The melody/arrangement is gorgeous, but the lyrics are hysterical.

For instance, in the third verse, everyone sings dramatically:

Look people warmly in the eye

Really?

“Look people warmly in the eye?”

Okay . . . .

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But the last verse is the kicker.  Here’s how it ends:

In love make peace, give peace a chance and share it like a treasure.

That’s right.

John Lennon.

In a hymn.

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What’s perhaps worse is the “In love make peace” line.

Why does that sound familiar?

Well, the opposite of making war is making peace, right?

No, I seem to remember something from the Lennon era about the opposite of making peace being . . . .

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Oh.

“In love, make peace”

Switch “peace” with “love.”

That’s why it sounds familiar.

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It’s impossible to sing the hymn with a straight face.

Actually, I’m just kidding.

(Anybody remember ’80s praise-n-worship, back before the girly-man guitar-pop days?  Like “Awesome God” and “El-Shaddai,” and “Sing Your Praise to the Lord.” Okay, it looks like what I mean is, “Anyone remember when praise-n-worship was written by Rich Mullins and Michael Card?”)

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Today in church the choir were singing Rutter’s Requiem, for All Saints/Souls Day.

But before that, they sang a hymn Adam wrote, called, “What Comfort Can Our Worship Bring.”

The two parts that really struck me were:

Not just in joy is God made known / but also in our tears

and

. . . where praise is voiced in pain

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Both of those stand out for a phenomenologist, because they get at two themes that have been central to phenomenology since its inception in 1900/1 with Edmund Husserl’s magnum opus (though not his final word on the subject, by a long shot), Logical Investigations.

The first is the question of what constitutes the appearance of something.  What does it take to make something appear?  How do we go about presenting something to ourselves?  How do things become present to us?

The second is the question of expression.  What does it mean to bring something to expression?  What, exactly, is expressed in expressions (things, ideas, meanings, feelings, experiences?)?  Can expressions accurately express the world?

(And then you have to ask, since we use words to present things, exactly how does that happen?  That is, how is language connected to presentation/appearance?  See Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things, by Robert Sokolowski.)

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In the above excerpts from his hymn (which is beautifully worded — and perfectly scored by Blake Henson, whose site looks fantastic, btw) Adam is making two claims.

First, he is claiming that God can be made known through tears.  That is, tears can reveal something about God.  God can appear through tears, in some sense.

Second, he is claiming that praise can be “voiced in pain.”  Now, this might mean one or both of two things.

(A) It might mean that it is possible to give expression to praise for God when you are in pain.

Or, (B) might mean that it is possible to praise God through (by means of) expressing pain.

Or, because of the wonder that is poetry, it might mean both.  Or some third thing I’m not realizing at the moment.

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The first claim — about tears presenting God — is especially interesting to me because of the claims Sokolowski makes in Eucharistic Presence (which, you will note, I reviewed enthusiastically) about how the Eucharist can constitute a legitimate appearance of Christ, due to certain fundamental ontological/theological facts.

The second is interesting for much the same reason.  (How could Christ show up through bread and wine?  How could God show up through tears?)  How could praise show up through pain?

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Really fascinating stuff to contemplate.

Thanks for googling your way to my site!

Take a look at the latest posts in the right sidebar, while you’re here!

They’re filled with lyrics and lols!

(Okay, they’re actually filled with insight and wit,
but that’s basically the same thing. Right? No? Oh, okay.)

______________________________________________

Speaking of people saying stupid things:

Jason Mraz‘s latest, catchy, Jack Johnson-rip-off single (“I’m Yours“) includes the following mind-blowing line:

It’s our God-forsaken right to be loved.

Utterly mind-blowing.

What in the world could that possibly mean?

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First: “God-forsaken” refers to places, not rights.

Second: If God forsakes a right (i.e., God decides to stop supporting the right, or decides to withdraw His backing from it), the right’s not a right anymore.

Why then point out that the thing you want other people to recognize as a right is something that God doesn’t recognize as a right (and is, therefore, something that isn’t a right at all)?

Not familiar with how one makes a good case or develops an argument, are we Mraz?

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Best I can figure, Mraz is simply using the term “God-forsaken” as an intensifier because they don’t let you say “mother-f***in’” on the radio.  (Same number of syllables.  Fits the melody perfectly.  I’m nearly positive he wrote “mother-f***in’” first, and then had to find something to replace it with later.)

But no one in the history of earth has ever used “God-forsaken” as an intensifier.  Ever.

Which shows that Jason Mraz has been misunderstanding people for a very long time (ever since he first heard the phrase, “God-forsaken” in some old coyboy movie), and has now enshrined his ignorance of what everyone else in the world means by the term in a song being played all around the world, even as we speak.

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“God-forsaken” is always used to emphasize the badness, emptiness, or barrenness of a place.  When you say, “This God-forsaken town,” you mean the same as, “This terrible/tragic/sad/deserted town.”

What you definitely don’t mean is, “This totally/seriously (!!!) town.”

Which is how Mraz is using it.

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One can just see Mraz fans coming back from a Mraz show.

Their friends who were more intelligent hadn’t gone.  The non-goers ask the goers:

So, how was the show?

And the goers reply:

That was one God-forsaken awesome show, man.  You should’ve God-forsakenly been there.

And the non-goers then hang their heads in despair for the human race.

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And finally, did I mention that no one has the right to be loved?

