Music is Evil class 101. Professor in Music, Mr.S, keeps taking quotes and references from Jessie Jackson and Mick Jagger. Personally, I don't take a word that comes out of their mouthes as having any value whatsoever, whether it has to do with music or it has to do with how *insert exploitive* President Bush is. It is all trash.

He is also taking quotes from secular sociologists on the basis that the secular sociologists are not biased toward the Christian view that all music is evil except for the Living Hymns, the Praises book, anything written by Ron Hamilton, and the latest Patch the Pirate^tm CD. While that makes excellent sense up to a point, in my experience most college professors, let alone sociology professors, are rather wacked to begin with. So I don't like taking quotes from people that I have never heard from and who are referred to without name as "a proponent professor at X college". And they usually tend to be biased toward something, even if it might not have religious connotations

I am trying to be objective. I really am, but it is hard to do so when your only choices are (good) Christian worship music, and rock. Christian Worship music being what was described above in the sarcasm block. Rock being everything else (yes, everything else).

I have a feeling that this is all going to wrap (ha, I almost said rap [which is not actually music, by the way]) around the fact that, after money, The Beat is the root of all evil.

This beat is so evil due to the fact that it makes us want to tap our foot. Yes, this is true. A sense of beat is a gift from God, I would say. Without it, we would have no sense of music. We wouldn't have poetry, we wouldn't have songs, we wouldn't have the whole book of Psalms. All music, as we see it now, would appear to be just another random set of dots splattered all over the paper. Patterns are necessary for us to live. We wouldn't have mathematics without patterns, we wouldn't have any concept of years seasons months days or moments without patterns. A beat is just another form of a pattern set in the medium of music.

This form of pattern is one of the most natural ingrained functions of our brain. It is really very incredible. Something as complicated as defining a beat and a rythem and an off-beat and an asyncopated rythem is very complicated when put down on paper or when trying to get a computer to do it, yet it comes naturally to us.

So, I am sorry to say, in every single holy hymn we sing there is a beat. I don't know where they get off on saying that there is none, because it is there. It is very easy to see, and it is very proponent. In fact, at certain points in certain songs where a more accelerated or emphatic point is being driven towards, I hear the pianist specifically emphasizing the beats in order to push forward. Scandalous. If they really wished for there not to be a beat, we could have everyone hold whole notes, all of the same pitch tone and volume, tied over for the whole song. But, even then, a beat would be apparent because of the fact that everyone started at one time and ended a set amount of counts later. Oh the tangled web we weave! My cursed inner foot tapping self needs to be cleansed!

And, for the record, I am not saying that every song needs to have a pounding drum beat and a driving bass. In fact, it makes me nuts a lot of times. It is a sign of not being very creative.