Re: Good Dog Bad Dog classic album

[John Paul Davis <johnd at antioch-college_edu>]

Angela Pancella wrote:

> http://www.thunderstruck.org/overtherhine.htm

What a strange web page... Yet another one of those evangelical web 
sites (like: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/ or http://www.theooze.com) 
that works hard to put forth a veneer of coolness and hipness and which 
ends up just coming off as a sort of apologia for a strange synthesis of 
conservative Christianity and consumerism. Stuff like this: "I've not 
said much yet about the lyrics. They are literate; "All I Need Is 
Everything," for example, has a higher BAPM (Biblical allusions per 
minute) count than even most U2 songs."
(What does she mean by "they are literate?" The lyrics can read?) That's 
intended, I think, as a selling point, which suggests something about 
who their percieved audience is, people who want justification for 
consuming mainstream "pop" culture (and fast food! and getting tattoos, 
explicitly forbidden in Leviticus!)but who also want to feel good about 
getting some kind of undefined spiritual cash value.  The songs are 
"pop" culture but they have a whole bunch of Biblical references so 
they're "ok" for gelicals to consume?

Odd.

I wonder if the writer has thought more deeply about the ongoing 
undercurrent of doubt that is in GDBD, esp. in songs like "Happy To Be 
So" - the whole entire point of the song is that prayers aren't 
answered, and the song's character has to come to terms with that (see 
"I Radio Heaven" for another example of that).
GDBD's main spiritual force is *community* more than any church or deity 
- almost all the songs on GDBD deal with human relationships, and the 
divine enters in to some of them, but songs like "The Seahorse", 
"Everyman's Daughter", "Etcetera Whatever", "Latter Days" and 
"Faithfully Dangerous" all deal with the spiritual as realized in the 
nexus of human relationships- the community. Not that community in 
unChristian - it's very Christian - but a preoccupation with consumables 
("pop" culture) and a definition of the self centered in the stuff one 
buys and eats and listens to is corrosive to community (and I'd argue, 
to faith). One doesn't see the very Christian ideas of responsbility and 
   social morality enter in here - no one seems to be asking not if 
Starbucks is yummy or if the Bible allows us to drink coffe but the more 
important question - is giving money to Starbucks moral? Is giving money 
to the racist/mysogynist/hate monger Eminem, no matter how good his 
movie is, moral?

"Latter Days" is *not* a reference to, as the article's author suggests, 
the "last days" (for you not-Christian folks, that's a popular 
evangelical terminalogy for the End of the World As We Know It).


- John

np: "Umoja" - Geoffrey Oryema

-- 
John Paul Davis
Center for Community Learning
Antioch College

++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Ned Flanders: Let's just agree to disagree
Principal Skinner: I don't agree to that
Mrs. Krabapple: Me neither
++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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