Traitor’s album has a natural rhythmic progression, like a good novel. It flows into where it needs to be with every song — emotionally, physically and spiritually.
Having spoken of forests; death; god; Greek mythological concepts; the search for knowledge; soul seeking; yearning; pain and the journey of life all in the first two opening songs of the album — Traitor enters a new chapter in his book by beginning to bring to life specific figures in his consciousness. And with that comes ‘Hosanna’.
Hosanna is a term ‘ used in worship to express praise, joy, and love for God, especially in the Christian and Jewish religions’ and to express ‘an exclamation, originally an appeal to God for deliverance, used in praise of God or Christ.’
To take this term literally would suggest adoration for a higher power, a need to be closer to it, a desire to drift into the depths of its eternal, spiritual bed.
Love of God and romantic love are intrinsically similar, and I do think it’s important to note that this song — and the entire album — is clearly about Traitor’s admission of powerlessness in the face of love. Nostalgia for a Wound is his parable of the struggle, the passion and the yearning for connection that come with love — and of course the inevitable difficulties and trials (a word I have used before in this series of reviews). Falling in love is like a worship, a type of deliverance from evil. And with that come pangs and torture. One that we can all attest to, whether we have endured and graced a long term romantic relationship or not. With a person, an idea, a muse of some sort — artistic, musical or anything of the like. For some this may even be with food, it was like a relationship to God, to Hosanna — because we are and will always be questioning our faith with it, our commitment and joy.
Traitor’s use of terminology and devotion to love remind me of classic reggae tunes. In his earnest exclamation of connection and love, his songs are reminiscent of earlier Rocksteady love songs. ‘I’m Still Waiting’ and ‘Sunday Morning’ by Bob Marley and the Wailers come to mind (the latter of which is sung by Bunny Wailer). Both these songs are some of my all time favourite pieces of music. They are inspired by Gospel Music, hence their devotional essence and their religiosity and metaphysical embodiment of eternal love and desire. A slave to love you might say. The lyric in Hosanna “only you can shame me” suggests a deep existential reliance. I am so enthralled by your presence and impact on me and my being that one utterance of shame would purely bring me to a point of complete despair. From the strongest person in a room, to the man standing on the edge of the road, it’s porous broiling ground crumbling under his feet. I think too, that this idea suggests that we are owned by our Hosanna, a sacred bond, and so only Hosanna can shame us, only it and our love is allowed to shame us. By this take, we see a positive understanding develop, where malignant shame — a concept particularly present today, could be provided with a sense of detachment, entwined with an assessment of one’s relationship to self and reparenting in love through our Hosanna, displacing the reliance on external voices of shame that could articulate our inner critical voice of shame.
Traitor unfortunately is not actually a reggae artist and really musically nothing like it, though some of his themes do echo the tropes of reggae. Traitor is a sort of nondescript genre artist, at once a noughties American folk rock singer as much as he is a post-hip hop emo pop rapper — the latter of which needs mentioning given the use of beat patterns verging on hip hop, with the aforementioned tinges of pop and devotional faux-real eclecticism. Perhaps this is what makes ‘Hosanna’ and others like it on the album so unique. it really has no straightforward place in today’s musical landscape— in that sense it fails to meet a prescribed understanding of music, which is where its power lies.
Much the same as ‘Eurydice’, ‘Hosanna’ begins with a beautiful progressive beat and acoustics with a backing vocal of hymn-like sounds to support its own engorged centre, a powerful and pop star sex icon feel, his words and delivery are like a lure to the gods and the figure in the emerald fields he verdantly orates. Listening to this song, it is beyond me that this level of talent and passion goes mostly unnoticed in today’s decrepit and artistic landscape, and speaks to me of the parables of the many voices of a generation lost behind the veil of vapid, meaningless modernity.
Music today, all art might I say, existing in the mainstream is cut from styrofoam, easily transportable, easily constructed, unchallenged and disposable. It’s no wonder the ancient peoples created monolithic structures in almost permanent fixtures of stone, too deeply significant for contemporary society to ever grasp their true meaning and importance.
Which brings me again to the cruciality of a song like Hosanna, reserved only for the very lucky listener, blessed by its serenading bliss and aural and sonic pleasantries, its outro ending this chapter with true sincerity and resolution, leading us, gracefully, to the next.