No one.

Except husbands and wives.  They have the right to be loved by their spouses.

And children have the right to be loved by their parents.

But there is no such thing as a general right to be loved.

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To have the right to be loved, you have to first be lovable; you have to make yourself worthy of love.  Husbands and wives automatically are that for each other (it’s part of the vows), and children automatically are that for their parents (it’s part of the responsibility of creating a child).

But everybody else has to earn it.

How do songs that aren’t good get recorded, and get played on the radio?

Why don’t people who are writing bad songs just give up in the middle of the song and start working on a different one?  That’s what I always did.

So, for the education of the world, here are three things to keep in mind when thinking about songs.

(1) A song must have a melody.  It’s called a song because you sing it.  If you can’t sing it, it’s not a song.  Songs are not songs if they can’t be sung.

To know whether your song has a melody, play it for someone who doesn’t know it, and then ask her or him to sing the melody back, unaccompanied.

If he or she can’t sing the tune to him- or herself without musical backup, it’s not a melody.

(2) A song’s melody must reach its highest point on the chorus.  The chorus must be generally higher than the verses, so as to build tension.  (“Times Like These” [video] by Foo Fighters is a perfect example of what not to do.) The chorus is supposed to be the high-tension point of the song.  If your chorus melody is lower than the verse melody, you have not written a good song.

(“Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” is one of perhaps two songs ever to actually be able to build intensity by having the melody go lower, rather than higher [on "in thy dark street shineth"].)

(3) If your song has a melody, but it’s not fun or interesting to sing without accompaniment, it isn’t a good melody.  Try making the chorus go higher, rather than staying flat or going lower.  If that doesn’t work, give up, and write a different song.

Occasionally, a good song can have a boring melody, if the interaction of the melody with the accompaniment is interesting in itself.  However, this is rare.  It happens.  But not very often.  But it does happen.

So, that reminded me of my theory about how different musical genres can be distinguished based on their general lyrical approaches.  I.e., they can be distinguished based on which “person” they are written in, and which attitude they take toward that “person.”

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Metal: “I rock”

Grunge: “I suck”

Emo: “You suck”

Hip-Hop: “I rock”

Punk: “They suck” (And so do you, if you happen to be a part of them.)

Soul/R&B: “My life rocks now that you’ve arrived/gone.”

Praise-n-Worship: “God rocks and I suck (without Him).”

Inspirational: “We rock”

60′s Folk: “If only we rocked (together)”

Indy Singer/Songwriter: “Your life would stop sucking and start rocking if you would only listen to my sage observations about you and life.”

Traditional Ballads: “She/he had a rockin’/sucky life” (here, let me tell you about it)

Etc.

I very much enjoyed it, but still have a lot of processing to do.

Also watched the latest episode of Dollhouse today on Hulu.

Continues to be awesome.

So, there you have it.  The Wife is reading over my shoulder and I can’t write when she does that.  So I’m going to go now.  :-)

This is one of my favorite of the “Digital Shorts” in which he co-stars. (I know, it’s “old” by now and everyone’s already seen it, but watch it again.  It’s hilarious, and good. Hilariously good.)

(1) The Foo Fighter’s album, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, is the best album I’ve heard since Coldplay’s X&Y.

An essentially perfect album.

(Like Joy Electric’s The White Songbook.)

(Or Saints & Children’s Of Seasons, Of Souls. ;-)

(2) Wall-E is fantasmagorical. It’s amazing how much they could do with essentially no dialogue between the main characters/couple.

The artists/character designers were geniuses.  Emotion in robots, brilliantly done.

And I even ended up liking the humans too.  A great movie all around.

Listen to what he does with the melody, the chord progression, and the song structure.

(The song doesn’t have a verse-chorus structure like normal rock songs.  It has a verse-chorus-verse structure.  Or something.)

(And I love the minor-four in the “Mix and a-mingle” line.  There’s nothing like the major-four, minor-four, major-one cadence. [But I'm not sure he goes to one immediately.  I'll have to listen to it again.])

Awesome.

I heard a version of the song the other day that included the second half of the song:

In the meadow we can build a snowman

And pretend that he’s a circus clown

We’ll have lots of fun with Mr. Snowman

Until the other kiddies knock him down

When it snows, ain’t it thrillin’?

Though your nose gets a-chillin’?

We’ll frolic and play

The Eskimo way

Walkin’ in a winter wonderland.

Most renditions of the song do not include this half.  I suspect it’s because the artists think the reference to Eskimos is racist.

But what really caught my attention was the fact that the artist singing the song changed the line, “Until the other kiddies knock him down,” to “Until the other kiddies come around.”

Why would you have to stop having fun with Mr. Snowman if there are other people around?

What exactly were you doing with Mr. Snowman?

(2) “Do You Hear What I Hear?” by Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker

The second line of the song is, “Do you see what I see?”

I heard a version of the song the other day in which the first verse was cut out altogether, presumably so, “Do you hear what I hear?” would be the second line of the song.

(3) “Frosty the Snowman” by Walter “Jack” Rollins and Steve Nelson

Why does Frosty run down to the village with a broomstick in his hand?

What is he planning on doing there with the broomstick?

(4) Any song in which the artist is too much of a wimp to sing the explicitly Christian lyrics, and instead, sings, “Noel” over and over again to cover the lyrics she or he has omitted.

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