Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Worst Songs Ever!

Blender magazine, a branch of Maxim I believe, has compiled the list of the 50 worse songs. Sadly, some of these are still favorites of mine. The link above lets you see the criteria employed when making the list.

I know that I am crossing into dangerous territory, but what about liturgical music? I have noticed the "Society for the Moratorium from Haugen and Haas" mentioned on other blogs. I have a great story concerning someone's disdain for Marty Haugen, but that's for another time. There does seem to be a need to scan through hymnals and metaphorically remove useless music. Before Todd posts it, I am not advocating going back to Gregorian Chant alone. I am dismayed to see the wholesale removal of chant (and the Latin language) from the average parish repertoire given that chant for the most part is not terribly difficult. There are many songs written in the last 40 years that are very good. They are many songs that are very bad, both musically and theologically.

So, here's the idea. Name the songs that belong on the list and why. Then when a week or so is up, essentially right before this archives, I will list the most frequent mentioned winners, maybe a first, second, third place thing. Please limit submissions to three per comment.

P.S. When I ran the spell checker, the computer offered the word "hemlock" as a substitution for the word "hymnal." Does Blogger know something we don't?

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