Roll Over de Azevedo

What I have in mind for the gentle reader is to view the slick video on this smashing new church-sponsored page. I think it's best I comment very little on this, but needless to say, it blew my mind. Not as some might suppose, however. . . It left me pondering on the status of urban and popular culture. As soon as a pop/urban style or trope becomes a tool of an obscure American sect (read: cult), what is its status? The question is not whether it is dead but how neutral it has become within the cultural landscape when the dangerous temptations of yesteryear merge into our synthetic conformity. Of course this is the nature of culture and is not unique to our time. I once heard composer Harvey Sollberger say that the great masterpieces are like tigers that must be tamed to be made safe for the masses, losing their claws as they enter the canon (this is a paraphrase). And when a cultural product is toothless and neutral how can it be useful? It is useful not for individual consumption, but as the fabric wherewith we all patch our lives, the stuff of our shared experience. This video is indeed bizarre, but it seems real and genuine in a way that can be accomplished only in our age.