Everything She Wants, annotated

For some reason I have not been able to get this song out of my mind in recent weeks.  It's not a great song, and as we will soon see the video is hilarious.  But kind of like Last Christmas, it's so poppy and fun that I love it.  

0:07:  Never a good sign when people are trying to actively leave the video 7 seconds into it...

0:17:  Oh no.  It's the 'We're gonna make this a concert video, but use the studio recording, and just overdub some crowd noise' method of video production.  I think we shoulda known that this group wasn't going last much longer.  

0:22:  WHEEEE!!!  It's one of those money cyclone things!  I love those things, though I've never seen them.  They bring out both greed AND human dexterity issues, all in one hateful machine.  

0:31:  Just once when it came to Wham! I would have loved to have seen Andrew Ridgely be the center of attention.  But he's the Tubbs to George Michael's Crockett, I guess.

0:35:  Oh.  I guess that's why the above is true...

0:58:  "She".  That witch over there.  Yep, that's the money grubbing golddigger I'm talking about.  

1:27:  Gotta give mad props to his hair in this video.  That is some serious body that I never had.  

1:33:  Andrew Ridgely, everyone!  

1:48:  "Don't look at the eclipse!  Don't look at the...DOH!"

1:53:  I mean, what is he looking at here?  Is he also the lighting tech for this tour?  Is this why Wham! didn't last, because they were needing better management?  All for the want of a good production crew...

2:03:  Round and round and round and round and round and round and

2:06:  I can do it too!!!!

2:14:  Air punch!  Hi-keeba!  

2:22:  OK, we gotta talk here about something real...this is a serious diss track, and in the middle of this sidekick Andrew starts laughing and pointing and I DON'T THINK YOU GET THE SERIOUS NATURE OF THE SITUATION, ANDREW.  

2:31:  Well, at least they were married in their screwed up situation.  Gotta give them credit for that.

2:55:  Wait, did Andrew just forget the words to 'oh, oh'?  No wonder George ditched him.

3:16:  Money shot for the ladies...

3:31:  FIGHT THE POWER!  FIGHT THE POWER!

3:40:  Um, George, can you speed up the dance?  Let's try that again...

4:20:  DANG.  Them Brits know how to high jump!  Maybe they didn't break up because Andrew was holding him back...maybe Andrew quit because he wanted to join the 1984 Olympic team!

4:47:  Knees up!  Knees up!  You're not gonna make the Olympic team if you can't run, Andrew!

4:56:  Can I admit that I haven't ever gotten this far in the song, that I've changed it by this strange part at the end?  

6:02:  I got nothing else.  I think I've seen these same shots of Andrew forgetting words and a random concert crowd shot and a camera flashing and a woman's hand reaching for money and people jumping around about 300 times now...I'm outta here.  

Visitors

Growing up Church of Christ I was taught that the 'five acts of worship' were the Lord's Supper, the Offering, Prayers, Scripture reading, and Singing.  I capitalize them because it was thought that these were five almost sacred acts, much like the 7 sacraments or the 5 steps of salvation.  In reality, however, it was more likely that Churches of Christ were known for a symbolic interpretation of the Lord's Supper, baptism in a baptistry, preaching, topical sermons with lots and lots of Scriptures, singing without instruments and with song books and a song leader, and overt masculinity in the public worship and leadership of the church.

I mention all this because years later most Churches of Christ are still like this.  But not all.  Being on vacation today we went to the late service of a larger suburban Church of Christ.  I knew that they advertised this service as being 'instrumental' and I wanted my kids to experience a slightly different experience than what they were used to.  As such, then, it was a bit hard for me as I am firmly in middle age.  I'm also one of those analytical/deconstructive people who look to pick out differences from what I know, much like those kids' puzzles where they ask 'what are the 10 differences between the two pictures of the bear on the log flue?'  I really want to worship and praise God and learn from the lesson, but part of me was thinking too much about what was happening. 

