Gospel

[rareboy]

If you have the opportunity, watch Henry Louis Gates and Erica Campbell host the opening concert for his documentary series on the history of Gospel music in America.

Her opening number alone is amazing.

Doesn't matter if you are religious or not...the music is so life affirming.

 

[eddielee]

I enjoyed it.

 

[unloadonme]

It's not for me. The religious mumbo jumbo element is too much.

 

[rareboy]

^ That's too bad, because divorced from its role in religion, it is the underpinning of blues, soul and arguably nearly all major music movements of the last century in the west.

It is what makes it such a powerful piece of history.

 

[Harke the Boeotarch]

It's not for me. The religious mumbo jumbo element is too much.

That greatly depends on the song.

Some songs just lay it on to thickly, like stupid country songs that explain the same situation five times where no explanation was necessary in the first place.

Like This Old House. We get it, you're going to die!
You don't have to tell us, how many times?

Religious music and song texts can be preposterous, but also magnificent,
but religion-inspired poetry is always bad (at least I don't know any good examples in Dutch).

 

[NotHardUp1]

Religion is a different topic altogether, and both to its credit and its discredti, "Gospel" is often secularized in commercial exploitation, both in sales as well as in local consumption.

But, the authentic music in its true setting, is a world treasure.

Black Americans rightly point to it with pride as their legacy in a society that cruelly made hope on of the only treasures they were allowed, for centuries.

Sitting in black worship services (and I have) can be uncomfortable for the outsider, not because one identifies with any ancestry of oppressors, and not just because cultural expressions from Africa and the Caribbean are very different from those from Europe. My sensation was that I was in someone else's private space, like when someone offers a tour of his home and it includes the bedroom, or entering a biker bar. The space is filled with identity, not mine, and rightly felt like "other" in it.

 

[NotHardUp1]

Religious music and song texts can be preposterous, but also magnificent,
but religion-inspired poetry is always bad (at least I don't know any good examples in Dutch).

The sonnets of John Donne might lead you to think otherwise. "At The Round Earth's Imagined Corners" is an excellent example of ecstatic writing, almost manic.