I: Introduction

Aqualung is a 1971 album by Jethro Tull, their fourth. It was their first album to have John Evan (keyboards) as a full-time member, and their first with Jeffrey Hammond (bass–billed jokingly as “Hammond-Hammond” at the time); incidentally, the new bassist had already been referred to in a number of Jethro Tull songs: “A Song for Jeffrey,” “Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square,” “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey, and Me,” and even “Inside” (i.e., in the line, “Old Jeffrey makes three.”). Aqualung would also be the last album with Clive Bunker on drums; when he was replaced by Barriemore Barlow, band leader Ian Anderson (vocals, flute, acoustic guitar, etc.) would be the only remaining original member of the band as of Thick as a Brick.

Aqualung was a great success for Jethro Tull, with four classic songs: the title track, “Cross-Eyed Mary,” “Hymn 43,” and “Locomotive Breath.” The band would go on to become a major radio and touring act in the 1970s. Aqualung is Jethro Tull’s best-selling album, having sold more than seven million units worldwide, being generally well-received critically, and being included on several music magazine best-of lists.

Though it’s been understood by many to be “an antichurch/pro-God concept album” (George-Warren/Romanowski/Pareles, page 495), the band has consistently denied that Aqualung was ever intended to be a concept album, and that only a few songs share common themes. I plan, however, to show that certain themes presented in the lyrics–homelessness/destitution, sin/perversity, prostitution/being of the working class/Lumpenproletariat, etc. on Side One (those down low), and religious authoritarianism and of the powerful on Side Two (those up high)–are more consistent than that.

There is indeed a dialectical relationship here between both sides of the album, fittingly subtitled Aqualung and My God. The “least of [Christ’s] brethren” would represent God far better than the Pharisee-like Church authorities scorned on Side Two. Christ came for the sick, and not the healthy, after all, hence His sitting and eating with sinners, as well as His forgiveness of Mary Magdalene, the “Cross-Eyed Mary” of His time. He never condoned her sin, nor that of the adulteress, nor of the tax collectors; with His mercy, He would have them “go, and sin no more.” (John 8:11)

Such is the real meaning to be found in Aqualung. We’ll find God in the sick and the oppressed, not in the powerful and holier-than-thou. When we look at the cover of the album and see the filthy homeless man on it, his long hair and beard may remind us of Christ’s. Consider also the text on the back cover of the album, which reverses the Creation by having Man create God, and later form Aqualung out of the dust of the ground, Man’s Adam, who in being cast out of Eden is thus made homeless.

So, in helping these least of His brethren, one is helping Christ, which thus equates Aqualung, “and a host of others likened unto his kind”, with Christ, and therefore in turn with God, an ideal created by Man. But Man cast all of the Aqualungs into the void, out of Eden, made homeless. Thus, Man became the God he created, that is, the stern Church authority figure to “rule over all the earth.”

Man isn’t seeing the Spirit that lives on within all men, and even in Aqualung–that creative, divine Spirit within all of us, a ruach-breath made sick from Man’s mistreatment of Aqualung. Man had better start looking for that Spirit, though, if he wishes to save himself and his world.

Here is a link to all of the lyrics on the album, and here is a link to the whole album.

Side One–Aqualung

II: Aqualung

The character of Aqualung was inspired by a number of photographs of homeless people on the Thames Embankment, taken by Anderson’s then-wife, Jennie, who co-wrote the lyric for the title track.

The song begins with a riff played by lead guitarist Martin Barre: D, G, A-sharp, C, C-sharp, C-natural. The shift from the perfect fifth (D) of the tonic key (G minor) to an augmented fourth (C-sharp) is significant, for this latter note is a tritone in relation to the tonic.

Finding the tritone dissonant, unsettling, and difficult to sing, the Church called the interval the diabolus in musica, or the “devil in music.” If we rename the augmented fourth with the enharmonic interval of the diminished fifth (or the flattened fifth), we thus can see in its descent from the perfect fifth a symbolic fall from ‘perfection’ to ‘devilishness,’ or to ‘sin.’ We will hear this descent from perfect fifth to tritone again in the main chord progression of “My God” (see below).

