By The Curbside Prophet
True Music Believer
Dear readers: I, one of your local Opinion staff writers, have come to a momentous epiphany.
Popular singer and songwriter, Jason Mraz, is Jesus Christ.
“But he can’t!” you might be saying. “He looks so young! How can he be over 2,000 years old? Is it his diet?” The simple answer is no—vegan diets are not the key to immortality. Mraz, born to an Earthly family 34 years ago on the 3rd of April, is the second incarnation of Christ, first prophesied somewhere in the Bible. (Possibly Revelations—I’m not quite sure.) He still grew up in a small town in Virginia, where the seeds of musical genius were first sewn. He is still a simple farmer-slash-international pop star. He is, for all intents and purposes, human. But he is also divine. Don’t ask how that works. It just does.
“But what proof do you have, Dear Writer?” I have plenty of proof, Hypothetical Reader.
Exhibit A: his appearance as of late. Have you seen Jason Mraz? Not only does he look like an unwashed hippie, he looks like an unwashed hippie who has been knocked unconscious, buried in a pile of dirt, left to decompose for three days in the hopes of turning him into eco-friendly fertilizer, dug himself out with his bare hands, and then went to the nearest second-hand clothing store for a fedora. He looks oily, is what I’m saying.
Who, other than an unwashed hippie, would want to look like an unwashed hippie with scraggly hair and an untamed goatee? Answer: Jesus. Jesus, in his attempt to reconnect to the unfettered masses his original message of loving all living things, would come back to Earth looking like the poor and the needy, the forgotten, to whom he originally preached and advocated for.
Which leads us to Exhibit B: the content of Jason’s music. A good 99 percent of his music focuses on some form or aspect of love. Sometimes it’s platonic love (“Song for a Friend,” “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry)”). Sometimes it’s love for your parents or the place you came from (“93 Million Miles”), love for yourself (“Curbside Prophet”), and the love for your significant other (every other song in his repertoire). These are all tenets of Christ’s first round of preaching. And it’s scientifically proven (by someone, somewhere) that using the medium of music is a more effective way to teach someone something than lecturing.
“But why is Jesus coming back? Is it because of the apocalypse? Oh, crap, are we going to die?” No, dear reader, no; the apocalypse has not yet dawned. And it probably won’t until the sun explodes in a few billion years. No, the Jason-Jesus is only here to help us remember. The human condition is fraught with missteps and forgetting.
In Our Lord Jason’s own words, “We remember, we forget. We remember, we forget. And I think it’s just for the opportunity for enlightenment; the opportunity to awaken again and again and again…” If this is a fact of humanity, then every so often there must be a reminder of what humanity must be every so often. It started with Jesus, 2,000 years ago, and it must have continued, incarnation after incarnation, until our current version: Jason Mraz.
Jason’s fourth studio album drops April 17.