Song tangles

I'm not terribly fond of songs where the drumset drowns your own voice, and somewhat monotonous repetition. If you take a random song from the hymnbook that I've never heard before and sing a line, I can generally predict the arc of the rest of the song (generally). It's probably my lack of familiarity with the genres that makes it harder for me to do this with praise choruses, though sometimes it seems as though melodic line is an optional feature.

Some praise song theology is a bit on the incomplete side, but that's true of the old hymns as well. It was quite a few years before I realized that a large fraction of the songs are aspirational rather than descriptive. And the ancient fad for trying to make English verse behave like Latin had repercussions that lasted a long time: Yoda's hymn from 1739, for example. The song has noble ideas, but it's not trivial to parse. (I try to make sure that the slides have appropriate punctuation and quotation marks--I remember being utterly confused as a child by lines like "my sin oh the bliss of this glorious thought")

When I try to look at hymns (old or new) as if I were an outsider, unfamiliar with Christianity or not very experienced in the language, they sometimes look very odd--topsy-turvy and misleading.

Topsy-turvy: I like some of Browning's work, but he had the same unhappy habit of practicing complicated knots with his sentences (at least he didn't put them in a blender). A little involution is forgiveable, and can sometimes add a tang to the verse, but too much doesn't seem respectful--to the language or the reader. Kipling generally wrote a clean strong line--it's possible to do.

The psalmist wrote of God putting a new song in his mouth--maybe he wasn't satisfied with the old ones either.

I grouse, but I love them.