I am not speaking about these things in terms of judgment.  I've come to believe that there are different varieties of worship that are valid, even if not everything is good.  Many of our debates in the church have been more about style than they are about Scriptural truths.  But I do have preferences, especially when so many of the things we have done are Good, and often when we try to change things we get out of our lane.  It's like taking somebody who is excellent in making cinnamon rolls and asking them to become a barbeque master.  Generally speaking, my experience is that we are terrific usually when we are singing together out of a songbook as a congregation.  But we aren't as good with guitars, with powerpoints that have words on the screen, with singing the same praise 'new' praise chorus a dozen times that the worship leader just learned the week before and the congregation has no idea about the melody.  It's not that we have to be bad at these things...but it's that we struggle to be good. 

So this congregation today had a few guitarists warming up as we came in, and they soon began singing a more familiar worship song.  It wasn't anything unexpected, except that the leader of the band and singers was a woman.  I would guess that it is easy for many of us traditionalists to accept a band than it is a woman leading that band.  Throughout the service she would occasionally read Scripture or encourage people to sing or once (strangely) chide the congregation for drawing on the green envelopes. 

Communion wasn't all that different than normal, though there were women who came front to pass trays down the aisles.  Not sure that's a problem Biblically, because isn't passing trays an act of service, and hasn't our hypermasculinity told us that women are there to serve?  But then for some that would be a problem still, because women (according to many men and women) are meant to be not seen nor heard.  A woman also led the prayer for the offering tray.  But a man preached the sermon, a topical sermon about the Holy Spirit that was solid and filled with a lot of Scriptures, and a man made the announcements and a man (presumably one of the elders) spoke of prayer concerns and led the final prayer. 

My son enjoyed the service; in particular he liked the songs and the fact that the communion wafer was already pre-cut.  My niece, who, rarely goes to church, noted that the songs were OK but whoever was running the powerpoint projector wasn't keeping up and many of the words on the screen never matched whatever it was were supposed to be singing.  That's often a problem I have noticed in churches that have gone away from songbooks...if you don't know the songs (about half were unknown to me), you'd better at least know the words, and if the words on the screen are wrong, you're kinda left in limbo.  Of course, it's a holiday weekend so perhaps the normal people in charge were not there...but it's still not the most singer-friendly way for those of us there who want to praise God.  My wife, who's likely far more conservative about these things than I am not based so much on Scripture but based on how she is used to things, wasn't the biggest fan.  In particular, as music played during the communion, she leaned over to me and said that it felt like she was at a wedding and we were there to be entertained. 

In the end, the reality of whether this was a Good service was whether it a)honored and glorified God and b)edified thoes who were there.  The first, I think, was done...God was at the center of the sermon, the songs that we sang, and the attitude of those who led.  I don't know that there was anything that unBiblical, though some would find things they don't like based on their understandings.  The second was likely true as well for most, but weak people like myself were likely thinking too much through the service for our own good.  Are we edified if we are thinking about whether everything is proper according to our traditional perspective of how things ought to be? 

More and more in the future we will likely see churches adopting new styles like this.  It gets us away from the traditions that we fought for as vitally important all those years.  But that's not always a bad thing...sometimes we need the Spirit moving us forward from where we have always been.  Yet for late adapters like many of us in Churches of Christ, that comes with a lot of growing pains.  It will be interesting to see what happens in the future. 

Listening to music at 48

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.

Shadow Dancing, annotated

I know it's not cool to like disco...especially some of its most cheezy forms.  But I have always had a strong appreciation for the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, et al.  And then there is lost Bee Gee, Andy Gibb.  What would it have been like to be coming of age as your older siblings are destroying the musical world with Saturday Night Fever?  What would it have been like to have Victoria Principal throwing herself at you?  What would it have been like having everything in your life set up for success, but then not being able to resist cocaine?  That was the Andy Gibb experience.

He died far too young, and he could have been something amazing.  But at least we have Shadow Dancing.