Speaking of sin, this is exactly what we find Aqualung doing on that park bench, looking lustfully at pretty little girls there, like a sex pervert. Though we naturally would never condone his pedophilia, his “watching as the frilly panties run,” matters will get more complicated. We look on him with disgust for his “bad intent,” for the “snot running down his nose,” and his “greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes”; yet we also pity him for his “broken luck.”

He’s “drying in the cold sun” because without a home, one is often cold even when the sun is out. When we go from the first verse to the second, Barre’s angry electric guitar riff changes to Anderson’s sad acoustic guitar strumming, a musical shift from the judgemental attitude towards Aqualung’s proclivities to compassion for “an old man wandering lonely.” Perhaps if we’d pitied, rather than shamed, him, he wouldn’t have stooped to the low of lusting after children.

Another thing to remember in connection with his pedophilia: many men in positions of religious authority have been guilty of the same thing, as well as having gotten away with it, thanks to that very religious authority (at least in the case of Aqualung, he’s only had impure thoughts that he, presumably, hasn’t [yet] acted on). Note what I said above in connection with this moral equivalence: there is a dialectical relationship between those in the lowly state on Side One and those in the exalted state on Side Two. These least of Christ’s brethren are equivalent to ‘Him’ (i.e., to the Church) in sin; they’re equivalent to the real Christ in piteousness, though.

With pain in his leg, Aqualung picks up cigarette butts, discarded ‘dog ends,’ since they’re all the penniless man has available to smoke. When he has to use a public washroom–a “bog”–he gets some of his piss on his feet, warming them, which ironically makes his soiling of them seem comfortable.

He’s alone, and the Salvation “Army’s up the road,” that is, not near him to give him aid and comfort. The Salvation Army has been known historically, by the way, for being rather selective with those to whom they want to be charitable. An interesting point to be made here is the reversal of the words “Salvation” and “army” in the two lines of the verse, which seems to represent a reversal, or inversion, of moral values: one isn’t charitable to whom one should be.

Anderson ends the verse with more sympathy for the “poor old sod,” then with the beginning of the third verse, the tempo and energy pick up the pace. He imagines the “agony” that Aqualung must have felt in the last, freezing cold winter, out there without any shelter.

The derelict’s “rattling last breaths/with deep-sea diver sounds” bring us to the meaning of the song’s title, which is a reference to the name of one of the first SCUBA devices. Aqualung’s heavy, laboured breathing, probably a result of pneumonia or emphysema from his smoking, exposure to air pollution, viruses, and bacteria, sounds like someone breathing in SCUBA gear.

This difficulty breathing in turn can be related to what I said above about the ruach (“breath,” “wind”) of God. This relation can symbolize the corruption and other problems of the Church, which make it difficult for the Spirit of God to flow effectively. More on this later.

The rest of the song’s lyric is repeats of the previous verses. That angry, judgemental first verse, with Barre’s electric guitar riff, ends the song, with the chord progression moving from the G minor tonality up a tritone to C-sharp major, D-sharp major, and F major. Evan finishes the song off with some piano arpeggios in that final chord.

III: Cross-Eyed Mary

The song begins with minor third tremolos on Anderson’s flute (What is a Jethro Tull song without the flute?), backed with Evan’s piano chords and Mellotron (strings tapes). The transition, from this instrumental opening to the rock riff and Anderson’s vocals, comes with a few trills on his flute.

The first two lines of the first verse are a reference to an old traditional English counting rhyme, “Tinker, Tailor,” which includes this line: “rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief.” Anderson’s lyric, though, reverses the poor men and other Lumpenproletariat with the “rich man,” as he did previously with the Salvation Army in “Aqualung.” Again, this restates the album’s theme of a reversal of how things normally would be.

Here, however, instead of things being reversed to become bad, they’re reversed…perhaps…to become good, with the poor coming first and the rich last, as Jesus would have had them. Only in the case of this song, the poor coming before the rich is in the form of Cross-Eyed Mary, a teenage high school prostitute who offers her services to dirty old men…if they have the money.

Being a prostitute, she is a member of the Lumpenproletariat, like Aqualung, who is referred to later on in the song. These two are the ‘low-lives’ of Side One; Anderson himself referred to her as such. With the other poor wretches of the Aqualung side of the album, they’re meant to contrast sharply (and dialectically) with the highly-placed religious authorities of the My God side.

