Mark Byron

CCM: Missing a Few Face Cards

I boo-booed; the Michael Card concert is next week. We got a nice drive on a warm early-fall evening and a stop at Dairy Queen from our abortive trip.

One thing that struck me is that the CCM scene I remember from the late 80s was much more diverse than it is today. I don't recall Card getting any airplay to speak of since his Joy in the Journey greatest-hits album in 1994. It might be that Card doesn't play the CCM game; his Wikipedia states that "He has at times distanced himself from the CCM industry by criticizing the promotion of personalities over musical content and the shifting emphasis away from God in order to sell more albums."

The music played on most Christian channels, K-LOVE in particular, tend to be less diverse and less theological than it was twenty years ago. I don't recall hearing Nicole C. Mullen for most of the 00s, but she has been active recording in a more "urban contemporary" vein that might not get heard on K-LOVE and its clones. Other than Mandisa, I can't think of a black artist that gets regular airplay, but back in the late 80s, you saw the Winans (both BeBe and CeCe and the Winans gospel act), Larnell Harris and Earth, Wind and Fire falsetto Phillip Bailey (who put out two good CCM albums in the late 80s while EWF was on hiatus) get regular airplay.

It might be that the Christian music universe has grown larger and has room to splinter; even K-LOVE does a slightly rockier Air One channel aimed at a pre-boomer crowd. Cities with a large black population will have a seperate black-flavored channel and Christian radio will often have a edgy channel, a K-LOVE clone and an old-school channel. Sometimes the old-schooller will be really old-school and play white southern Gospel but others will play classic CCM that the K-LOVEs have ignored.

Coming back from shopping the other day, said old-school Lexington station played Steve Camp's Whatever You Ask. Circa 1987 per this page. Maybe I'm an oldtimer, less than two years removed from being AARP eligable, but I miss a lot of '80s stuff and the ecclective nature of early CCM that had room for Twila Paris and Petra and the Winans.

LIbrary Musings

I need to get back to blogging more often. I had the whole week off this week, but haven't blogged since last Sunday.

For the second straight week, we watched the end of a football game at a restaurant. Last week, it was a Fresno-State Wisconsin game in metro Milwaukee with a bunch of excitable cheeseheads at a Champps sports grill; that was the first time I saw the end of a game at a "sports bar" loosely defined. Today, it was UK-Louisville in a near-deserted Ruby Tuesday's in Lexington.

There was a method to our madness; our cable system didn't have the game. The local Insight cable system in Lexington took the ESPN-U feed and had it on their normal side of the cable, but the SatStar system that is the captive cable outfit for our apartment complex didn't do that. Thus, we had a very leasurly lunch and caught the whole second half at RT.

After getting past some turnoveritis in the third quarter, UK hung on to win 31-27, surviving a UL hail-mary at the buzzer.

More blogigng later; Eileen has her books and we're heading back home to catch Notre Dame-Michigan State and a Michael Card concert this evening.

Catanomics

I haven't blogged on the President's speech yet, but here's a lolcat for the occasion-




There are a number of things we need to think of about the proposed law and what it will do to both businesses and people. Getting Manuel Lebour emergency health care isn't high on my worry list, but I'll discuss what is when I'm more awake.

Four Sigma Phelps

I was looking at a 2002 post where I described gay-basher Fred Phelps as a "Four-sigma conservative." My footnote at the time, before Phelps became a household word, for "Four-sigma" was "Four standard deviations from the mean-to the right of 99.997 of the population. OK, maybe he's only 2.5σ."

As we've gone forward through the decades, that first tongue-in-cheek estimate may well be right. If we had a town of 40,000 like my hometown of Midland, would we have someone who is more kick-the-cat homophobic than Phelps? As Descartes said before he disappeared, "I think not." If we do 1/(1-99.997%) we'll have 33,333, which is within hailing distance of Midland's population.

An anti-abortion protester, James Pouillon, got killed in Owosso (about an hour south of Midland) on Friday ; the shooter seemingly blew his top and killed a gravel-company owner after killing the in-your-face protester, who was across the street from Owosso Hight before school started in the morning.

Owosso has about 15,000 folks, and one could argue that Pouillon would be a four-sigma pro-lifer. I don't recall anyone in Midland who had his verve on abortion, and we're a rather conservative town. Phelps makes him look tame, so four sigma might be a low estimate.

So, I might not have been too far off on Phelps. Do I hear five Sigma? Going once... going twice...or are there more hard-core bigots than I think

Cash Bar at the Memorial

Eileen and I went to a very nice wedding Saturday afternoon; her cousin got married in Milwaukee. They rented out the War Memorial's Fitch Plaza, which had a gorgeous overview of Lake Michigan. They had a near-perfect day for it, with clear skies, temperatures in the 70s and a nice breeze to cool off the effects of being out in the sun. Also, a park to the north of the memorial had a slew of kites flying above; I Googled a bit and found just now that they have a kite festival this weekend. The only thing missing was a TV to keep tabs on the Michigan-Notre Dame game ;-).

The service was nearly pitch perfect, with one of the couple's churchmates doing some acoustic praise music, a great sermon on the wedding staple of 1 Corinthians 13-("Love is patient; Love is kind...") and a three-hanky rendition of Steven Curtis Chapman's I Will Be Here.

However, I was taken a notch aback during the prelude to the reception. They had hors d'oeuvres and a cash bar (pop was free) back towards the memorial proper, a striking design done by the guy who did the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Eero Saarinen. The picture here has a shot of the base of the memorial, which has a reflecting pool with an eternal flame (at least it seems like it would be) and the names of the local dead in WWII and the Korean and Vietnam "conflicts" inscribed in the black marble along the edges of the pool.

Saturday being the day after 9/11, I was in a reflective mood on the folks who have made our current freedoms possible and have sacrificed for this American experiment. I went around to look at the names on the memorial, not looking for any name in particular but reflecting on the individual and collective sacrifices. I couldn't get to the front left part of the memorial as seen in the picture, since the cash bar was right in front of that part of the memorial.

I'm not an overly-patriotic god-n-country guy, but that seemed almost like the moneychangers in the temple. American culture seems to work well to turn churches into social clubs and memorials into bars, blissfully downplaying the Savior who died for us all as well as the folks who died to keep this thing called America going.

That's not to say that the people who were enjoying their cokes, beers, cheese and crackers and chips and salsa weren't godly and patriotic, but like El Nino getting lost in the Santaization of Christmas, the post-wedding party seemed to blow right past the reason for the facility being their in the first place.