0:08:  What was the stage designer thinking with these pillars?
0:12:  Leg twitch alert!  Elvis had only been dead weeks, and yet here comes somebody shakin' it all about.
0:18:  I would have have especially appreciated in one of his hand mic tosses if he had missed.  'Cuz I know it's all lip synced and everything, but I would have loved watching him try to recover.
0:28:  Evidence A that this is lip syncing...the mic is about 28 inches from his mouth, flying around, and the 1970s audio is perfect.  Sure.
0:49:  Poll: Which is bleached more white, his teeth or his sweater?  I go with the sweater, but it's gotta be close.
0:53:  Barry!  Robin!  Maurice!  When you have the Bee Gees as your backing group, that's gold.
1:12:  Uh huh!  Andy Gibb may have been a terrific performer, but singing all four parts on this show was probably not the best thing he could have done to convince us that this was his song, not Barry's.
1:28:  Take me to the bridge!
1:37:  The studio audience goes wild!!!
2:01:  Um, Mike, you might want to track Andy's head?  Keep it in the inset picture rather than cut off most of his face?  Mike?  You there?
2:14:  Odds are 600:1 at this point that the rest of the Bee Gees are in this studio.
2:36:  1970s feathered hair for both men and women.  Gotta say, I kinda dig that look, even though I'm bald.  Maybe my kids will do this someday for their Donnie & Marie tribute band?
2:43:  Soul alert!
3:13:  This performance gets less sexy as it goes on.  Incredible since it started on the sexy meter at .04.
3:25:  Finishing it out at this point even as the cocaine is calling from the green room is the sign of total professionalism, if you ask me.

Walk This Way, Annotated

So why is music today what it is?  Some think that Michael Jackson bringing down the walls of white music on MTV is the big deal...but since rap/hiphop is what most kids these days really like, I think this is Ground Zero for music in 2019.  I'm neither a huge rap or an Aerosmith fan, but I have always loved this song.  Let's dive in.

0:05:  I know Steven Tyler and Joe Perry are crucial to this video...but I wonder where the other guys are during this practice session?  Or do Joe and Steven just dress like this while hanging out? 
0:09:  SYMBOLISM ALERT!  There's a wall.  It's dividing the rockers from the rappers.  Somebody's ticked off.  I'm guessing we will come back to this.
0:21:  Does Steven Tyler walk like this through the Kroeger?  Does he ever kick out the display table and then have to pick stuff up while the manager watches?
0:31:  See, this is why you don't live in apartments.  You get music rages where you stick your speaker up against the wall.  Hoping that violence doesn't break out.
0:42:  So, did Jam Master Jay have a copy of Walk This Way on vinyl?  If he liked Aerosmith enough to have this in his collection, and they are living RIGHT NEXT DOOR to the Aerosmith practice facility, couldn't they have made peace before this?
0:48:  Does Steven Tyler ever get dizzy?  Could he have been an astronaut, whirling around on the centrifuge?  True story...a few weeks ago I took my son to an amusement park and I agreed to ride the tilt-a-whirl.  I felt terrible the rest of the night.  I could never have been Steven Tyler in concert.  OK, end of story.
1:11  Did Steven Tyler gripe at Joe Perry to stop playing during this?  Was Joe auditioning for a new lead singer and just didn't have the heart to say otherwise?
1:18  "YEAH!  Throw that milk jug!  That'll show 'em!"
1:24  "Turn it up to 11!  We did that 20 seconds ago, let's do it again!"
1:32  Oh, he's not getting his rent deposit back now.
1:37  I always imagined that the walls of studios were a bit more sturdy?  Was I mistaken?
1:52  Gotta be hard to sing with all that dust flying through the air.  No wonder his voice gets so raspy.
1:58  Um, am I still in this video?
2:14  SYMBOLISM ALERT!  There's a paper curtain.  It's been impossible to break through for years.  But now Russell and and Darryl, they can do this...
2:23  I think this expression is the best part of the video.  That's some serious acting.  That's where his daughter Liv got her chops so that she could be in a sex scene in Armageddon with Aerosmith playing in the background which is so weird now I'm gonna just move on...
2:32  Oh, the laceless Adidas shoes.  Never tried pulling that off, but I wanted to.
2:42  Now they are a trio.  The walls have come down.  Happiness ensues...Run DMC is playing to Aerosmith's audience...but could Aerosmith play to Run DMC's audience?  Hmmm....Given how rap has overwhelmed rock, I think that this was prophetic in where music was going and how 'black' music has been accepted by a 'white audience'.
3:05  Wait, Russell...you break into somebody else's concert and then you are ticked off that they keep singing?
3:19  Steven Tyler screams on behalf of metal bands everywhere.  He knows the game is up.
3:30  The video ends with what seems like 3 50ish white guys trying to get their groove on.  Needless to say, the last thirty seconds of these guys dancing has not aged well.