As I said above, it’s the men who have the money who pay for her services, for “she dines in Hampstead village,” a wealthy area of London, hence her clients will be moneyed businessmen. The “jack-knife barber” who “drops her off at school” is a back-alley abortionist who illegally solves her pregnancy problems.

Also as I said above, it’s older men whom she services, not “little boys.” If only Aqualung had the money for her, since he’s got her attention as he watches her lustfully “through the railings” to the schoolyard. If he can manage to scrounge up a few pounds, though, he might get lucky with her, for “she’ll do it for a song.” With the money she gets from her rich clients, she can do charitable sexual favours for poorer men, thus making her “the Robin Hood of Highgate” (one of the most expensive suburbs of London, and the site of the St. Mary Magdalene House of Charity, for the rehabilitation of “fallen women,” or prostitutes).

So where Aqualung is the Adam, having been kicked out of Eden and into homelessness, Cross-Eyed Mary is the Eve of the album, a fallen woman. These are the sinners and the lowly who are judged by those on high, the religious authorities on Side Two…yet they’re men who really aren’t any better from a moral standpoint, if one regards such men more closely.

IV: Cheap Day Return

This short song opens with Anderson playing a brief prelude on his acoustic guitar, with Evan backing him on the organ. Anderson is singing about his sick father in hospital, hoping the nurse is taking good care of him. Thus, his father is another of the wretched, deserving of pity, one of “these least of [Christ’s] brethren.” and so he’s like God.

Also, being Anderson’s father, he can be seen to represent God the Father, who is sick because of Church corruption and lost of faith in Him. The nurse would thus represent the priesthood, who are trusted to guide us in understanding God, just as Anderson hopes the nurse will do well in nursing his old man back to health.

Yet the nurse, knowing Anderson to be a rock singer, asks him for his autograph, which to him is “What a laugh.” This hero-worship of a singer is like the idolizing of a false god, symbolically implying Church corruption, which has made God so sick in the first place. Such idolatry makes religion cheap, hence the Sunday service is on a “Cheap Day.”

V: Mother Goose

The title of this song reminds me of a quote from Clarence Darrow: “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.” Thus, the song’s title could be seen to represent the God of Church authority that is no longer believable.

The song lyric has been described as being a surreal pastiche with images of the same abstract ideas as in “Cross-Eyed Mary.” Indeed, there are schoolgirls in the song: is Mary one of them?

I suspect that, underneath the ‘surreal’ imagery, Anderson was–if only unconsciously–dealing with the loss of faith in the Church and the resulting indulgence in sin. If God is as unbelievable as the fairy tales of Mother Goose, then having “turned her loose” is a renunciation of that faith, leaving the Church authorities “screaming” at Anderson’s apostasy.

The Church and its faith can seem like a circus, or like a school, drawing the attention of “a foreign student” of Sunday school, as it were. The foreigner, knowing so little about the local faith, imagines that its ‘circus’ is full of fanciful animals–“elephants, lions, too,” like those in Noah’s Ark, when the place is really Piccadilly Circus, a not-so spectacular place, like our world, without the Biblical miracles and whatnot.

Since the Church’s teachings make it like a school, it’s fitting to hear Barre play a descant recorder and Hammond play an alto recorder, reminding us all of the instrument we as kids used to play in music class at school. Mother Goose tales tend, directly or indirectly, to teach morals (i.e., Charles Perrault‘s renderings of them), just as the Church teaches, through Christ’s parables. Anderson doesn’t want to learn all that, though, so he went “down by the bathing pond to try and catch some sun.” All those schoolgirls were there, too, and they probably didn’t know he was playing truant.

To get back to the circus-as-Church imagery, we learn of Anderson being chided by “a bearded lady” to stop “misbehaving,” or sinning. Apparently, though, a red-bearded man’s sister driving a lorry is far weirder. Could it be that the bearded lady of the Church-circus sideshow ‘freaks’ is really a man speaking for women, who are supposed to be silent in church (1 Corinthians 14:35), while a woman driving a lorry is all the more brazenly defying of traditional sex roles, since she, like Anderson, is giving up on her faith?

