God’s iPod – Keep Music Live
I certainly would not offer a piece of my own music for God on the basis that it’s the "best" in critical terms. I’m not that out of touch with reality. But as I said at the beginning of this set of posts, choosing music for God’s iPod is neither giving him my list of critical top 8, nor choosing the music of "my life". I imagine this as choosing music that illustrates things that are important when you think about the world theologically.
One of the things that I hope God would feel bothered about, faced with an iPod, is whether we are gradually ceasing to make music, and only listening to other people’s. It seems to me that fewer and fewer kids seem to take music lessons, play in ensembles, sing in choirs, and so on. (Or do I have rose-coloured spectacles on?) But if the "God’s iPod" exercise was asking "what music might be important to God?" I hope that one of the loudest answers would be "LIVE music!!" It would of course be irreverent to imagine myself telling God to turn off the damn machine and rejoin the human race… but I trust that the Almighty would already be ten steps ahead of us on that one.
So for my 7th offering for Greenbelt’s "God’s iPod", I did shut off the technology, got out my guitar and played a song. One of my own, because that’s what I know. Keep it live. At least some of the time.
3 Responses to “God’s iPod – Keep Music Live”
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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and actually, flopping on bean bags with young B companionably sharing his game boy progress at regular intervals, this gave me one of my best GB moments this year. Thank you
xx
My two teenage sons are rarely parted from their ipods, but they are also very into creating their own music. They don’t play in ensembles or sing in choirs, but they write songs, compose, mix tracks, record their own vocals all through their computers. The technology is there so they just use it and some of what they create sounds fab. Whether that’s ‘real’ music and musicianship is of course another debate!
sounds “real” enough to me, Jen, – I think the issue is whether you are creating something, not which tools you are using. (and no doubt God would have your boys on his iPod too…)