Fortunately, we don't judge this video by only its last few seconds.  Still great.  This song will still be played a hundred years from now.

Sugar, annotated

War between Pakistan and India.  Trump.  Winter.  Life is not as it ought to be.

But let's forget about this for 5:02.  I bring you, Sugar, from Maroon 5.  Let's go.

0:11:  According to The Week, this isn't one of the ten important things to happen on December 6, 2014. I beg to differ. 
0:13:  When all this came out I was fasincated by the premise of the video...did they really crash at least 7 weddings?  Yes and no...maybe not 7, and maybe it wasn't always a surprise, and maybe they did this over three days, not one.  But who cares...it's still a fun video. 
0:23:  WOOOO! 
0:35:  First 'older guy worried about these young'uns' moment of the night.  Not the last, either. 
0:47:  If you're gonna do this all day Saturday, fine...but are you starting this at a 9am wedding?  'Cuz that's what what it looks like.  Never done a 9am wedding personally, but hey it's L.A.  Maybe this is the wedding where the bride was 3 months pregnant and a 9am slot at the country club was all they could get? 
1:08:  Did they do a sound check before they started playing?  That would have been annoying for the wedding party at 9:15am. 
1:17:  "HEY!  Nickelback!"
1:47:  Still late morning.  Weddings are an all-day thing in L.A. I guess...
2:00:  Is Maroon 5 big in the Asian world?  Were the people at this wedding sad that it wasn't some K-Pop group?  Asking for a friend.
2:12:  And did this chef really know Maroon 5?  Is this his favorite group?  Would he have been more sad if this had been Snoop?
2:21:  "HEY!  Red Hot Chili Peppers!" 
2:50:  And now, the shots at the infamous 'Black Wedding', where everybody is a hologram beamed in from the other side of the planet. 
3:00:  Hotties always be driving on the streets of L.A., rolling up on bands.  L.A., man. 
3:11:  "Geez.  Couldn't we have had the roadies carry the guitars?" 
3:15:  Jessica Pare?
3:43:  Now the drinking starts.  I'm guessing that this is why weddings 3-7 were so condensed, as the band was a wee bit wasted by this point? 
3:56:  "Really, who came up with the idea for this shoot?  I am SO hungry now, and we got 3 more weddings to hit in the next two hours?  Get me Steve on the phone, RIGHT NOW." 
4:05:  Break dancing?  Not what you associate with Maroon 5, but OK, whatever.
4:10:  "Dave.  DAVE!  Sit down, you'll fall and hurt yourself.  DAVE!!!"
4:41:  Was the coolest thing ever the wedding, or the band saying this about themselves? 
4:54:  "I LOVE WEEZER SO MUCH!"

DMX, A Tribute

I'm not into rap music, but the rapper DMX has always intrigued me.  Maybe it's his voice, so raw and powerful.

A few years ago, though, I heard somewhere that DMX decided that his calling in life is to a pastor.  Sure, consider his lyrics to simply be art, the poetic rhymes of a prophet, and maybe you can see it.

