Saturday, March 24, 2007
From Plato to Oshkosh
Fred Clark, the blogosphere's theologian, has found a YouTube sermon by Alan Ives on ungodly music. According to Mr. Ives (Charles is spinning right now), three categories of beats are not Gospel: Boogie Woogie, Back Beat, and Break Beat. As Fred points out, this fine musician has been convinced that the pleasure he clearly takes from music is evil. It is very sad, since he does have talent, and is clearly devout as well. Something has broken down in his life to make this disconnect between what he needs and what he thinks he needs. I can only hope that this is his public persona, that Mr. Ives gets funky in privacy. Perhaps he is dissembling, borrowing from Plato in feeling that music should be used to manipulate the public. He doubts the devotion of his congregation, so he discourages them from listening to "physical" music. It is still wrong, but not as sad.
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3 comments:
Mr. Ives had better pray fervently that he never personally encounters me, because I'm very serious about my faith and I get IN THE FACES of idiots like him. All of the music I compose is inspired by my faith, and some of it is rock, some of it is jazz, some of it is blues, though most of it is classical. What a sad buffoon he is. He and all like him. If he had ANY IDEA how many people he keeps from God with his lunacy, he'd realize that he is part of the problem, and not a part of the solution.
/rant
Oh. My.
I wonder what he says about King David, who "danced before God with all his might."
But maybe that was ok, since boogie woogie hadn't been invented yet.
(But wait, didn't gospel come out of boogie woogie and the blues? Seems to me that the same folks playing on beats 2 and 4 at clubs on Saturday nights were often also working as church musicians on Sunday mornings...)
terminal, I'm afraid there is probably a racial component to his anti-boogie woogie stance, given my experience with Oshkosh. His definition of "Gospel music" is not black gospel.
Hucbald, I think he probably follows the philosophy of exclusion rather than inclusion. He isn't trying to bring all people to God, he is trying to exclude certain people from God. Though I may be uncharitable in this speculation.
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