I suspect a sexual meaning in Anderson’s putting and having “popped ’em in their holes.” Other men seem to be doing the same, “four and twenty” of them, to be exact, like the “Four and twenty naughty boys/Baked in a pye” of the original version of the nursery rhyme, “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” (I’m sure the original rhyme meant something far less naughty than what I’m implying about the “pie,” but my concern is with Anderson’s lyric, not the original verse.) The labourers are “digging up their gold,” again, there’s an implied sexual meaning, while Anderson, as cunning and opportunistic Long John Silver, is figuring out a way to get at that treasure of girl-gold (the schoolgirls, including Cross-Eyed Mary?).

Another example of sinning is when Johnny Scarecrow stole a “jet black mac…from a snowman.” This kind of sinning, along with the lechery and truancy cited above, is what worries the Church authorities when the flock loses its faith. Such sinners might sink low, down to the depths of Aqualung, Cross-Eyed Mary, and others among the Lumpenproletariat.

VI: Wond’ring Aloud

This is an acoustic guitar ballad about a loving married couple, though there’s some implied sexual meaning…or sinning…in the lyric, too. This combination of love and sexuality in a married couple suggests the sensual love expressed in the poetry of the Song of Songs, whose male and female lovers the Church often allegorizes as the love of Christ (the bridegroom) for His Church (the bride).

That the groom and bride “are [their] own saviours,” like Christ and His Church, leads us to wonder “will the years treat [them] well,” that is, will their faith in the Church remain intact, or will they lose faith in it, and will that lack of faith lead to sinning, as we saw in “Mother Goose”?

The sinning could be in the form of unbridled passion, the kind that priests might warn newlyweds of (recall Friar Laurence‘s admonition to Romeo and Juliet to “love moderately” [II, vi, 14]). After all, “the butter runs, then she comes, spilling crumbs on the bed.” The reference to crumbs sounds a lot like crumpet in this context.

Since “it’s only the giving that makes you what you are,” we hear what sounds like a negating of the Church doctrine of salvation by grace through faith. The giving, or the act of generosity, is an example of good works, which Paul insisted could not, in and of themselves, save you (Ephesians 2: 8-9). So here again, we see an example of Aqualung‘s theme of rejecting the morality of Church authority.

VII: Up to Me

This song begins with a blues-oriented riff, at first on Anderson’s flute and acoustic guitar, in E.

The verses of this song give us a series of vignettes of the life of an ordinary, working-class man: going to the movies with a friend, leaving him in a Wimpy fast-food restaurant, getting into a drunken fight with someone (with broken glasses and beer bottles not put away), being stuck in the cold or in the rain, and what seems like a sexual encounter with a smoking (and presumably smoking hot) girl…Cross-Eyed Mary, by chance? as she’s looking up to him while having something other than a cigarette in her mouth.

As contrasted with the sins of the lower classes, we also have the excesses of the upper classes: they who have a Silver Cloud (a kind of Rolls Royce), one big enough to fit inside it the tennis club they’re members of, and the indulgence in the ephemeral fashions of the time (e.g., bell-bottoms, etc.)

One notable manipulation in the lyric is the multiple meanings given to “up to me”: “running up to me,” “that one’s up to me” (i.e., it’s my responsibility), the high social status of the rich “was up to me” (i.e., “up” in relation to my low status as a worker), and the naughty girl with yellow fingers from smoking “is looking up to me” as she smokes…something else. It’s also “up to me,” that is, an uphill battle, to scrounge up money and ask of it from others “when the copper fades away” from the pockets of “a common working man.”

And so, this is the last of the songs of the lowly: the homeless, the prostitutes, the hospitalized, the sinning apostates, the lustful lovers, and the working class. From the Aqualung Side One, we move on to the My God Side Two, and deal with those highly-placed…and see what’s wrong with them.

My God

VIII: My God

The song begins with Anderson doing an acoustic guitar solo, one very dark in mood. First, we hear octaves in A, with a few Gs thrown in, all played accelerando, before other notes come in, giving us an A minor tonality with an added ninth. Played in a fast 3/4, the solo repeats the same basic motif, but ends in an A minor chord with an added high tritone (E-flat).

