AT Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 20:48:06

>Lee said:
>
>"I would not listen to a band that had an album with ten songs advocating 
>becoming a junkie, telling kids at their shows between songs to become 
>junkies, and handing out literature after to teach the proper way to be a 
>junkie.  But if a junkie writes a realistic song about the hell being a 
>junkie put him/her through - I might buy that.
>
>You could substitute 'christian' for 'junkie' - and the above statement 
>would still be true (for me)."
>
>I say:
>
>Bingo.
>
>It's the monothematic-only-thing-you-ever-eat-sing-or-breathe and 
>you're-wrong-if-you-don't-eat-sleep-or-breath-about it the same way and 
>boy-if-we-could-only-make-everyone-else-be-just-like-us that gets in the 
>way of any obsession music for me (Christian or otherwise).

I'll cut to the chase -- I'm not a Christian. I don't even have an 
identifiable spiritual centre...unless you're talking Ho-Ho's or Ding-Dongs, 
here.

Not much of a Christian music fan or a "junkie" song fan, but I've yet to 
hear an artist with a do-or-die drug habit spit out an album of songs saying 
"please, come be cool...and strung out....just like me."

I don't like Christian music if it contains the 
beat-me-with-a-bible-and-make-me-pack-my-bags-cos-I'm-going-on-a-guilt-trip 
verbally abusive, condescending, moralistic, self-righteous platitudes 
spoken in the name of an imaginary old geezer or his martyred son telling us 
we're all going to burn in hell because he made us in his own image, as 
failures, when the irony is that this *is* hell and they've all arrived too 
late to save us because the weenie roast has already begun.

AND

I don't like drug addled/inspired/tinged creations because they're filled 
with self-loathing, alienating, self-destructive, insular, gratuitous, 
pitiful wanking. Boo, hoo, hoo....I'm a strung out crack addict and have no 
one to pity me so I'll write 10 songs about circling the drain and how I 
consciously know I'm a fuck up, but what the hell, I might as well take this 
out on the world before spiraling into oblivion where the media and a 
certain percentage of the public can make me into a martyr as someone with a 
"deep and troubled past whose dark soul was only out lived by his briliant 
songs of self-loathing, alienation, self-destruction, and gratuitous, 
insular pity...with a side-order of wanking."

Substituting the Christian aesthetic with that of a "junkie" doesn't work as 
an analogy....unless you're talking about the underlying motivation for both 
-- the search for salvation.

Gord Gano of The Violent Femmes seems to have taken all the platitudes out 
of his public spirituality...and it works for me just fine.

Jaimie Vernon
Annoyed by the double-standard of some of the posters here.

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