 |
| Snoop Dogg, soon to be history |
Well, maybe not the whole world, but just my own corner of it, but if all good people would follow my suggestion
maybe we’d at least get rid of rap filth blaring through car speakers. How many times have we been at stoplights or in parking lots only to have a car roll up behind or beside us and suddenly we feel our cars vibrate as if an earthquake is happening? We hear the deafening boom boom of drums and revolting death, drug and sex related lyrics of filthy smut.
I finally decided that I’d had enough! I go to the local Goodwill and often see an electrician friend there. Actually he’s the father of my granddaughter’s best friend and I’ve met him several times at my daughter’s house so we’re practically family. Anyway, he and I occasionally bump into each other at Goodwill and ask if the other has found any “good finds” lately. One day I told him I needed advice…that I was looking for car speakers but didn’t know how they would be attached and that since my car is small I didn’t want giant speakers.
He told me that smaller speakers were available and it was an easy fix getting them installed, then asked what I wanted them for. I told him I was sick of listening to vile rap and wanted to do something, to counteract that by playing good music - loudly. Anywhere there were people as a captive audience. At stop lights and gas stations. Slowly driving into a parking place at the mall, at the grocery store. Just like the rappers do. He laughingly accused me of being a trouble maker but said he’d be glad to keep an eye out at Goodwill for speakers. He would buy them if he saw any and I’d repay him later. I hope he knows that I’ll be asking him to install them also!
Once the speakers are installed I plan to insert the Missa Luba - the Muungano National Choir Kenya version. The Missa Luba is the Latin Mass sung in styles traditional to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Have any of you heard that? It’s beautiful! The Kyrie (first song on track one on the music video below) is especially beautiful with mens’ and women’s voices singing, alternately answering one another. The mens’ voices are so masculine, the womens’ so feminine, each answering back and forth to the other. It gives the message from Gen 1:27 - Male and female He created them.
It has the drums, the beat, the voices – but instead of leading people hearing it into sin, it elevates the mind to God through the beauty of music and the Mass. Personally I think rappers will love it! Who knows, maybe they've never heard anything else but rap. Maybe at least one rapper will listen and be converted. Maybe he'll go back to his gang and say, "Hey! Listen to this - it's God rap and we're going to play that from now on."
So please join me! Get your speakers installed, choose your favorite Catholic CD and let’s go slay the rap dragon out there.
I have a copy of the recording by the original group, Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin (King Baudouin's Troubadours), a choir of adults and children from the Congolese town of Kamina in Katanga Province of the then Belgian Congo.
ReplyDeleteI have always been fascinated by it and other settings of the Latin Ordinary of the Mass in different times and places - from Gregorian Chant through Renaissance polyphony (especially of Palestrina) through 18th and 19th century "classical" Mass settings (such as those of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and especially Bach's Mass in b minor) and 20th century modern music Mass settings (such as Stravinsky's Mass with all its Neoclassic dissonance).
Nonetheless, I exclude Leonard Bernstein's post-Vatican II (1971) Mass (but with a pre-Vatican II format) as a travesty.
Beautiful music! Beautiful idea! I am sure Cardinal Sarah and the many other African bishops would approve.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean. I was once traveling down a freeway here in California while playing beautiful light and easy music on my car radio. When I reached to get my cola in the container near my radio, I accidentally hit a button on the radio, and the most foul rap music blasted out of the speaker. It took me several minutes to gain my composure, get my cola back in its place and the station changed as fast as I could do so.
Thankfully, the containers for drinks in cars now are nowhere near the radio and in a much sturdier, safer place so the cups do not fly out and spill their contents if one has to make a sudden stop.
Thank you for the wonderful idea and choice of CD. I need to get a CD player for my home as mine wore out quite awhile back.
Go for it!
ReplyDeleteI am the anonymous poster from California at 1:13pm. yesterday. I do sing in a Traditional Latin Mass choir. I am not the best of singers as I started late in life and was a violinist/violist in my much younger years, but with practice I do well. Once a musician always a musician, and singing is a good substitute when the hands go.
ReplyDelete