www.jeffthefish.com

When I was doing my “research” for my Larry Norman pun, I came across a crazy person’s web site!

Here is a minimal background story: Larry Norman was a Christian musician whose heyday was in the 60s and 70s. With church kids my age, he is probably most famous for the apocalyptic song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”, as popularized in a DC Talk cover.

Anyway, Larry at some point realized that Christian pop music was becoming cheesy, and that secular music was….less cheesy. So he wrote a song called “Why Should The Devil (Have All The Good Music?)”. It was really meant to be as tongue-in-cheek as it sounds. It was also meant to be a sort of plea for Christian musicians to make quality, innovative music.

But fundamentalists can be nuts.

These folks use sophisticated logic like:

“…where did ‘Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?’ actually come from? The ‘mis-quote’ was taken from a message Reverend Rowland Hill, pastor of Surrey Chapel in London, preached in 1844. Reverend Hill did NOT say, ‘Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?’ — what he actually said was, ‘The devil should not have all the best tunes.’ “

Wow, big diff lol.

But my absolute fav part was when they said: “Let’s conduct an observable, provable and scientific experiment…”

1. You missed Larry’s point completely didn’t you?
2. Observable? HAHAHAHAHA
3. Provable? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
4. SCIENTIFIC? JAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJA (that’s how they laugh in Mexico)

So what’s the experiment?

“Here are two songs in RealAudio. Listen to both. You decide — which one is GOOD! And also which one is the DEVIL’S.”

Holy frick. So I did it. They did not make it easy. The first song is a heavy metal song featuring a guy grunting things like “God is dead and now you die.” I personally don’t like heavy metal, but the music was fine. The vocals, meh.

The second song was a lawrencewelkian version of Some Generic Hymn. Acoustic guitar playing predictable chords, predictable (OMG is it predictable!) three part harmony, generic lyrics, violin solo exactly where it’s supposed to be.

And the site never explains which song is better and more importantly, why one of those songs is better! It’s supposed to be self-evident, I guess.

So which one is good? Neither is very good, but the second one, in my Official  Internet Opinon, is less good than the first. Which one is the devil’s? Over the top, anti-religious lyrics or overwhelmingly bland formulaic music that makes would-be believers vomit? Is this a trick question?

The page goes on and on with logical fallacy after logical fallacy. I’d make fun of all of it, but there’s only one Internet and I don’t want to waste it all.

Stumble it!

Posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 in Category Funs. Please comment, ok?