After a run of single notes up the A natural minor scale, from the root up to the minor sixth (F), we go into the main riff of the song, which is the strumming of an A minor triad and an inverted B seventh chord. This involves, as I pointed out with the electric guitar riff of “Aqualung,” the perfect fifth descending to the tritone (i.e., to the major third of the B-seventh chord, a dropping from the A minor triad’s E to an E flat). And as with the album’s title track, this going down, from the perfect interval to the ‘devil’s’ interval, symbolizes a descent from grace into sin…only this time, it isn’t a lowly, homeless pervert who is falling–it’s the Church authorities who are doing so.

Jesus is in a “golden cage,” the wealth of the Catholic Church. Now, that golden cage isn’t limited to religion, for many in the Western ruling classes have used Jesus to justify their accumulation of wealth, their wars, their bigotries, their colonization, and their right-wing tendencies in general. Indeed, mankind has “made Him bend to [man’s] religion.”

Just as the lowly on the Aqualung side of the album aren’t only sinners, but are also the working class (proletariat) and those destitute and outside of society (the Lumpenproletariat), so are those on high on the My God side of the album not just the Church authorities, but the rich bourgeoisie as well.

If all one can see in God is the God of the religious and political establishment, then He is no real God at all–“He is the God of nothing.” In the next two lines of the second verse, Anderson seems to be hinting at his pantheistic leanings when he says that “the God of everything” is “inside you and me.” What’s more, if the God of nothing is He of the establishment and those in power, then the God of everything is He of the people, the working poor and the global proletariat, those least of Christ’s brethren, those equated with Him.

We should “lean upon Him gently,” that is, have Christ as a figure of comfort, love, and aid to the wretched, and not as a figure to judge others with. We shouldn’t “call on Him to save us,” that is, use Him as a crutch to limp our way to heaven and to help us save face when our sins disgrace us publicly. Salvation is supposed to be about real moral betterment, not about social status and being with ‘the right group’ or social circle.

“The bloody Church of England” would have been used as the religious justification for British imperial conquest and the “white man’s burden.” Going to “the vicarage for tea” reminds me of the line in “Aqualung” about the Salvation Army “and a cup of tea.” Instead of prioritizing the poor, the Church all too often prioritizes social gatherings; it’s all about that being in the right group, an exclusive social circle, and keeping the Aqualungs out.

Next, Barre does a blues-inflected guitar solo, then Anderson comes in with his trademark breathy flute-playing, similarly full of blues licks. After that, instead of the flute being backed by the band, we hear the “odd voices” of Hammond, sounding like a church choir…only the music doesn’t have the usual peace-inducing effect it’s supposed to have; it sounds rather eerie, suggesting how disturbingly corrupt the Church has typically been.

To get back to the lyric, we’re reminded of how the second Commandment condemns the use of images for God, or any god, for that matter; yet Christians have images of Christ all the time, including the crucifixes they wear–Jesuolatry is even acknowledged in the New Testament itself (Colossians 1:15). Does God actually get a kick out of this excessive emphasis on His Son?

Will “confessing to the endless sin,” which one all the same will continually fall into, actually lead to salvation? One will be “praying to next Thursday,” or before Good Friday (or even before the Muslim day of congregation), “to all the gods that you can count,” because far too many people out there think that only saying, “Lord! Lord!” is sufficient, as opposed to actually doing the good deeds that God wants us to do (Matthew 7:21).

The song ends with some soft flute playing…that is, not with a bang, but a whimper.

IX: Hymn 43

This song, in D, continues the criticisms of Church corruption, with its hoarding of wealth and violence to secure its ends. God on high looks down on Christ (or on His Church, anyway), as we the lowly looked up on Side One. We ask Jesus to save us from our sin instead of correcting ourselves.

Examples of that violence have been the genocide of the Native Americans to make the US into a ‘Christian nation.’ Then, Western movies in Hollywood portrayed the white man as the hero and vilified or denigrated the aboriginals.

Again, we ask Christ for forgiveness while we, “the gory glory seekers…use His name in death.” As was complained about in “My God,” we find hypocritical believers praying for forgiveness, then committing the same sins, the worst ones (killing), over and over again.

