How To Disappear Completely

I find the work of such groups as ApologetiX to be rather discreditable. I can see why you'd be cautious. There's such a thing as a medium being inappropriate for a particular message (the Enimem parody you mentioned being an especially egregious example of that). After all, one of the main reasons why Weird Al's songs were funny was that the words that he was singing completely trivialized whatever the original artist intent was of the pieces that he used. I don't think we want to do that for the Gospel.

Yeah.....last week we listened to a parody of the "Hallelujah Chorus," which I found offensive because it blatantly trivialized the original Biblical text. I was just having trouble deciding if trivialization occurs in the reverse direction (changing secular to sacred). However, I am finding it more fruitful to start with musicians they already respect here, such as Sufjan Stevens and Johnny Cash (Note of clarification: Stevens and Cash are not parody musicians; I mention them rather to point out Christians whose music might provoke good discussion of the gospel).

I think it does - because a sacred text, to use your terms, is too serious to be set to certain types of music. For example, you can sing "Amazing Grace," a common meter song, to the melodies of both the "Gilligan's Island" theme and "House of the Rising Sun" - just try it. See what you think.

I think the trivialization is not because of anything inherent in the melodies; the connotations these melodies conjure up is what causes the problem. I can hardly concentrate on taking grace seriously if I sing about it to a tune that reminds me of slapstick humour and absurd plot situations. "House of the Rising Sun" has much more serious connotations.

Semiotic codes operate in music, and the techniques in "Gilligan's Island" are typically used to signify humour and triviality. The methods used in "House of the Rising Sun" are typical for portraying intense personal feeling. However, if the codes changed, we might be able to sing "Amazing Grace" to "Gilligan's Island" successfully. That would take an entire societal shift, though, so I don't think it worth the effort.

Haha...can anyone out there tell I have been reading WAY too much McClary recently?

My primary point was simply that connotations exist, no matter whether we like it or not. Don't you think that in some sense, though, the "semiotic codes" that make the Gilligan's Island appropriate in its original context but not as a hymn tune reflect something inherent in the nature of musical form? Isn't that, on a more basic level, why we distinguish between major and minor keys? I know this is a debate that goes all the way back to Aristotle and Plato with their attempts to classify musical modes (memories of CHAM). But, though I wouldn't agree with all their detailed conclusions, I can understand the motivation behind their writing.

What I DO know: we react to music in certain ways.
What I DON'T know: is our reaction natural or the result of conditioning?

For instance, we can say that the minor triad produces more tension in the listener than a major triad, because the minor third occurs further along in the harmonic overtone series. But how do we know what "tension" is? How do we know how to describe what we feel, and does what we feel change as a result of our description? I don't think we are tabla rasas, but I also believe our perception mechanisms are formed as we grow, as we learn from parents, peers, society how to think (so pure Kant doesn't really appeal to me, either). I am really not sure how the process of perceiving the world actually works. How can I help it? I am a philosophy major. :)

I guess to answer this question adequately, I'd need the insights of ethnomusicologists. I know there's sounds that appear atonal or dissonant to my Western ears that may be nothing of the sort to their creators. (The Bulgarian's women's choir harmonies based on seconds, sevenths, and ninths come to mind.) Still, how does this make sense when combined with our knowledge of the psychology and physics of hearing (such as the harmonic overtone series you mentioned)? Shouldn't it sound dissonant to every human being? Or is it that these sounds always sound the same, but reactions and definitions of the beautiful are vastly different? After all, to a listener from the time of the Notre Dame school, the triadic harmonies of the classical period would be offensively dissonant, correct?

I'd prefer to consider the question from an ethnomusicological/psychoacoustic standpoint, as above, simply because Kantian philosophy is a generalization that doesn't really have empirical moorings as far as I can tell (basically philosophy to me feels like intuition - and different people have different ideas of what "makes sense" to them, hence never-ending debates like idealism vs. realism which are really based on differing psychological tendencies, I believe). Unfortunately, I don't have the empirical data to make any claims from my chosen perspective. I just have lots of questions and a philosophical agenda.

Regardless of whether this phenomenon is the result of inherent musical structure or codified societal response, I have decided that "The Real Sin Savior" reinforces the "evangelicals are a bunch of obnoxious in-your-face psychos" stereotype and thus not very good to use in class as representative of Christians. I have already apologized for Pat Robinson. I don't want to keep apologizing.

Or is it that these sounds always sound the same, but reactions and definitions of the beautiful are vastly different? Yeah, but does how a thing sounds depend already on some sort of conditioned response? I guess my question is this: God's Word actually created the world. How much do our words create the world? (and I use "create" in a much less perfect way in the latter case, of course, since we are NOT God...yet certainly our words shape how we perceive the world.)

Oh, you're a constructivist, are you? :) All I can say is "I don't know about that," but since Philosophy of Language class, I've been leaning more toward realism in my views of language. Though at the same time I agree with many of the insights of Saussure and later semioticians.

I don't know the words to "The Real Sin Savior." I was just turned off by the concept. It's so trivializing. Like the Jesus Christ/Coca-Cola t-shirts that say "Try Jesus. He's the real thing."

Also, it depends on what the music is for. Can I take ApologetiX seriously as a work of art? To be honest, no. It's too silly.

However, I can listen to their songs, laugh at them, and ponder the message and how it contrasts with the original song. I don't think that is trivializing to the message, and it often makes me think in different ways... and compare and contrast my enjoyment of secular songs with the christian message, things that all to often tend to get shoved into their own isolated boxes. I don't think a message delivered in fun necessarily means the message is trivialized.

They also say it works well for broaching the gospel to unbelievers, however, I can't speak to the effectiveness of that, since I can't really step into an unbeliever's shoes to see what impressions I'd have.

I guess it depends on what unbelievers you're talking about. I know my friends who aren't Christians would think Christians were a pretty foolish and aesthetically insensitive bunch if their only knowledge of us came from this music.

Part of the problem is that we all seem to have fairly snobby friends (the participants in this discussion are all well-educated and most likely run in well-educated circles, both Christian and non). Maybe ApologetiX would work more effectively if we weren't so elitist; however, in our particular contexts, music that is perceived to be more serious will be taken more seriously.

Probably true; the people I'm referring to are not all necessarily terribly well educated, but they're all culturally educated, so to speak (into the indie scene, etc.). To clarify, they're people I know back home, not people here.