Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!ihnp4!zehntel!dual!amd!decwrl!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!godot!ima!inmet!lutton From: lutton@inmet.UUCP Newsgroups: net.music Subject: Re: Worst Song Lyrics (Offensive) Message-ID: <1763@inmet.UUCP> Date: Sun, 28-Oct-84 01:53:03 EST Article-I.D.: inmet.1763 Posted: Sun Oct 28 01:53:03 1984 Date-Received: Mon, 29-Oct-84 02:41:04 EST Lines: 31 Nf-ID: #R:inmet:6600209:inmet:6600210:000:1675 Nf-From: inmet!lutton Oct 25 21:11:00 1984 Thank you all for your replies to this message. "You're all right by me" is not an appropriate thing to say to your God in any religion I have ever heard of. Nobody talks to Jesus that way in the Gospels. (Nobody talks to anybody that way in the entire Bible. The English language has deteriorated since then. :-) ) The music in Jesus Christ Superstar, if you listen to it today, is Seventies-pretentions and does not impress thirty-year-old listeners as much as it did back when they were teenagers and had never heard anything as sophisticated as Sondheim. (-: Sondheim sophisticated? :-) The lyrics are as hopelessly dated as the characters in a Wilkie Collins novel. Americans had a certain way of looking at the world in 1971 that had no counterpart in a first-century Middle Eastern community. (But then, how many Americans can understand how first- century Middle Easterners felt?) The composer and author apparently felt that audiences would understand Jesus and his times better by retelling it in terms of modern characters -- business men on the expense account, prostitutes who worry about "relationships" as abstract things, followers who hope to cash in by writing memoirs, and a central character with such serious doubts and feelings of inadequacy as to come close to abdicating his responsibilities. We deserve better than this. (Or some of us do. Most of us HAVE better than this and it sits on our bookshelves unopened and unread.) Whoever wishes may move the above to net.flame. I still cringe whenever I hear "Ho Zanna Hey Zanna Zanna Zanna Ho." I wonder what it means in Hebrew when it's arranged like that?