Musical Prejudice

One of my musical projects is putting my records and cds onto my computer hard drive so that I can enjoy the tunes in a more user friendly fashion. And it is great, I have them loaded up on Media Player and can listen to my cds and high resolution vinyl sourced files with ease. I expected this ability to make it more fun to listen to tunes, and to make them more accessible for my wife and children, and it has done that. For instance, it is easy and simple to listen to different versions of songs or just Ben Folds or all Beatles. My wife and oldest daughter responded by listening to music more. Cool! But I expected that.

I did NOT expect that my cds would sound so much better once they are ripped to my hard drive. I rip them at full resolution, that is what external 1 terabyte drives are for! And they sound better than they do when played by my rather nice Denon universal player. I use a M-audio sound card that can play the 24/96 vinyl files and use my Denon receiver to decode the data. And it sounds fantastic!

But those are not the real topics of the post, just encouragement for any reader of this humble blog to do the work to put their music on their hard drive. At full rez, you will thank me.

The real subject I wish to address is a form of prejudice. You see, after I rip the files, they are sorted into a genre. Now the genre is typically wrong or simplistic. Ben Folds does not always ROCK, he is more likely to POP or even POWER POP. And he writes a mean BALLAD. Think Brick. I do not want to hear Brick, a BALLAD when I am wanting to ROCK out. So I go in and make more accurate genre labels for each song on each album. It takes time, but it is time well spent.

So I get an artist like Phil Keagy or a band like King's X and they are lumped into RELIGIOUS or CHRISTIAN. Huh? I guess I can kind of understand Rebecca St. James being in that genre, but it is difficult to make that fit when she does songs like this:



OK, it starts off nice and gentle, but that is rocking in the middle! I agree that her lyrics are explicitly Christian. But many of The Clash's lyrics were explicitly socialist. And I do not see their music lumped together with Billy Bragg because of the world view of the people who make it. Here is Phil Keagy. Most of his music is classified in the RELIGIOUS genre, but does that fit his wide variety and diversity of musical output? You decide. Here is Phil playing what I call ACOUSTIC.



Wow. And it is wonderful in full resolution over your stereo. It has no words, but it is RELIGIOUS? Now I am sure Phil dedicates his music to God and Jesus, way to go Phil! But so did Bach. And if this is RELIGIOUS, what is it when Phil does this?



I think that fits the genre of ROCK or AMAZING GUITAR if I had that genre. Perhaps I will! But most of Phil's excellent work is put in RELIGIOUS. And some people would rather be caught listening to Perry Como than shopping in the RELIGIOUS aisle of even iTunes.

If this is you, stop being so prejudiced. It is keeping you from knowing and listening to outstanding music. Now I appreciate and am blessed by the spiritual content of Christian music. But I love listening to the Clash and I do not share their world view. If you are avoiding good music because it is Christian, your life is the poorer for it.

So listen to some Phil Keagy, some Rebecca St. James, some Jennifer Knapp, some Petra, some King's X. Rock out with The Call, funk it up with Kirk Franklin, bob your head to Toby Mac. Heck, I am an old fart, so I am not hip to even a small percentage of the excellent Christian music being made. I will the stuff I know and love in the future, but in truth, to hear about it, you will have to seek it out. Because mainstream wants to put it in a little box that does not fit.

But you, gentle reader, are not the kind of person to accept that kind of prejudice.

Rock on.