Weird Worship meme

It’s time, folks, for another meme! We’re just on the verge of the dreaded Summer Blogging Slowdown and the good news for faithful readers is that bloggers will become increasingly desperate to get a reaction out of people who are outside having fun instead of hunched over their computers drinking herbal tea.

So, on to the meme. This meme was provoked by the recent acquisition of Volume 4 of Songs of Fellowship. This book has 510 songs in it. 510! And I don’t see a single tune from the ’90s. Now for someone like myself with the musical attention span of a teenager at the video game palace, 510 songs should be really good news. All this new music! But unfortunately, Hilary and I have started working through the book and found that most of it is fluff.

In fact, we’ve been able to place the music in three categories:

1. Vacuous, cliché-ridden fluff
2. Anything by Stuart Townend or Keith and Kristyn Getty
3. Weird Worship

Every evening, Hilary and I have been playing through this book and putting a dot next to any song that we like. After fifty songs, the ratio is about 1 in 5. If a song gets a yawn from either one of us, then no dot. Hilary is one of the fancy-smancy piano players that likes to tickle a few sonatas or nocturnes before retiring for the day. And I’m one of the wild-eyed drummer types (Think Animal from the Muppet Show) whose foot starts thumping uncontrollably at the first hint of a beat. Beauty and the Beast, basically.

So if a song gets a yawn from both of us it is either a. really, really imitative of all the other millions of P&W songs or b. written by a guitar-player. I shouldn’t say anything rotten about guitar players since I is one. But for some reason, guitarists tend to not be the most musical of musicians. They really like songs in D. And if they have an electric guitar they can play an entire gig with just three fingers.

But I promised myself that I wasn’t going to diss anyone in this post. So let’s move on to the dots. In category 2 are a small number of original, musically substantive compositions. A lot of them sound like hymns. This makes me suspect that I’m getting old. I mentioned Stuart Townend and the Gettys above as being songwriters who almost always get a dot. Think “In Christ Alone.” A lot of the Gettys‘ stuff is hard to play. It has more than three chords. Some of the words have more than two syllables. So you might not have heard much of their music played by the average worship team. But if I had to guess what music was on God’s iPod… well, I digress. Another musician who is consistently, uh, musical is Paul Baloche. An ethnomusicologist could tell you why I like this guy’s music so much: he’s playing my heart music. All that maj7 and sus2 and a drummer straight out of the Scooby Band. Rita Baloche is an excellent musician as well and has written songs like I Will Celebrate, and perhaps one of the most beautiful songs in the P&W genre: Arms Open Wide.

Let’s move on to the really interesting category: Weird Worship. One of Paul Baloche’s songs crosses briefly into the weird worship category for this line: “Like a rose trampled on the ground, you took the fall and thought of me” from the song Above All.  But that’s pretty mild compared to some of the really weird worship that’s out there. You read the lyrics and play it through once and then… dot or yawn? It’s definitely not a yawn. But this is some really weird stuff. Far from being cliché this stuff sounds more like a mystic trip than grist for the hymnal. Trouble is, most of these songs are almost impossible to sing in a congregational setting. But there is something transcendent about a song that defies categorization and taps into the realm of ecstatic prophecy.

I’m going to give you five examples of Weird Worship and then ask some of my blog friends to chip in with some examples of their own.

1. Here Is Our King by David Crowder

I’ve listened to this song for a long time without ever realizing that the verses are bizarre in the extreme. Bizarre like Crowder’s hair-do:

verse 1: “From wherever spring arrives to heal the ground, from wherever searching comes the look itself…”

verse 2: “And what was said to the rose to make it unfold was said to me here in my chest, so be quiet now and rest.”

2. Not To Us by Chris Tomlin and Jesse Reeves

“The earth is shaking, the mountains shouting, it’s all for You. The waves are crashing the sun is raging, it’s all for You.”

3. Joy Is In This Place by Tim Hughes

Key of D. Rips off John Newton. But this would be really fun to dance to.

verse 2: “Shout, shout, ev’rybody shout, ev’rybody scream, for joy is in this place.”

4. Obsession by Martin Smith

“What can I do with my obsession, with the things I cannot see? Is there madness in my being? Is it the wind that moves the trees?”

5. Show Me The Way by David Ker

Well, I deserve to be made fun of as well for all the Cyber-Psalms. Um, Praise Dog… Hello? So there’s plenty of stuff there that could be called weird. But possibly the weirdest song I wrote is Show Me The Way. The lyrics are pretty tame but once five or six of us got done collaborating on the thing it was indescribable. Especially my sister, Jeana’s Star Trek background vocals. Click the link for a sample.

So, there are five examples of Weird Worship. Please add your examples in the comments.

For the meme, I tag Eclexia, ElShaddai, MetaCatholic, Qaya and Nick. Please give us five examples of Weird Worship and tag five more people to do the same.

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Update: This is turning into a homage to monotheistic liturgical weirdness. Cyber-Psalm 35 is set in Baghdad and now Iyov gives us some Judeo-juju mumbo-jumbo. And don’t miss ASBO’s stomp and Eddie’s riff.