Virtual Thought

Evanescence is one of my formerly guilty pleasures. See, I don’t believe in guilty pleasures anymore—I’ve conciously given them up. So, yeah, I like music like Nine Inch Nails, Chemical Brothers, Enya, DJ Shadow, Tori Amos, BT and Ferry Corsten… but, also, thrown in there are acts like Dream Theater and, as I mentioned before, Evanescence.

I like the music a lot… I’m given to writing music that sounds like a soundtrack myself, so I appreciate it in wildly successful mainstream music (Fallen has gone to 5x platinum). That said, though, the lyrics read like junior high goth poetry. It’s a little embarassing. “Tourniquet”, a song about killing oneself and worrying about whether that disqualifies you for God’s grace or not, is probably the best, most mature song on the album. I can also barely listen to “Hello” because the emotional context is so raw (it is written about Amy Lee’s sister who died when Lee was six). The rest of the songs, though, are kinda silly fun. It’s no wonder, since Amy Lee has questionable taste in inspiration. But enough teasing—like I said, I love this album. I just don’t take it too seriously.

But what does that mean exactly? I don’t take them seriously? They’re expressing themselves honestly, and if I like the music and her voice then what’s there not to take seriously? As much as I enjoy snobbery, I’m trying to move away from that in my music taste.

And yes, I consider them a Christian band. And, no, that doesn’t disqualify them from my playlist… it’s too bad that there are some people that can only listen to so-called “Christian rock”, which one person on a message board proclaimed as ”...music that doesn’t just entertain, but contains an evangelical message bringing others to Christ…” All I can say is that I fear for the world in which everything must be shoved into some false dichotomy of black and white or right and wrong.

And, Ms. Lee, if you’re reading this, feminism doesn’t mean that you hate men. Sheesh!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2004 at 2:06 pm and is filed under music, thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.