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“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”–Hunter Thompson
I’m in my confirmation class, where we sit around ‘rapping.’ [Oh God, how I detested that word, it made my gall bladder twist.] Our leader is the ‘youth minister’, a curly grey man who is incredibly effeminate….he is married, however, with an adopted daughter. He made the old man nervous, so he wasn’t all bad; even though he lived in enemy territory/borough next door.
“So,” he asks me, “You like music. Do you think there’s a trend now to put more Jesus on the radio?”
I was ready for this piece of shithouse paper on my shoe. “No. It’s just another trend and a way for record companies to make more money. As soon as the songs stop selling, they’ll move on to songs about cars and girls,”
Silence. The fool doesn’t ask for more input, goes back to his notes about all the wonderful praise-worthy songs out there.
So, as David Byrne asked, “How did [we] get here?’
Well, as the hippy ethos self destructed in a sea of acid and dead fish, ‘love one another’ ideas hung around, dirty clothes on the line. Clean cut young people sang hopelessly chirpy ditties:
Good bass line, tho. I liked her voice.
Religion (or at least spirituality) seeping through the crack in the door, taking ‘love one another’ to a different place. Norman Greenbaum’s Sprint in the Sky with its textbook boogie, the silly final verse of “Signs,” Pacific Gas & Electric’s Are You Ready, which is just a gospel song with a long smoking guitar solo. Aretha (of course) and Laura Nyro had gospel influences and lyrics in their mainstream stuff. Then you get inane blather like this:
Or just change lyrics to a gospel song (how creative):
Eventually, Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell came along and overdosed the country on AM radio pseudo-karmic spirituality. Want to hear the coolest part of ‘JC Superstar’? Listen to Chris Hubbard get down!
However, since we’re being nostalgic-ish, let’s push A28 on the jukebox and listen to this: