Coded gray.

Friday 20 October 2006

Screenshot Smallville

Pic of the day: Somebody save me! Images of death and destruction... here from the TV series Smallville.

The Devil and good music

I distinctly remember writing about this before, but Google Desktop can't seem to dredge it up. It may well be that I never kept it... I have a tendency to write much more than I actually publish. Probably a good thing overall.

Anyway, "Why should the Devil have all the good music?" asked William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. He then set about to reclaim much of the more energetic music for Christian use. But could there be a reason why the Devil and good music tended to go together in the first place? There have actually been some theological speculation on this, most of which is based on Ezekiel 28, the prophecy against the King of Tyre. Historians have claimed (I am not in a position to verify this) that there was no king in Tyre at the time, as the title of the city's regent was Prince. This should somehow mean that the prophecy is about the real ruler behind the throne, the evil spirit that considers itself god of this world: Lucifer. In older translations there is a mention of musical instruments in this passage, along with precious stones and gold:

"Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee."

Admittedly this sounds like it could refer to Satan, whom Jesus said he saw fall from Heaven like a lightning. From the text (which reads quite differently in some modern translations) one could get the impression that music was one of Lucifer's domains.

I'm not saying this because I believe it is so. I have no strong opinion on that text, which seems one of the least obvious in the book, especially if you read several different translations, which I tend to do rather than latch on to one particular phrase translated by humans and fight to the death for the view that THIS is God's own word.

What I have discovered recently, though, is that some of my new favorite music is quite evil.

***

You may remember that I subscribed to Last.FM, a music service, a few months ago. It installs a program that takes note of the music I play via my computer, and creates an imaginary radio station that plays my favorite music and songs that are similar to that. If I come upon songs that I like particularly well, I can mark them as "loved", and occasionally (not all the time) play a collection of only my loved tracks. Nice when I take five minutes at work to defragment my brain. And that's where I discovered it. A disproportional number of my loved tracks were beautiful and had really disturbing lyrics. Also, they tend to play on in my brain afterwards. (Of course, this could be because of the beautiful music. Or because my brain is a very disturbing place...)

Now playing in my head: Wild World, by Cat Stevens. A beautiful melody, really catchy, and a love song of sorts. Except for the passive-aggressive manipulation. The lyrics basically amount to "I don't want you to leave me, but if you do I wish you safe travels, as if that would ever happen!" Eh. Who would not break up with a guy saying things like that? (Not that I know anything about breaking up with guys... perhaps girls really like this stuff. Eww.)

Another favorite with a surprisingly similar name: Mad world. I know the performance by Gary Jules only, but the original is supposedly by Tears for Fears, which seems a well chosen name. It is also a beautiful melody. I did see it on YouTube, so you may be lucky to find it there unless YouTube has pruned it before you read this. Anyway, the lyrics are so over the top depressive that I cannot imagine anyone but a few goths listening to them without the pretty music. "...dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had", eh? Talk about the devil and good music!

And then there's the Norwegian band Sirenia, which to their credit is unabashedly "metal". I went so far as to buy the CD with this song, Meridian. It is the theme song for one of the novels I haven't had time to write (although I did start on it, as usual). The melody is so beautiful, and the small part of the lyrics you can easily understand sound good too: "Come with me to seek the sun inside", which sounds like something I could have said. The murky male vocals are all about death and destruction, of course. Then again, what do you expect from Norwegian males? It is not that long since the Vikings. Oh yes, the lyrics.

Even Eurythmics, despite the name (the ancient Greek prefix eu- means "good") has done a similar thing in their favorite song in my ears, "I saved the world today". You can easily see how I would like a song like that, and the tune is certainly living up to their name. But the body of the lyrics is filled with emotionally loaded words that evoke images of death, destruction and despair.

I won't even mention my favorite country and western songs, none of which are on my last.fm or come into my house anymore. Depression and destruction is par for the course in that genre. But I've written about that before.

***

Certainly there are non-spiritual explanations of this. The most obvious being that extraordinarily creative people tend to come from families with bipolar disorder. Depression and self-destructive thoughts is something they are intimately familiar with ... many of them are no more sane than necessary themselves. The same people who write the best poetry tend to not live too far from the edge themselves, presumably by some genetic code that is literally part of creation.

But why search for such a complicated explanation, when we can simply blame the Devil?

Luckily there is also some beautiful music that is not Evil Inside. Or at least I haven't found it out, yet. Stay tuned...


Yesterday <-- This month --> Tomorrow?
One year ago: WorldWind vs Google Earth
Two years ago: Incredibly detailed
Three years ago: Undesiring
Four years ago: Sims Unleashed again
Five years ago: King of Dreams
Six years ago: Into the public domain
Seven years ago: MS Comics

Visit the archive page for the older diaries I've put out to pasture.


Post a comment on the Chaos Node forum
I welcome e-mail. My handle is "itlandm" and I now use gmail.com.
Back to my home page.