashtag that imagined him spitting raps by Eminem and Drake. The Holy See's populace is growing increasingly unruly, and it's a trip to hear this confusion worked out musically in the age of Spotify.
With collaborators that include a folk-swami, a theatrical lyricist, and a former member of Italian prog-rock band Le Orme, Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. It’s like you drank a bunch of cough syrup and went to Live Aid: The Vatican. Every track features a Barnes & Noble-CD-section pop instrumental, sometimes with additional choral or solo vocals, building momentum that halts when Pope Francis starts speaking. The opening track is "Annuntio Vobis Gaudium Magnum!", the Latin for "we announce with great joy." Following that phrase is an assumed "habemus papem," or "we have a new pope," and the excerpted speech is Pope Francis’s first one after being appointed. It’s a powerful moment to commemorate, only slightly compromised by the fact that the instrumental sounds like a holiday-themed IMAX.
The song titles in Wake Up!, exclamation-point-loaded and decidedly outré, are in many ways better than the songs themselves. There’s a climate change track ("Cuidar El Planeta"); another track whose title translates to "The Church Cannot Be an NGO!", and one in Spanish that translates to "Faith is whole, does not liquefy!" There’s a track in Italian whose title translates to "Do not steal the hope!", and a closing track in Portuguese whose title translates to "Do what he tells you!" Only the title track (in full, "Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!") bears a name in English.
On it, Pope Francis speaks to a crowd after wheeling streaks of electric guitar, a cinematic horn section, the track gridded loosely by a high-hat. "It is a duty to be vigilant," he intones, to a crowd in South Korea, as a light revue piano tinkles in the background. "To not allow the pressures, the temptations and the sins to dull our sensibility of the beauty of holiness." But, if this album is the indication, beauty isn't exactly holiness's sound.
But there is something beautiful about this album; it exists. Pope Francis, already a more human papal figure than any in recent history, is humanized even further by this album's total musical awkwardness, its bewildering genre, its pluralistic good heart. The album's producer Don Giulio Neroni—who produced Pope John Paul II's 1999 choral album; the Vatican is on a relaxed release schedule, but a release schedule all the same—told Rolling Stone that he "tried to be strongly faithful to the pastoral and personality of Pope Francis: the Pope of dialogue, open doors, hospitality." He succeeded. Chill Pope, the leader of 1.2 billion people, urges you to accept this weird-ass album as your spiritual Genesis, your graceless way of saying Yes.
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