I don't listen to music when I am trying to do some serious thinking, like when I am studying for or writing sermons or even writing on this piddly little blog. I suppose I'm a bit too old to fully multi-task like my kids: my son plays Fortnite while watching YouTube videos, my daughter does homework (not all that well) while watching music videos or 24 hours in the lives of annoyingly charming families in Utah. Perhaps I had this kind of gift or ability at one time, but most of my music listening at this point usually happens when I am doing routine tasks at the office or at home, like cooking, cleaning, administrative work, or such.
For that reason I don't buy a whole lot of music these days; when do I really listen to it? There's not very often I will buy anything new...occasionally a Steven Curtis Chapman or TobyMac album, or I will see a digital sale on Google Music of some album that I loved back in my high school and college days. Even then, I rarely pay for it...I use my Google Reward points and buy when I have enough saved up or I decide to not rent a movie that my wife wants to watch.
But I do listen occasionally, and as I get older my music tastes are not much different than when I was younger. I'm one of these old farts now who listens to what young people like (being around my daughter and her friends, or the kids who ride my bus) and I immediately think that is crap...back in my day we had real music. 90% of us become our parents when it comes to listening to music some day. My mom used to talk about listening to Doris Day, who died this week in her 90s. I talk to my kids about listening to music and half of the people I followed (the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Tom Petty) are dead. We don't replace the dead people we liked...we just double down on how good they were before and pretend that music doesn't and shouldn't change.
Growing up Church of Christ, I see also how we fall into the same patterns. Many of us who grew up in the church for generations sang the same kinds of songs...whether or not theose songs were really good was not the point. Many of them were, filtered as they were through the quality guage of time (how many of Fanny Crosby's songs do we sing now? I'm guessing most of them were not so good), but we sang them because at one point we identified with them as our music (even if in fact it was really our grandparents' music or our great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents' music).
And so at one point in our church history the trailblazers of music came along and decided that hey, why can't we sing these other things? Why can't we sing the same chorus 30 times in a row]? Even some of the milder changes like praise teams seemed just as threatening to us traditionalists as those who were more radical and brought in the drum kits and guitars. All along, we mumbled to ourselves (or screamed at others), this is crap...back in my day we had real music.
Personally I am a big fan of singing without instruments in music and don't care much for praise teams...I think it engages more people instead of turning the service into a performance (which most of the other acts does, like praying or preaching). And I believe time has enabled most bad songs (musically or lyrically) to be filtered out and discarded, while much of the modern music in worship has not had time yet to be though of as timeless. But when I'm at my best, I'm long past thinking that everything else is crap, and only my music is 'worthy'. Maybe I could be more tolerant towards my kids' music as well (though a lot of it is crap, to be honest). But having patience with other kinds of music is perhaps one of those goals I need to set for myself in coming years.
