More Dangerous Than Guns

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”

-- Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

What Nick Hornby doesn't say is that the vast majority of love songs don't even present a realistic picture of relationships in general.

Unless you're a teenager, it isn't all moon-June-spoon, immediately followed by a tidal wave of heartbreak. In real life, what happens is something like what Mindy Smith sings about here. You volunteer for the process, or you don't. If you're really smart, or previously wounded, but probably both, you go through it before you get to the moon-June-spoon phase.

The violence intrinsic to love songs isn't in the way they encourage us to marinate in our own pain, but in how they swear up and down that true love isn't true if it takes any work on our part.

This is a song about what it means to work on a relationship -- every damn day when you're positive you can't do it for one more second.

Mindy Smith with "Out Loud".

The Real Heaven Tourism

The first two verses of this song are fine; you've heard these sentiments before. But the third? Who uses a pop song to teach you how to die?

There have been enough people all across the belief spectrum who have had near-death experiences that match what's being described here -- closely enough that Mindy Smith's deity-of-choice shouldn't be that off-putting.

Besides, the recent spate of debunked "heaven tourism" books from the Christian Industrial Complex is as opposite this song as a pink plastic Christmas tree is opposite a Douglas fir. As if to underscore the bald reality of the lyrics, the melody has some distinctly-modal elements that recall Ralph Stanley more than contemporary Christian music.

Here's Mindy Smith, with "Come To Jesus".