So to start things off I would just like to say that in this edition I am in no way trying to besmirch anyone’s religious beliefs. I feel that everyone should be able to pursue whatever path to enlightenment and/or salvation they choose to follow (as long as it doesn't impede on or attack other people’s happiness and way of life… looking at you Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell). What I am doing in this edition is pointing out (some might say ranting about) the terrible music that passes for Christian rock (specifically here in Central America). So as a background to this I must explain that my best Honduran friend and his wife have recently joined a Catholic couples group to strengthen their marriage. This has led them to become much more vocal about the merits of Christianity (which honestly doesn't really do it for me) as well as (much more annoyingly) to start listening to the same ten Christian rock songs and hymns on repeat. This started off badly enough for me, since they are my closest neighbors and have a seriously bumping speaker system (thus inside of my house it sounds like I am playing the music at full blast) and they invite me over for meals at least three times a week (which is really nice and I really appreciate, except that the music doesn't stop for meals). Things got decidedly worse when his wife (who is one of my coworkers) decided to put together a mix cd for the other members of their group and recruited me to download the songs and burn them onto cds (I tend to get suckered into these sort of jobs as I am one of the only people in town with the computer know how to pull something like this off). This process took an unfortunately long time since the cd she had was badly recorded and we couldn’t just get the songs directly off of it, and thus had to find them all on the internet. A feat made even more daunting by the fact that she did not know any of the artists or song titles and thus we had to search them all out based on the chorus lines for each song (which meant we ended up listening to them repeatedly). This was followed by a long process of finding places to download the songs from (with me having to repeatedly explain the concept that while we could listen to music videos on you tube it did not mean that the song was downloaded to the computer and could now be put on a disk). Despite the many setbacks we finally got all of the songs downloaded and the cds burned. As a closing remark, I would just like to say that if people we singing songs praising me and my good works (which [fingers crossed] they will be some day) I would definitely like them to be more musically complex and lyrically creative than the majority of trash that is being passed off as Christian rock these days (I think I can safely say, that whatever deity or greater entity is hanging out up in the clouds these days, is not really impressed).
Ps. For those of you who are curious about the type of music i am referring to her is an example of one of the songs:
