songs

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

After she read my last post about sexist Christian music, my friend, Sarah Morice Brubaker of Religion Dispatches, told me I'd gotten a terrible Christian song called "How Beautiful" into her head. I'd heard it many years ago, but what I didn't realize was that it makes frequent appearances at evangelical Christian weddings. It's a truly horrific song, but it got me thinking: This business about "husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church" is more or less the foundation of Christian Right politics. Any guesses where we can learn all about it? That's right: Dippy Christian wedding songs!

Season six is my favorite season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I like the dark themes, and I like seeing Willow grow up and mature as a result of her grief. (I also like the musical episode.) Recently, I was talking over Buffy when my friend, Bitch contributor Emily Manuel, reminded me about the surprising musical accompaniment to that season's final moments. This is the moment when Xander Harris forgives Willow Rosenberg, and Sarah McLachlan's "Prayer of St. Francis" plays in the background (lyrics):

I agree that apocalyptic imagery has figured prominently in the public imagination in 2011 in part as a result of the anxieties of this moment in time. Nowhere has this been more evident than in songs about love, in which said love is either a distraction from or metaphor for the end times. First, let's take a look at Aussie singer, Lenka's "At the End of the World (lyrics here): 

 

My name is Kristin Rawls, and, yes, I am a preacher's daughter. I'm in my early 30s, and I was raised in an unusual blend of Protestant traditions. The preacher (my dad) grew up in the Southern Baptist church, got "saved" during the Pentecostal-influenced "Jesus movement" of the 1970s and ultimately settled in a mainline (not fundamentalist) tradition. My family practiced a confusing mix of them all. The result? I became pretty cynical about the the whole thing.

This blog series is named after blueswoman Michelle Malone's song, "Preacher's Daughter" (transcript here):

(Neko Case, "This Tornado Loves You," lyrics here.)

In that way that some people (read: me) obsessively decide which three wishes they'd choose if they had three wishes, I have considered carefully whose voice I would want if some fairy godmother appeared and granted me the power to actually not sound like a squawking turkey when I sing. The choice gets tougher, though, between the top two.