Excerpts from Music: ramblings

I don't know when it happened, but sometime in the 90's, electronic music began to be harsh. People wanted buzzing, somewhat violent noises; they wanted their synthesisers to scream, instead of sing. Notes flew in like knives, and the whirl of machinery turned not strong, and not even quite sinister, but razor-sharp; blood was never far, and it might be your own. Voices were not enhanced but distorted and mangled; the faces behind the music were no longer strong or happy, but mean and even bestial; they worked for the expressions of harpies, and sang for chromium-plated blades.

To a degree I have to wonder if this is an overreaction to the feminization of men in our culture. First off, men dominate electronic music. Men, as a whole, tend to like things offering a strong and manly image because it is in their nature to act that image. For decades our generation of men have listened to many giving voice to the lie that men are taught this strong nature. Instead of handing us footballs and G.I. Joe, we are supposed to kick back and EZ-Bake with the girls down the street. Men are not taught maleness. It is a gift from God and it needs to be nurtured, practiced and perfected in the image of Christ. In the disco days and immediately following, you had men who were willing to create songs that were beautiful, but many of them were devoid of the final touch that makes music most appealing to men. The songs were effeminized. Without God and without a strong male culture in electronic music, the experiments of most were doomed to obscurity because it wasn't there yet.

Clearly some men saw the manliness missing from the disco era and they strove to find it. Unfortunately there is a corrupt and false imitation of the manliness that I am talking about, and I think that is what you are seeing in the music you are calling harsh.

The easiest way to accomplish the false image of strong manliness is through simplistic but overtly aggressive rhythm, dirty or even unabashedly ugly sounds and dull yet driving and repetitive compositional structures designed solely to arouse animal angst. It seems the part but it is quite the opposite. The music is offensive to every aspect of the well-formed sense of beauty. It is ugly. It is intellectually shallow. It is disturbingly aggressive, with lyrical content focused on things of a perverse sexual nature and often times including elements of violence either physical or, at a minimum, towards the truth. That is why it bothers you. It offends every element in you that is perfected in Christ and it offends the desires in your heart for the things He has yet to perfect in you. It offends the Truth.

For the Christian, the well formed male artist can manifest this latent desire of men into songs with powerful rhythms, complex melodies and intricate logical composition and combine them with lyrical content promoting strong values like physical sacrifice and perseverance. Men are drawn to those qualities because they imitate Christ. Some of what you listen to embodies that to a degree because, as all are impressed with the natural law in our hearts, even secular artists have access to much of this by default. This typically shows up most clearly in instrumentation as opposed to lyrics, which is why I have trained myself to listen to lyrics last. (not always a good thing) -- Good instrumentation combined with content in conflict with the Truth doesn't give us enough because its focus is all-wrong.

There are many things which people associate with my little corner of music that I detest. Disco has homosexuality and effeminacy, electronica has the smarmy, oiled Euro-trash, and now this horror of evil lurking in every mix I hear. And how can I tell people that I make electronic dance music, when the words conjure visions of dark rooms with flashing lights and the incessant thump-thump-thump of the overwrought four-on-the-floor, punctuated with the sounds of the devil's own drilling machinery? Who in their right mind would want to be part of that? It is a roller-coaster gone insane: it is insane.

Insane it is. I went to a couple of raves before they had really hit this side of the Atlantic. It was fun. All of the people there were about the music. It reinforced my errant view of what it is about for most people. You had radio DJ's like myself and club DJ's and most of them were not "scene" people. They were music people. They suffered from the same naive affliction that I had. Several years later I went to a show in Gainesville Florida. In the past I would spend time in a club and be utterly shocked when people seeming to have a good time divided into warring factions competing in a violent brawl. I tossed those evidences aside as the exception and not the norm. I figured they didn't care for the music like I did. I was looking for God in the music. I was looking for good and that is all I wanted to see. The ones who didn't care for the music were there to notch their next one-night stand. They assumed I was there for the same reason -- and every guy there was a threat to arouse this deep territorial animalist urge boiling within. My problem was that I refused to see evil when it was guiding me by the hand, urging me to take the plunge. My whole world came crashing down because the reality of the "scene" surrounding so much of what I enjoyed became abundantly clear. I saw first hand that it was about promiscuous sex, alcohol, drug abuse and violence. I saw more that night than I cared to see in 100 lifetimes. I was standing in hell and one bow to temptation may have hauled my soul down as a permanent fixture in it. Grace got me through that night with nothing more than a damaged vision of mankind and a bad hangover. My vision of "the scene" that was so intimately tied to "the music" was shattered in a giant heap of reality. Satan was there and I wanted no part of that.

I found it in the headphones: through them I saw a world of intense joy, even in intense sadness; a world in which I could be alive, and could be myself; this is Art, the gift of music, which God made for man. All the facade is stripped away; all the half-truths and compromises gone; and what remains is Reality, and a glimpse of the face of God. Those people who think they see only evil in this genre have not heard or understood the true manifestation of it. The music I love is the good and unpolluted thing, and they have heard only its perversion. And I do not apologise for being attracted to the good. And if any credit is due me at all, it is only for having wanted to follow God. Praise Him, and follow Him too.

Despite my vision of the scene being shattered I knew that I loved the music for all of the right reasons. I preferred instrumentals because they shielded me from the Godless lyrics that accompanied so much of electronic music. I always dreamed that one day there would be a Christian electronic artist. The first one I heard disappointed me to all ends. It was simply samples of the album “Frequencies” by LFO with over-dubbing of mumbled Sacred Scripture and extemporaneous prayer. The musical innovation was LFO. The samples were virtually entire songs. Why would I go for the imitation, even spiced up with the Truth when deep down the music itself was such a blatant rip as to be a total lie? The two were simply not compatible.

I have experienced nearly physical pain at masses with bad music. This means that going to mass at all is a struggle for me, since nearly all of them have bad music; the last mass I attended with good music was a midnight Christmas mass three years ago. I have refrained from communion more than once for the pain and rage in my soul at the musicians who blindly and stupidly wreck the moment for me. God forgive them: for they know not what they do. But this is my weakness: and it is nevertheless objectively not good. It is a bad weakness, for were I a saint, I could make a sacrifice of praise at all times, even when assailed by the typical music of modern masses here in America

I see you joined the club man. Camp tunes do not induce right and reverent worship. God deserves the best. You know that and I know that. It shouldn't be such a secret.

And I praise Him, therefore: I praise Him! To God be all the glory! Soli Deo gloria!

Please make sure to read Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists, 1999

Pope Clement VIII on coffee

Believing it was the drink of the devil, invented by Satan for the Moslem infidels as a substitute for the wine they were forbidden to drink, Catholic priests attacked it and forbade its consumption.

Since wine in the Western Christian world was sanctified by Christ and used in Holy Communion, coffee must then be of the anti-Christ.

It wasn't until the late 1500's that Pope Clement VIII settled the dispute. He asked that the brew be brought before him. Intrigued by its powerful aroma, he sipped the coffee and found it to be delicious. The Pope blessed it on the spot, saying, "Coffee is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it." With the Pope's blessing, imports of coffee to Italy and the Western world came flooding in, paving the way for the first western coffee houses.

This is the calling of the Catholic electronic musician: "It would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it" ... we must baptize it in the name of the Lord.