But then look at his arrest record, his addiction to drugs, and that he has at least 15 children by any number of women.  At that point the protests get a little bit louder...should we be putting people in positions of caretakers and guides in life when they are either going to get the women in the church pregnant, the kids in the church hooked on crack cocaine, or the men's Bible study tossed in jail overnight?  Probably not a good idea.

Of course, we elect leaders all the time that have no business being leaders.  We select as role models those whom we would she never see as Godly examples.  We make into heroes people who have never done anything truly heroic in their lives.

So why not have DMX be our pastor?

I guess my reaction would have to be in the immortal words of DMX,

November Rain, annotated

In the early 90s my good friend Derek and I had a running joke that November Rain, by Guns 'n Roses, was 'the song of the 90s'.  Maybe it was the pretensions to be epic, or that we really liked it, or that grunge and hip hop were already starting to change the music scene and so we were being ironic...but whatever it was, this was another video that stamped something upon me.

0:07: Why is my innocent mind's first thought that he's snacking on tic-tacs?
0:21: Weird Al?
0:59: I don't know which special effect was better, the sudden move from church to desert or Michael Jackson's Black or White
1:02:  OK, here's the biggest problem with this song...the continual drum beat of 2 beats, three quick beats, and one final beat.  Everytime they don't know what to do they keep doing this.  Again, again, again.
1:11:  So, is this all a dream?  Flashback?  Nightmare?
1:26:  Couldn't be a hair band song without a hot blonde playing a flute.
2:11:  Smoking ordinance violation.
2:31:  Seriously, I'm getting lung cancer just watching this video.
2:51:  Swaaaaayyyy...swaaaaaayyyyyyy
3:04:  DOH!  It's the 'missing ring' trick!  Makes even the priest happy.
3:22:  But do you really need rings when you've got a spectacular pinky ring/letter opener combo?
3:33:  Tongue.  Yech.
3:38:  "Slash?  Slash?  Hey, can you go get us a gatorade?  We've been on this set all day and we are SOOO thirsty.  Thanks, man.  You're the best."
3:58:  "Oh man...I was in this giant cathedral...and now I'm walking out of a tiny chapel in the desert while trying to get my friend a gatorade.  I gotta lay off the tic-tacs, man."
4:14: Wind machine's gotta get back to the rental place in two hours, so they rushed through this shot.
4:34: All joking aside, that's a great moving shot, especially in the days before drones.
4:59: Slash leans back in this scene so much I wonder whether his back needs chiropractic work a quarter-century later.
5:10:  Probably not a good sign for the future that as they are leaving their wedding the lyrics keep speaking of needing some time on your own?  Maybe?
5:37:  GUNS.
5:56:  Has anybody else wondered whether or not that glass is going to leave a stain ring on that piano?  Or am I just getting old and uptight?
6:23:  The wedding party looks like it belongs in a Guns 'n Roses video.  The rest of the guests look like they just stumbled out of a Christmas party at the country club.
6:41: Ominous stare into the sky by the priest.
6:48: Do sudden downpours happen in SoCal?  Or did they do this wedding here in the midwest?
6:58: Now that's just over the top.  Body checking the wedding cake?  C'mon, dude.
7:04: Remember my worries about the glass ring?  That's nothing compared to my horror at Slash scuffing the top of the piano over the next two minutes.
7:09: The wedding priest must not have been available for the funeral.
8:14: Ominous look into the sky by the kid.  Wait, rain ruined the reception, now it's gonna ruin the funeral?  COME ON.
8:33: If that dude running from the funeral flies into a cake, I'm done.
8:40: ROSES.  Ohhhhhh
9:05: "It's Red.  It's White.  Yeah yeah yeah!"

Party in the USA, annotated

The week is dragging along, and if I drank coffee I would have downed my 4th cup by now.  But I don't need it...'cuz I got Miley Cyrus and Party in the USA freely available on YouTube.  Wooo!  Let's roll the tape!

