Pass the BBQ sauce; it's word-eatin' time

Just last week some online friends and I were discussing the sad state of popular music in general, and Christian music as it tries to copy said drecky music to form a new genre of bad art. Of course, sniffed I, my dawg's sittin' out this fight 'cuz I don't like rock music anyway.

Yeah, right in a pig's left eye I don't. Almost as soon as I sent the words out, I began to list the ways:

Carry On by CSNY
Jump and When Is It Love by Van Halen
Don't Dream It's Over by Crowded House (decent cover by Sixpence None the Richer)
Lots of stuff by Journey and Foreigner and Fleetwood Mac, oh my
Beatles. Santana. Beatles. Duran Duran. Moody Blues. Layla (the high-spirited original, not that mousse-laden, sleepy unplugged thing). Beatles. And on and on.

And of course, the best of all, Mr. Mister with their tender Broken Wings and the inexpressibly beautiful Kyrie.

What I did notice was that my love of rock ended pretty much when the 80's did, which was when Nirvana came thrashing out of Seattle all angry and mean. Before that, there were safety pin-wearing metalheads a-plenty, but one could easily avoid their negativity and weirdness. Then it seemed to turn cynical and ugly. Pretty much gone were songs of yearning, reflection, poignancy. The nihilistic 90's gave way to the trashy hedonism of what is called modern "urban". Bands like Creed who evoked that earlier longing were ridiculed as irrelevant, derivative, sentimental. (Somehow or other, though, "irrelevance" made them a lot of cash!)

But then, as Stevie Nicks says, "...children get older--I'm getting older, too." All this I Don't Like Rock stuff really means that I like what I like, and am pickier about it than when I was young. Some of the music I like, Christian or otherwise, is Celtic, some classical, some Old Time, some New Age, some rock, some other genres or blended ones or none at all. I still maintain that "rock" is far too broad a category when Patsy Cline is installed in the R&R Hall of Fame; just as I still don't like boring or coarse or sappy or kick-you-with-my-jackboots stuff.

And now I am making no sense to myself because it is 2:40 am as I edit this for the last time. I really wanted to say more--and I did. There was a first draft of this entry; and like the fish that got away, was just about perfect. I was classic, I was eloquent. I was also very stupid and didn't backup. So my perfect crafted entry is no more. (Hey, I'm doing better than some I could name!) Point is, of course, that you never get it back. There's no place but onward, without that sparkling prose that might have been in this space had I not neglected the Prime Directive: Save Your Work. Ai, the pain.