Go tell it on a mountain that this song sucks

To get into the Christmas mood, we've been listening to a lot of Christmas songs on internet radio recently. I've been listening to a lot of songs, some religious, some secular. Most are fun, or bring back fond memories of Christmases past, or otherwise have some musical value. One song I really can't stand, though, is Go Tell it on a Mountain. Stuff a stocking up my ass, this song really sucks. It's very repetitive and getting on my nerves.

So, to summarize, this song and the occasional John Tesh (who seems to be everywhere when it comes to Christmas music) is ruining the season for me.

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My wife and I were up until 2:30 last night cooking and baking for various potlucks and get-togethers that are coming up soon. My wife especially was baking butter tarts from scratch for about eight hours straight. This holiday crap is exhausting.

Music Project

In my youth, I used to be quite musically skilled. I played piano to a Royal Conservatory grade 8 level and scored extremely well (very high 90s) on the music theory exams. Alas, in the many, many years since, my skills have dimminished and my knowledge of theory has evaporated - I couldn't construct a chord to save my life, I find myself confused by any time signature that isn't 4/4 or 3/4, and I couldn't tell you what those funny knobby and dotty signs above, below, or next to the music notes mean. What was once crystal clear is now utter gibberish; I might as well sneeze on a sheet of blank staff paper for all the good it would do me (Hey! I remembered that it was called staff paper! Yay! - note, this is not sarcasm, I really am pleasantly surprised that its name just came to me as I was writing this)

Keeping this in mind, I need to reacquire these music composition skills because I have an idea for a wondrous musical project: One day, I'd like to compose and produce an epic orchestral piece the likes of which the world has never seen. What would make it so special? An orchestra consisting of nothing but bagpipes, accordions, kazoos, tamborines, didjeridoos, Sousaphones, tympani, and a triangle - that's what. It would be awesome, nay, glorious.

Or horrible. Either way, it should be done.

Music and Thick-headed Fundies

A while ago (in fact, when I first started this blog last year) I wrote about my seething, festering, boiling-over raw hatred at the crappiness of the music played at my wife's church, and practically all modern evangelist churches. It is vacuous as music, like the crappy pop music that fills the airwaves only crappier still: fluffy love songs that, as Eric Cartman says, replace "baby" and "girl" with "Jesus."

I then progressed from wanting to kick John Tesh in the nuts to declaring my suspicion that most religious people liked crappy pop music even outside of their church goings. At the time, the now semi-retired (at least blog-wise) Hallq challenged me and said that he had doubts that was the case. He was right, of course, and I myself know some religious people who do like more intelligent music. So it's definitely not a slam dunk that if you're religious then you'll like Britney, Mandy Moore, et al. I still had my suspicions though.

And now these suspicions are bearing themselves out. On Mixing Memory, Chris reports on new research by social psychologist Sam Gosling on the correlation between musical preference and a person's personality. I'd highly recommend that you read his post, and I'll let Chris sum it up here:

In short, people who listen to jazz are smart, liberal, adventurous, and poor; people who listen to heavy metal are smart, liberal, adventurous, athletic, and prone to social dominance; people who listen to Madonna or the "Dancing With Wolves" soundtrack are agreeable, conscientious, conservative, rich, happy, dumb, emotionally unstable, and hot; and people who listen to hip hop are extraverted, agreeable, liberal, athletic, and hot. Well, those are the tendencies at least (I've known some smart Madonna fans, though I have to say that they were pretty emotionally unstable). (Emphasis added)

Of course, you can typically substitute "conservative" for "religious" in most cases. Now, it's certainly not true that all people who like pop music are religious or vice versa, but here it says that there is a positive correlation between pop music and conservatism(religion)/stupidity. You gotta trust the science*.

*At least until the next study shows up refuting those claims ;-)

Songs of Faith = Injustice against Music

For my first post with content, I would like to look at at contemporary Christian music. First off, I'm an athiest. I'm also a classically-trained pianist of moderate ability (I played seriously for 8 years), so I know music pretty well. I know that in the good ol' days of the Baroque period, church music was at the pinnacle of compositional achievement, with Bach, among others, writing powerful, uplifting, and complicated holy music. Personally, I find most Bach to be overly technical, but a lot of people like him. Second, my wife is a happy Christian who loves popular Christian music that she hears in church: she sings it in the shower, buys CDs of the stuff, and feels that it is very uplifting. You know what else it is? It's crap.

I'm not knocking the content (well, I could), rather I'm knocking its musical value. These songs are just plain awful. There is one song she has on our computer that sounds like it was a rejected ensemble song from an awards show, with about a hundred people singing, "Ce-le-brate ... Je-sus ... Ce-lebrate!" over and over again to repetetive and obnoxious John Tesh-style synthesizer music. Speaking of which, John Tesh is one person I'd seriously like to have kicked in the nuts.

The songs at the church we go to aren't much better. Since this church is fairly modern, they invariably play uplifting, peppy music. The styles vary, but what doesn't vary is their lack of musical complexity. Sometimes it's fluffy pop music, sometimes it's the new fashioned "wimp rock" (you know, that style of stuff that airhead teenage girls listen to when they want to rebel against Britney and her ilk, that only has three different guitar chords that are each played repeatedly for two measures, forming no melody whatsofreakinever), or sometimes it's adult contemporary, like Kenny G but with vocals. Regardless, there is no musical soul.

Now, I know there are some excuses, like the music and lyrics need to be easy so people can sing along. And I understand that. But I've noticed that it seems to extend beyond church singalongs as well. I know that this is unscientific, but in my experience, a lot of Christians tend to listen to fluffy crap music outside of church as well. My wife listens to pop and dance music, and prefers Britney (who can't sing) to Christina (who can). My religious friends in high school and university also listened to music of dubious quality, mainly country and pop. My non-religious friends tended to listen to Metallica or the Tragically Hip: music that without a doubt contains more talent and creativity.

Could it be that turning off your skeptical, critical mind when it comes to religion results in turning off those same skills when it comes to music?

I don't know. What I do know is that it still sucks, and I heartily recommend the South Park episode where Cartman forms a successful Christian rock band by taking pop-rock songs about love and replacing the words "baby" and "girl" with "Jesus."

In closing, there is a Christian song where the singer sings the line, "I can sing of your love forever," for the entire second half of the song (about 3 minutes). He doesn't really sing of Jesus's love forever; it only feels that way.