Monday, November 27, 2006

Gospel Music v. Other Playlists

The question was posed as to why I prefer the other music that we have listened to over the gospel music that we recently started listening to. Well...since I know very little about the technicalities behind music I tend to focus mostly on rhythms and lyrics (if they are decipherable) or just the over all melody. The gospel music has pretty clear lyrics and I'm not a huge fan of religious music in general bacuse it makes me feel as though I'm being preached at. Some of the music we listened to before had songs that I couldn't understand the lyrics in at all and I liked that better because I focused on listening to the voice to try to understand what the singer was feeling, but I had no desire to feel what the musician was saying while listening to the gospel lists. In addition to that I just related better to some of the other songs that we have listened to. I suppose if I were to listen to these lists in full (I only made it half way through the second list because it wasn't working properly and I had spent over an hour there already) perhaps I would enjoy the music better, but from my taste of the gospel music, it's just not in my realm of enjoyment.

1 comment:

Nic McPhee said...

Thanks for the thoughtful response. So the issue is mostly about the lyric content? You can understand them, and you're not interested in being preached at, so it isn't really your bag, or something close to that?

I'm not much interested in being preached at either (I got plenty of that growing up in Texas), and I suspect I would have responded pretty negatively to this when I was 18 for a lot of the same reasons. I think it helps, though, to focus on the people that made the music, however, and see this music as one of several tools we can use to try to understand them and their lives a little better. Then we can talk about the fact that they're preaching to someone, and who they're preaching to and why, without it being about them preaching to us.

Thoughts?