iPope bopping to divine beats

Last month the staff at Vatican Radio gave Benedict XVI a shiny new iPod. (Although the Papa's known to have a taste for luxury, it's a relatively humble Shuffle.) Apparently he's got it loaded with Vatican radio programming: audio plays, commentary and snore-inducing classical.

 

I mention this because I'm working with a few friends on a prayer service focusing on contemporary music and thought I'd hit up my dear blogfans for suggestions. Understand that I'm not talking contemporary liturgical music, although we all love the acoustic guitar. I fear that Catholic prayer post-Vatican II risks being stuck in the aesthetic style of era that created it--the sixties--just as firmly as pre-Vatican II worship was mired in the medieval trappings that codified it. Parish choirs sometimes do a good job breaking out of this mold (and I'm not just saying that because I'm a little afraid of them, because everyone knows that she who runs the liturgy runs the parish and that's the choir director, so please stop brandishing those music stands) but when you've got amateurs organizing prayer outside of liturgy you're even more likely to end up surfeited with the chords C, G and F and lyric imagery straight out of Free to Be . . . You and Me. Which is certainly fine in proportion.

 

But there are more ways of being spiritual than that particular aesthetic vocabulary can express, and my friends and I think the music we listen to contains some fine examples. Which rock, hip-hop, techno or (gasp) pop songs fire your spiritual imagination, and why? I'll try to find your choices and comment on them in a later post, and I'll talk about some of my own.