A heavy riff is heard a number of times on Barre’s guitar: these notes–D, D, D-C-A, F, G–then his pick scratches on damped strings, four groups of three scratches each, with Bunker pounding the same rhythm on the drums to emphasize it all.

Jesus is said to have been sighted in places from those as mundane as a city to those as legendary as the Mountains of the Moon, yet the bloody violence of the Church throughout history makes us doubt such miracles of His as the rolling of His stone to leave Joseph of Arimathea‘s tomb, to indicate His resurrection.

So, why is the song named “Hymn 43”? It’s an arbitrary title Anderson used to reflect how the song is just one of many ‘hymns’ or critiques of Church corruption and hypocrisy. Normally, hymns are given specific names, dealing with particular issues in a meaningful way, whereas the generic, random number of 43 shows that the issues critiqued here are generalized ones, widespread and having occurred throughout the history of the Church.

X: Slipstream

The song begins in a cheerful E major, with Anderson singing and playing his acoustic guitar. If you pay close attention to the song lyric, though, things are not all that cheerful.

“The lush separation [that] enfolds you” is your alienation, as one of the common people, not only from each other, but also from the luxurious life of the ruling class, who would separate you from themselves “and the products of wealth.” You go “on the bow wave” of the slipstream (a pun on a stream that you slip on–then “you paddle right out of the mess”–and an actual slipstream), one of the “spiritless, undying” rich, who have no souls, yet never seem to disappear from the world.

You give “God’s waiter your last dime,” leaving you penniless “as he hands you the bill”: in this we see how the Church, far from doing what it’s supposed to do–to help the poor–instead has a way of propping up the bourgeoisie (We need churches to do more than just react to homelessness, for example…we need them to help prevent it.). “You spin in the slipstream,” like so many whom the religious and political establishment have ruined and left behind, and all alone you have to solve your own problems, unaided.

Anderson’s singing and strumming are accompanied by an arrangement for strings by David Palmer (who would become a member of Jethro Tull in 1976). His arrangement is similarly cheerful…until the end, when it changes to creepy-sounding, dissonant glissandi, as one might hear in a horror movie. The effect is to tell us that the ‘cheerful, free life’ promised by capitalism and the Church is an illusion, and when we finally wake up from the dream, we find waking reality to be a nightmare.

XI: Locomotive Breath

The song begins with some bluesy/jazzy piano playing by Evan, soon to be accompanied with Barre’s bluesy guitar licks. Then the song proper begins.

The rhythm, with more electric guitar scratching, is meant to imitate the chugging sound of a train. As for the lyric, Anderson had grown worried about overpopulation, hence, our world is a “runaway grain” because “of population growth and capitalism,” as Anderson himself explained. Is the train going to crash because of overpopulation, capitalism, and the using-up of our Earth’s limited resources? In the years since he wrote this song, in which so much more population growth has undoubtedly happened, Anderson has grown much more worried.

The steam power “of the locomotive breath” can be linked thematically with Aqualung’s laboured breathing, partly a result of air pollution, coming partly from trains. As with Aqualung’s difficulty breathing, the smoky “breath” of the runaway train can represent the diseased breath of the ruach–God’s spirit–in today’s troubled world.

Indeed, there’s an almost apocalyptic quality to a song about a runaway train that “won’t slow down,” one in danger of crashing because of not only overcrowding, capitalism, and the using-up of Earth’s natural resources, but also Cold War fears of a nuclear Armageddon–a fear from back then as well as of now. The train can thus be seen to represent our imperiled planet.

“The all-time loser” would have to be Satan, since with the dying of Christ on the Cross, the Devil has lost the battle for our souls. Still, as “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4), Satan has control of the train, and he’s running it “headlong to his death,” endangering us all, too. I suspect that “Old Charlie” who “stole the handle” is also Anderson referring to the Devil, since the name can be associated with a demon, and such an interpretation is consistent with the rest of the song.

