musica generica

Does anyone else find so-called 'worship music' insufferable? I call it musica generica because it is so boring and generic! Just had to vent.

I went to a big crusade-type thing last night in my hometown, with the evangelist Greg Laurie of the Harvest church in California. It was very very cool. Hundreds of people responded to the altar call; I've never seen something on as large a scale as that before. There were several bands there like Audio Adrenaline, the Katinas, and Steven Curtis Chapman, and an extremely cool guitar player called Dennis Agajanian (???? spelling ????) who used to play for Johnny Cash. The message was good, really sound and interesting, which was nice to see when the word 'evangelist' often means 'wacko' to people in my culture.

But the worship music! There was a band put together from different churches throughout Christchurch. It was so loud it was actually unbearable at points, worse than any of the real musicians who played; all the singers were gyrating around to these immensely predictable and boring songs with words that don't quite make sense because the person who wrote the lyrics can't rhyme and that are the most modern songs out so only people from "cool" churches know them. Sheesh. To me, worship music has got to be the most boring style of music ever created. Sure, some people can do good stuff with it, but in the main it seems to me to be tuneless, repetitive and immensely predictable in its chord structure etc. Why can't we take a leaf from African Americans' book and do cool gospel stuff?

Sorry to complain. It was actually a great evening. It's just embarrassing that the only band/musician there from Christchurch was terrible. Usually I don't mind worship music too much, but this - this was different.

A very cool thing that happened yesterday, however - my friend got engaged. :) She and her fiance met us at the event and was waving her ring hand around with a big sparkly diamond on it. It was so nice to see because they were so happy; just grinning and grinning all night. Ah, young love... It's also slightly weird because it doesn't seem like people my age are mature enough to get married - it makes me feel old. But mostly, it's all just very very cool. They've been going out since they were about 16 or 17 so it's not like they're just rushing into it or anything.

(Just realised I've used the word 'cool' about a million times in this post.)

Photos: my dad yelled for me to come running yesterday morning when he spotted these hot air balloons out the window. It was great seeing them so close up/low to the ground.