A Look At My SG Past

When TT was here he was rummaging around in his old attic or his old room and happened upon a few old pieces of paper.

Back in the day, he was a big Southern Gospel fiend (i.e. fan). In fact, so were DK and I. KK was too, though he was less overt about it, I would say. In those days, a large Southern Gospel convention debuted in California. Tom attended the first one, and after that either DK or I or both went with him for a couple/three of years. We even took 3rd place in their talent contest (as a trio) one year.

But as he rummaged through stuff, he found these papers. He offered to post them on the web for me.

Now, this whole idea of impersonal criticism via the web is an unresolved issue in my mind, so to be safe, all negative comments that we made regarding specific individuals or groups have been blotted out. TT was kind enough to do this. I haven't thought this through completely, so if it appears hypocritical in some way, forgive me.

A Political Question

To all you "conservative" (politically) Mennonites out there, doesn't there seem to be a conflict with supporting so vigorously a group of people (conservative evangelicals) who are so set upon the use of force as Christians (albeit in a national setting and only "when necessary"), a teaching that - in my view and yours too, presumably - militates directly against the teachings of Christ?

I'm alive and God is teaching me to keep perspective when things go bad. And things have gone bad. But I'm doing well, because everything's going to be all right!

God doesn't show his love by making things rosy all the time. He has ways of getting at your weaknesses to try to make you more like Him, yes He does.

Theory

"...that's what you can do with theory, assume away all your problems, then you get back to the real world and things aren't quite as nice."

So says my Stat professor. And it's true, you take people out of the "real world" (and I will use that term for lack of a better one), focused solely on getting published and you get myriads of variations on a theme, each "original," but sometimes irrelevant to that big, bad world out there.
Ah, well that's an easy one then. Banish anything that might be construed as "theoretical" from anywhere, since it seems to serve no good purpose and can in fact get in the way of real, practical advances in technology.

Not so fast, superman.

Where did all the cool technology come from? Certainly not from people that had no understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of their field.

So academia could be improved. Yup. What couldn't?

Yea for practical. Yea for theoretical.

A Couple of Notes

Tonight AHQ gave a program at a church about an hour and a quarter away from our home base. Many people from church came to see us, which was quite nice. It was a bunch of fun to sing again. It took us until we're about breaking up to begin to feel the freedom of singing without a set list in front of us on the floor. We did that tonight, and though there were a few hitches, nothing major. TT forgot some word, I forgot how a song started, KK semi-missed an ending ... uh, can't think of anything DK did overtly wrong. But boy we had fun.

One other thing, I just wanted to let everyone know that on Saturday I played approximately 7 hours of board games. A blast, to be sure. Christmas Break's should always include that: chilling with friends/family and playing games. And I heard that SG--bro's girlfriend--wants to play some Scrabble. Can't wait.

RARB

The Recorded A Cappella Review Board (RARB) is a website that allows a cappella groups to send in their albums to be objectively and thoroughly reviewed, ostensibly by people that know something about a cappella music. A stated goal of RARB is to give the public honest insight into the merits of the submitted albums.

Honestly, I don't know the size of RARB's readership or the status they enjoy in the a cappella community, but several excellent and famous groups have submitted albums, including GLAD, The Bobs, The Swingle Singers, Rescue, and the Acoustix, so their opinion--though really and truly only their opinion--should be regarded with some degree of respect.

All you have to do to get reviewed by these folks is record an a cappella album and send, like, six of those albums to where they tell you. So, AHQ did--twice. The review system is set up so that three people independently review the album, and it is compiled at the end into a single review, complete with ratings of each song and five different technical categories.

We didn't have real high hopes when we sent in Lookin' Up to be reviewed. In fact, if I recall correctly TT had real questions with sending it in at all. But we did, and we were predictably skewered, particularly by one reviewer. He calls us "square," says that much of the album consists of "facile melodies and cheesy lyrics," and opines that we "utterly slaughter" those songs that happen to have good arrangements. Furthermore, we're "completely devoid of soul and expression." He criticizes our arranging, songs, solo voices--almost everything. The other reviewers were a bit more kind. One even liked us.

In my life in general, I'm rather sensitive to criticism. But with AHQ, that sensitivity threshold increases dramatically. Well, except for criticism of our latest album cover. That gets to me a little bit. But then, it's sort of understandable. But regarding our singing, I don't get bothered to a large degree when people tell us that our endings are too outlandish, they don't like a certain song, or we just plain stink. In fact, I think those things are interesting, and in the case of RARB, many of the criticisms had their basis in fact.

When we recorded our latest album, it was a no-brainer to us to get it reviewed by RARB. We knew it was better than our last one, and we (some of us at least) were anxious to see what would come of the second go-around. TT wasn't impressed when he saw that one of our reviewers was the same one who blasted us last time. He wasn't expecting very good scores, though I had hopes of good scores. Or at least I was confident that it would be better than last time.

And the Purpose review was better. Much better. Our basher became our fan. The worst thing anyone said about us is that we were bland. Well, except for the comments on our religious presentation, which are very interesting in their own right.

I like RARB, and I don't even mind that many of you folks reading this will surf on over and see how terrible we really are, though it would be interesting to hear if their reviews affect your opinion of our music in any way. Just don't bash RARB, take it as informed opinion. These sorts of yardsticks are valuable to us, because most people that listen to us probably aren't musically equipped to give an informed critique of our technical prowess, and for the ones that are, there is no forum set up in which that could happen. Besides that, being personally involved with a group makes it difficult to shoot straight with them.

So that's RARB, a fascinating study in opinion and honesty.

CLP

For the uninitiated (by the way, I've wondered before just how many of the by-log readers would, if pressed, label themselves Mennonite ... I'm guessing 60-70%), CLP is Christian Light Publications, probably the most prolific conservative Mennonite publisher. They publish books, Sunday School materials, gospel tracts, even a school curriculum.

From my perspective, as a "progressive" conservative Mennonite (this just means that I don't particularly follow the Mennonite party line on some things, both practically and theologically), CLP gets to me sometimes, in that I would consider them "staid" as opposed to "progressive." This comes through to me at times when I read their material, and I've been tempted to comment in this forum about problems that I (think I) see in their approach.

I've refrained, however, because it doesn't feel right.

Digressing for a moment...

It's this whole thing of Christianity and criticism, which I simply have not resolved in my mind. If we're talking personal issues, we can't publicly talk about and criticize others--that's gossip and unkind. Instead, we are to take up our issues personally or through the church.

The question in my mind is how these things are to be treated when there is a distance, when there is nothing personal involved. Does anything change? Is there any place for Christians to publicly hold other Christians accountable, when the views and/or lives of latter said Christians are in the public eye?

Ok, back to CLP.

I wanted to give them props for an article that they recently published in "Companions," one of their weekly Sunday School publications. It was about reaching out, and how that there's plenty of opportunities right around us, that there's more to the "being a light to the world" thing than foreign missions, and I think implicit in that is that there's more to being a light than just living and people seeing the "difference."

And they also talked about sipping a latte at the local bookstore--that predisposed me to think favorably toward them in this particular instance, even if I don't like coffee.