Daily Archives: May 19, 2018

Story Pile: The Blues Brothers

Okay, hold up.

I watched this movie kind of. Back in the fundamentalist church, there was this thing some families with VCRs would do, where they’d record a movie from TV, pause at points they knew the movie would get bad, then unpause afterwards. Think of it like cutting the ads (which they did as well), but for swearing and sex and music.

Yeah, music.

The fundamentalist cult I was in had their own special twist on Evangelical Fundamentalism (weird how little evangelism we ever did), where church leaders believed that music itself, the very nature of how it sounded and affected people, could be a sin. Thought crime, for rhythm. This was part of how we insulated ourselves from the outside world. There were sins of the mind, sins you couldn’t control, and they could come from hearing an errant snatch of music. The tones of a beat faster than your heartbeat was a toxin that could summon literal actual demons.  In my youth group, after I left that church, I saw Blues Brothers 2000 with Youth Group. It echoed of something. There was a church scene! They did things inspired by God! There was a Faith-Ish message! It could be tied back into what our youth group leader wanted to talk about, like The Matrix! I remembered really liking Blues Brothers 2000, because hey, that was really cool music.

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