Two small rants about music

I love music. It is an integral part of me, and always has been. There is a soundtrack to the movie that is my life. But lately I've been thinking about two things with music that bug me.

1) I have a confession. In 99% of all popular songs, I think "the bridge" sucks (I guess more technically I am talking about "the middle eight"). I mean, you're sitting there bopping along to verse-chorus-verse-chorus and suddenly there is this, this thing that happens and the song takes this left turn off into a down-tempo section that leaves you going "WTF? What happened to my song?" And then suddenly we're back into the verse-chorus thing again and riding toward the home stretch. To me, this brings on a depressing case of "groovus interruptus."

Now there are many songs I love with effective changes in the middle, and many songwriters who are adept using the form. The trouble is most tunesmiths are not Lennon nor McCartney, and so their attempts at following "standard form" takes an otherwise good song and grafts a foreign part onto it that just plain sucks. I notice it quite a bit with pop music, and a lot with modern "praise music" at church.

Me? I'm old-fashioned. I'd rather have a crudely structured, fast and furious "three rounds and you're out" punk song with a good riff than a carefully crafted and layered pop song that then has another piece bolted to it, Frankenstein-like, because that's how songs are "supposed to work."

[The following is about church - so if you're not interested you can bail at this point. And I have to be careful because my wife's in the band there, and we've had a few, um, "discussions" around the topic.]

2) Let's see if this has happened to you. You're attending a church service that uses PowerPoint (ugh) to put up the responsive readings and the words to the songs on the expensive LCD screens now marring the once-beautiful sanctuary. The band is playing some new song, and because you're supposed to participate, you're gamely singing along, sorta getting into it, figuring it out as you go, line by line from the slides. And then, right when you think you have it down, there is a line (usually in the chorus) that changes tempo and is either all-really-fast-words-squished-together-breathlessly or else really...bizarre tempo...changes that...throw off the whole...rhythm. And you resentfully stop singing because you don't know what to expect next and can't keep up.

Know what I mean?

Even though I was in choir for three years in school and jazz stage band for one, I don't read music. Not really. But I know enough to be able to discern a quarter note from a whole note and recognize "get ready, we're gonna sing faster in this next part," but there are no such visual cues when singing along to just words on PPT slides. So those songs, the ones that leave you floundering? I can only deduce one thing from the band choosing to play them - you're not supposed to sing along. They're land mines, little bombs meant to make you stop singing and just listen to the band. It's no longer about participation but performance. And that's fine, if that's what they want it to be, but then don't put the words up on the screen - just let the band play the damned song, like when there's a choir-only hymn in a traditional service, and we'll all sit there and listen appreciatively to the music. It's hard enough for most people to even want to sing in church without putting in extra barriers to it, songs with structures guaranteed to make them feel foolish.

Or is it just me?