…...
….......
-slowly raises up the white flag and
waves it about-
Ok internet, ok.
You win.
I give up.
You can stop now.
…Please?
Seriously though, there seems to be a
disturbing trend lately, of trying to make “cool” Christian
parodies of popular songs. (Gangnam style in this case.) The problem
is that... well... they are done pretty poorly. And I do not just
mean they use things like “Open Godman Style” and try to rhyme
Joseph with the supposed word “coatses.” I do not just mean the
people in ridiculous afros. Those things are pretty dumb, but hey, no
parody is absolutely perfect. Some of them are even intentionally
silly. What I mean is, these particular ones do not make a lot of
theological sense. The words are just a bunch of nonsense that only
vaguely relate back to scripture. And, considering that these are
supposedly theological songs, that is pretty important. Look at the
lyrics of this song. They make a lot of references, but then they
fail to explain them. They mention the story of Jesus's birth, but
they fail to explain the significance of it. They barely even touch
on it. The only reason it would have meaning is if you already knew
the importance of the event, a non-christian watching this could
easily become lost. Especially if they knew nothing about the birth
of Christ.
“Ok, so they had no inn... he was
born in a stable... and they named him Jesus....wait what? That's it?
Well... that was kinda pointless.”
The exact same problem comes with the
crucifixion verse. If you do not already know the story and
significance of the cross and the resurrection, it makes very little
sense. They do not mention the salvation that comes with the cross.
They do not mention his sacrifice. They do not explain anything. What
they do end up doing, is leaving the listener asking “...so what?”
Another problem I have is they use very
vague terms. Such as “open Godman style.” ….what exactly does
this mean? Are they saying that God has an open style of faith for
anyone to join? Are they saying their church practices this style?
Are they saying this style is open for interpretation? And what about
the verse where God “opened it with his Godman style.” Does it
now refer to the power of God? Is it completely unrelated? This catch
phrase of theirs, while most likely created to suit the lyrics of the
original, gets really distracting. It shifts the attention from the
song to the silliness of the lyric and defeats the purpose. Even
worse, this is not the only line that has this effect. (...By the
way, talk about a misunderstanding. That line “pursing you until
the end” is extremely creepy if you fail to connect what they are
talking about.)
And speaking of shifting attention, let
us now talk about the actual subject of the song. Nearly half the
song focuses on the church. Praising their leaders and efforts at
evangelizing. Now if you want to make a song about that, that is
perfectly fine. Go for it. The efforts of the church are an important
part of faith. The problem comes when you either A) try and make the
church the sole focus. Or B) try to mesh a focus directly on God with
a focus directly on how awesome your church is. The idea would be to
try and convey how important it is, and how fulfilling it is, to
share the Word of God with someone. If you just talk about how great
you are as a church, you sound arrogant. Or, in this song's case, if
you try and combine the focus being on the church, and then solely
about God alone, it ends up being very muddled and confusing. You
start going every which way and it becomes a jumpy incoherent mess.
Either keep the focus on God, or find a balance between the two.
Preferably without virtual jump cuts in the song.
This is not to say all parodies are
bad, and I do recognize the difficulty in making them, but you need
to be conscious of what you are making. Simply throwing a ton of
theology at the page and seeing what fits is not going to work well.
-BlackFox
(733)
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