0:04:  Um, I'm guessing nobody over the age of 25 is going to be in this video
0:09:  Good parties start with everybody parking in their proper spots.
0:19:  If Trump builds the wall, illegals will still be getting into Miley Cyrus videos in the trunks of cars.
0:29:  That's the wave of 'Hey, I see you, I'll just keep walking, OK?'
0:44:  Um, Miley dear, that's a speaker, not a microphone.
0:52:  Neck cramp!  Neck cramp!
1:22:  Why you singing about your girls not being around you?  They were just in the video like 12 seconds ago?
1:40:  'MERICA!  WOO!
1:49:  "What did you do in the video?"  "I was the guy feeding the confetti into the blower."  "Did you get paid for that?"  "Nah, but they had a really nice buffet on the set."
2:06:  Just hit me that she's singing but there's nobody there.  Not much of a party in the USA or anywhere else.
2:14:  Safety warning...dancing on jungle gyms is not a recommended use by the manufacturer.  Warranty becomes void through misuse.
2:18:  Five years earlier everybody in this video would have been more interested in playing on that jungle gym.  My, how the kids grow up.
2:30:  USA!  USA!
2:34:  Gotta admire the ethnic diversity of Miley's background dancers.  Miley is the American Dream.
2:59:  Parkour was a big thing around 2009, I think.  I'm guessing one too many flips where a dude landed on his head and it probably died out.
3:13:  For about the 6th time in this video the old guy in me is starting to worry about safety violations in this video.  Break dancing on a rickety picnic table?  Maybe Miley faded because she spent the next five years fending off liability lawsuits.

Last Christmas

I love this time of year for so many reasons, but one of my favorite ones may be hundreds of versions of 'Last Christmas' that I can find on YouTube.  Last year I did something like '34 days of Last Christmas' on Facebook with a new video each day, and looking around I find that I could do the same thing with an entirely new playlist or by limiting my selections to Asian versions or any other way of doing this.

But there still may be no better version than the original Wham! version with George Michael and Andrew Ridgely.  It's not just a great song, but also high comedy in watching the video.  Here are my second-by-second highlights.
0:06 ooooohhhh  aaaaahhhhh ooooohhhheeeeeaaaa, with a beautiful mountain background.
0:22 big wave!  big wave!
0:35 'wait, I could have been with George Michael and I got stuck with this guy?'
0:41 George hugs.  Girlfriend coldly shakes hands.
1:07 So, there are houses with no roads, and you have to walk there?  Geez.
1:12 Twirly guy decorating tree!
1:18 So happy to be putting out plates!
1:28 Dorky guy with dorky smile bringing in firewood tracks in snow.  Thanks, Bill.
1:40 STOP DUMPING SNOW ON THE FLOOR, BILL!
1:52 Whee!  We get to go outside and play!
1:54 Blue steel pose alert!
2:06 Cake on fire!
2:32 Oh, that was cold.  She knows what she's doing looking at him that way.  Which leads to...
2:36 Pouty eyes!
2:43 'Crap, I didn't know shooting this video was going to be an all-day thing.  I am sooooo bored.'
2:58 FLASHBACK alert!  Is she trying to escape from him?  Play hard to get?  Do we need an intervention?  What's going on here?
3:15 She is SO COLD.  Se gave Andrew the cheap knock-off jewelry George had got for her last year when he was a nobody, but now Andrew wears it upside down.  Forget it George, she's done.
3:24 'We have to walk back to that stupid gondola?  Good thing we're all dressed so brightly that nobody will shoot us!'
3:37 FLASHBACK?  Are they back together?  ???  Last year?  This year?   So confused...
4:07 Incoming gondola alert!  Move out of the way!
4:22 Well, I'm glad they could end up as friends.  Glad they are all happy.

Cassette tapes and the uncoolness of my music

This week I took the painful step of throwing out my old cassette tapes.  They had been thinned out over the years, but I still had a few dozen lining the shelves of my office, waiting for that last play that would never come.  Over the years most of them have been replaced by CDs which in turn have been ripped to the hard drive of my computer and now conveniently sit on my iTunes account.  A few of them I had lugged around from place to place over at least 30 years, but the last one (Foo Fighters: The Color and the Shape, thanks Lani!) was bought somewhere around 1998, itself symbolic of my lateness to newer and better tech.  After I had deboxed them five or six years ago I had systematically listened to each one last time.  Suzy Boggus, the Black Crows, Boston, and DC Talk all took me back to my younger days.  A few had gone bad, as cassettes do, but most of them had survived.

