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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?