In other posts, such as this one (scroll down to VIII: Conclusion), I’ve used the metaphor of a runaway train racing to a cliff, to represent how neoliberal capitalism is driving us all to the abyss; it’s rather similar to what Anderson is singing about. I wrote of Marxist-Leninists as being the ones actually jumping off the train in time to save themselves from the inevitable crash. In “Locomotive Breath,” Anderson sings of “children jumping off at the stations, one by one.” These kids are sensible enough not to have any more kids (perhaps like millennials today?), while the Devil is “crawling down the corridor, on his hands and knees”: the Devil is like the conservatives, liberals, and moderate leftists of my analogy–they’re either staying on the train, or they’re not moving fast enough to get off in time.

Meanwhile, the Devil’s “woman and his best friend [are] in bed and having fun.” The horned cuckold doesn’t care that his woman is getting pregnant with another man’s child…because he doesn’t care about rampant population growth. After a flute solo by Anderson, we hear the final verse.

Satan “catches angels as they fall,” just as he caused the fall of the rebel angels, as well as his own fall, in his failed war with God and the good angels (Revelation 12:7-9). Thus, as he’s the all-time loser, God is the “all-time winner,” who’s “got [Satan] by the balls.”

An amusing side note ought to be made here. Since this song would be a single played on the radio, many were uncomfortable with tender ears hearing the word “balls,” so in one of the most ridiculous examples of censorship ever, the word “fun”–from the second verse, where the melody is the same–was spliced in the place of “balls,” rendering the new line as “got him by the fun,” and giving us a new, amusing euphemism for that part of the male anatomy.

Anyway, the “all-time winner” seems more accurately to be the Church rather than God, since the Devil finds Gideon‘s Bible (presumably in the hotel room where his woman and his best friend are in bed and having…balls?), and on page one it says “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28), implying that the corrupt Church is also at least partially responsible for the population boom problem. After all, “God, he stole the handle” now, rather than the Devil holding it.

XII: Wind-Up

As the last song of the album, “Wind-Up” sums up what Anderson has been saying the whole time. There’s a huge difference between blindly following the dogmas of the Church and having a genuinely spiritual relationship with God, the Divine, or whatever you would call the Ground of All Being.

With Anderson singing about having been “packed…off to school” as a kid, we’re reminded of the references to school in “Cross-Eyed Mary” and “Mother Goose.” The point is that conforming to the ways of the Church is like going to school: not merely learning the three Rs, but also being made to conform to a way of living, “how not to play the game,” or not to sin. In the other two songs, we have examples of people who played the game sinfully…Mary, and Anderson the truant/apostate.

As a child, Anderson was “groomed…for success,” and he had “their God tucked underneath [his] arm,” that is, the Bible, or the family’s idolatry of the Good Book as linked with a bourgeois wish that he grow up to make a lot of money; recall the Church’s “money games” from “Hymn 43” in this connection. “Their half-assed smiles” indicate the hypocrisy of a self-righteous, ‘loving’ bourgeois Christian family “and the book of rules.”

In prayer to God, Anderson got the reply that God is “not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays,” that is, you don’t have to wind up in church to know Him, and you don’t have to get wound up over Him there, shouting “Holy, Holy!” and “Hosannah!” Anderson doesn’t care if the Church excommunicates him for playing truant from Sunday school; as in “Mother Goose,” he didn’t want to be inside on a sunny Sunday–he instead wanted “to try and catch some sun,” not catch the Son.

Instead of conforming to Church dogma, Anderson would “rather look around [him], compose a better song, ’cause that’s the honest measure of [his] worth.” As he sang in “Wond’ring Aloud, “it’s only the giving that makes you what you are.” We’re justified to God based on the good we do, not on the faith we conform to, a conformity based more on a fear of what will happen to us after we die than on sincere piety.

XIII: Conclusion

Though the members of Jethro Tull have denied that Aqualung is a concept album, I’d say that it is unconsciously a concept album…and I’m a strong believer in the power and meaningfulness of the unconscious mind.

In any case, the issues raised on the album–homelessness, lechery over underaged girls (including those involved willy-nilly in sex work), people needing proper health care, the working poor, questioning Church authority (and the despair that often accompanies it), and apocalyptic fear from overpopulation, ecocide, and nuclear war–are more relevant than ever.

In a world where the ruling class, including evangelical Christians, rationalize an ongoing genocide, we can see how what is not being done for these least of Christ’s brethren, the Aqualungs of the world, is something that should make us all say, “My God, ‘people, what have you done?'”