Oh My God! Music

I hate praise music. Hate it. It puts me in a decidedly un-worshipful mood. Uninspired bass and drums thumping along underneath guitars and piano that are entirely devoid of musical imagination, all playing the same four chords behind some guy/girl moaning softly like they're in physical pain. What part of that is supposed to get me all fired up for Jesus? I know there's no accounting for taste, but why is this contemporary praise stuff so popular with Christians?

As a bass and guitar player, it really frustrates me listening to and watching praise music. The guitarists don't ever do anything outside of simple strumming, and the bass players are seemingly satisfied with playing four or maybe five notes throughout the entire song. I saw Casting Crowns last year, and the bassist stood in the same spot for the whole show, playing straight quarter note rhythms and never deviating from the roots of the chords. For non musicians that sentence just means the bass lines were boring. I don't want to pick on just this one guy, I can't remember ever hearing an interesting bassline in praise and worship music. There are times when simple music is important, but an entire genre of completely colorless musicians? No thanks.

I know that praise musicians love the Lord. I'm not slamming them for that. But if you're going to create something to give glory to the most amazing being in existence shouldn't you put some work into it? God know we love him either way, yes, but why not actually put some skill into offerings? Praise musicians seem to think that throwing a few choruses of "you're totally awesome God I love you so much oh my God oh my God oh my God oh my God Jesus Jesus"on top of some lame music is beautiful art. I read in a magazine, I don't remember which one, a letter to the editor about praise music having low standards. The writer said "Make good art, not just Christian art" or something to that effect.

If you're satisfied with music that any 8 year old who's been playing guitar for a month can reproduce with no problems then go out and listen to your hearts content, but I'll spend my time listening to real music. Christian doesn't have to equal bland and lacking imagination.

Cabbages and Kings

Or Chronicles and Kings, actually. I've just read 1 & 2 Kings this last week, and now I'm slogging through the Chronicles. And I've noticed something. They're practically the same thing! Not exactly, Kings talked more about certain people and subjects than Chronicles and vice versa, but they're extremely similar.

Does anyone know why there are 4 whole books where a couple would have probably gotten the job done? I haven't done any research at all, the answers probably easy to obtain, but I'm feeling particularly lazy today.

Well I'm gonna go read some more Chronicles. It's not really light and airy reading, so it's taking me a while to get through. I might look up the Kings/Chronicles issue later. Just leave this page open and hit F5 every few minutes if the mood strikes you. I may update later, who knows.

Gnarly Trails

So I haven't posted for a couple months, which isn't really the regular update schedule that my readers crave. If you scroll down the page you will notice that I once went without posting for the time it takes a zygote to turn into a wriggling little baby. Now I've got it down to a lot less than the gestational period of a pig. In case you were wondering, pigs are pregnant for about 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days.

The above paragraph was carefully designed to show off my knowledge of our porcine friends. It has nothing to do with the rest of this post.

About a month ago my family and I moved from the Oklahoma panhandle to a little town in Northeastern Colorado. It's a significan't improvement. I liked it better the day we got here, but today it got a whole lot better.

I was riding my bike around town, and I thought I'd head by this cool little fishing hole that's maintained by the local Lions club. I saw a dirt road going off into some trees and I figured I'd follow it. After a few minutes I discovered that there are dozens of roads crisscrossing around this little tree filled wilderness park like area, and they are perfect for mountain biking! They're covered in lots of steep hills that are really fun to ride down, and there's lots of sharp curves to power slide around. As I was racing around and around the park I noticed gaps in the grass that looked like trails heading off the roads every now and then. I thought I'd take one and what do ya know, the park is also filled with bunches of straight up bike trails. There are several jumps where one could get mad air if one wanted to. Several turns even have berms and there's even a rhythm section.

The area is pretty overgrown, 3 or 4 foot tall weeds go right up to the trails, but it's still very rideable. There's one huge bowl like area that's filled with water. Judging from the dozens of trails that head over the lip and down into the quagmire it must have been quite the extreme bike park in its day, which looks to have been quite a while ago. Even with a good portion of the trails underwater, the huge weeds, and the mossy mud puddles everywhere, it's still a ton of fun down there. I felt like a real mountain biker again, something I hadn't experienced since we moved down to Ooooklahoma.

I'm as happy as a pig in mud.