Most of these cassettes, though, were bought before I started to encounter the musical snobs of my life.  You know, the same people who this week are beside themselves that David Bowie has died.  I'm not here to rip David Bowie, but it's always amazing to me when people find a not-quite-mainstream artist and judge all others according to his/her current hipness.  I didn't own any David Bowie records, nor did I find myself rummaging through used vinyl shops to find a rarity from the Velvet Underground or very cooly describe how much Miles Davis influenced my worldview.  No, for years I was happy with my little case of cassettes; it was music enough for me.  I admit to owning a lot of music that was and remains decidedly uncool.  Lots of Eagles, .38 Special, Huey Lewis, and Genesis.  Once in awhile I had something that the snobs wouldn't snob about (hello, REM!), but generally my collection was not nearly as cool as people remember theirs as being.  Even today the critics would shudder at my iTunes listing. There's a lot of John Denver, Air Supply, and Wings scattered about...and even worse, I am more content to get a lot of Greatest Hits (shudder) and not get worked up about not having the final track on an early Queen album.

But what's the problem, really?  Why do we have to look down on what others like?  Perhaps we can lay the blame for our snobbishness on awards shows.  Whether it's the Emmys, Tonys, Oscars, or a thousand other lesser ones, we have to have this mindset that something, somewhere is extra special and deserves our adulation and what the common folk think is good is in fact vulgar and to be despised.  Certainly, often times such shows may open our eyes to something we otherwise might not have looked at.  But can't we still enjoy our Phil Collins and Peter Frampton without people thinking us worse for it?

A lot of people today have moved on from music snobbery to now being TV snobs.  Likely this is more of a problem for me.  I loved Mad Men and I refuse to watch the Bachelor with my wife.  Yet I still can't get into Breaking Bad, even though I can see some value in it.  I haven't watched The Wire, The Sopranos, or even New Girl.  My Netflix watch list is filled with stuff that I like, not stuff that I will need to talk about around the watercooler (though I have no fellow employees, nor a watercooler).  Would this be a good time to confess that I'm finally getting around to watching Glee with great glee?

As I get older the more I realize the futility of being cool.  There will always be somebody discovering something new, and in all honesty I just don't have time to keep up.  Life is hard enough as it is without trying to impress everybody with the things we don't really care about.

Background Jesus

I've noticed a strange thing in local businesses in recent weeks:  contemporary Christian music being played as the slightly audible music playing in the background.  My local grocery store has done it for awhile, and last week the same thing was at Wendy's.  It's not just that one song has snuck onto a playlist, but I stopped and listened...the whole time I was in these businesses, I could hear the quiet sounds of this music filtering into the heads of those who shopped and ate at these places.

I'm not here to say this is a bad thing.  I'd much rather have my children hear this kind of music than most of the stuff on country or pop radio these days.  To hear about how God is awesome is much more preferable than hearing about tractors, dirty girls, and the grunts that make up most of the stuff one hears today.  I'm grateful that management of these businesses are happy to play this kind of music.

But it got me to thinking how very American this kind of influence is.  We really like having Jesus in our lives, we like talking about God's goodness...but we like it as background music.  None of the times I have heard this music was it blasted...too loud, and probably there would be complaints.  But keep it in the background?  Great.

American culture wants there to be Christian influences today...but we want it in the background.  Don't make it too loud, don't make it too noticable, and certainly don't make it something too real.  Even those who decry the fading of Christianity from our national landscape probably don't want Loud Jesus in their lives.  They want a Jesus who waves the flag, tells us our consumerism and militarism are great, and generally marches to the beat of our drummer.

No, background Jesus suits us just fine.