Spirit
Chapter 15 of Love and War includes: Draggin' the Line, Who's a Rebel?, Play That Funky Music, Farm Aid, Face Time, and False Prophets.
Draggin' the Line
It was just before intermission at Prince's November 6 show at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. The band was moving through "Anna Stesia" when Prince stepped to the mike and began preaching forcefully, describing his need to finish the show on a different plane than the sexually-charged first half.
"You know, God isn't going to come down out of the sky and make things right for you. You've got to get things ready for Him. You've got to make things right so God will want to come out and play... Now, put your hand over your heart. Look inside yourself. God is in there..."
Who's a Rebel?
"I think there's a large percentage of people who are born without the ability to detect injustice," Nirvana's Kurt Cobain recently told Alternative Press. "Those are the people who usually resort to religion."
Was that what Sinead O'Connor was trying to say when she tore up that photograph of the Pope on Saturday Night Live? The statement O'Connor released ten days later indicated the answer. Yes and no.
She's most emphatically a Christian, Sinead explained at the outset, but she's a Christian whose native Ireland came under Britain's ruinous domination with the cooperation of the Holy Roman Empire...
Play That Funky Music
“Funk is the means by which black folks confirm identity through rhythm, dance, bodily fluids, and attitude,” writes Rickey Vincent in his classic book Funk: The Music, the People and the Rhythm of the One. But, Vincent insists, “every booty is funky.” Vincent is obviously referring to American whites, but the implications are global in scope.
Indeed, “every booty is funky” is a much more compelling call to the delights of “world music” than the current promotional literature, which posits the genre as a politically correct yuppie condiment. Like American soul music, the compilation Pakistani Soul Music is about rhythm and dance, love and lust, loss and the struggle to overcome it...
Farm Aid
During the time of Jesus, life for the peasants was almost unbearable. “A dry year could bring water shortages and famine, refuse and animal dung littered the streets, and hygienic sewage disposal was unknown,” writes Roberta L. Harris in The World of the Bible. “Disease and early death were common. Vermin of all kinds infested people or houses… Only the rich ate white bread; poorer people baked theirs from barley… Few people could afford to eat meat or fish on a regular basis.”
Transportation was primitive, so peasants could only eat food grown near their homes. If the local crops died from pests or drought, the peasants died too...
Face Time
The clerical collar
Today nobody knows it
Why the first ministers chose it
The ring around the neck
Was meant to look like a link in a chain
To express unity with the Roman slaves and their pain
Now that’s all forgotten and besides
It doesn’t look good on TV...
False Prophets
The Gospel Music Association recently commissioned the Barna Group to survey the attitudes of Christian youth toward music “piracy.” The GMA wasn’t too happy with the results, which revealed that only 8% of Christian teens think sharing music files or burning CDs is morally wrong and that 80% of them had done the deed during the past six months.
“A lot of students think it’s a cheap way to witness the Gospel,” Scott Flagg of the University of North Texas told the Dallas Morning News. “They go out and buy a CD, then burn several copies to give away...”