Love Truth Blog

A common refrain that I hear constantly in Christmas conversations is how it resembles anything Christian. I don’t mean that nonsense of how trees and Nativities are some sort of subterfuge for keeping alive some ancient pagan saturnalia. Christians around the fourth century AD had actually set December 25 as a day of observing the Advent of the Christ, which was intended to be a rival celebration to the paganism. Still, many Christians in the twenty-first struggle finding anything Christian in the modern Christmas holiday. This detachment from the Christ in Christmas is evident in the way popular expresses itself in music. Sometime ago I received a gift of a Christmas compilation music CD, and I was greatly appreciative of the present. One of the songs on the CD was about the sending to Santa Claus a long list of “Things I Want,” which included a “solid gold Harley with machine guns on the front.” The whole tune is very comical, and certainly a parody of the kind of crass material...

I remember back in the 80s the very shock and awe of Boy George. One can imagine the conversation between two dudes going like this way: Dude 1, “Hey, check out this chick!” Dude 2, “Um, that ‘she’ is a ‘he.’ ” Dude 2: “Whoa….?!” Pushing the envelope from what is the norm to the extreme is part and parcel of the popular music scene for decades. This pushing of the envelope more often than none dissipates into normalcy, so what is extreme at one time simply is adopted into the mainstream so there will always be some heckler saying, “Yeah, been there done that.” Alice Cooper, Adam Ant, Boy George, Prince, Madonna, Brittney Spears, Lady Ga Ga, Miley Cyrus, etc., all in some way have pushed the envelope in their own way; yet, even now some may be considered a novelty, the stuff someone might say, “Wow, I remember listening to that as a kid…” Another downside to the whole pushing the envelope idea is some attractive ideas floating around in the music scene can never be sustained over...

I was 14 years old (was I ever that young? Oh, so long ago!), but it was then I got into Ozzy’s Blizzard of Oz . What an audio journey to hear Randy Rhodes on that Les Paul and Flying V stream out one arpeggio after another a light speed. If there was an electric guitar in the early nineteenth century that would be Paganini’s signature sound. Only a few years earlier Edward Van Halen left 70s rockers shell shocked with his whole “brown sound” and two hand tapping technique. The craziness of the music I listened to as a lad. The thing is this: Rhodes and Van Halen never invented their techniques out of nothing, they simply capitalized on the way they innovatively used them into their own creative stream of conscious. I was a 6 year old tyke when Richie Blackmore streamed arpeggios on “Highway Star,” years before Rhodes. Still, Blackmore other guitarist would have melded the classical style into their own music. Guitarists were doing two hand taps before Van Halen. Elvis was not even ...

Just looked at my I-Tunes library and discovered there’s about 39.96 gigs of music, which is roughly 15 days worth of listening pleasure, give or take a hours worth of downloaded music videos and a Simpson’s Tree House of Terror episode. But, with all that ear candy, I thought to offer some reflections on what I have learned from popular music through the years. Something that I have mentioned to some friends is the curse of the second and third hit. Having a hit song is more than something that is popular at the moment, but it has lasting power to transcend time, so that once it is out there people of various generations can easily recognize it. “Hound Dog” is nearly a half-century old, the tune is stamped upon the collective consciousness of generations of people, and it has lasting power in that the song sounds just as fresh today as it did back in the 1950s. Imagine the few iconic musicians pulling off five or more hit songs, it is a rare club. Think of the Elvis, Michael Jack...