Kill the Moonlight

“Religion don’t mean a thing, it’s just another way to be right wing.”

-Britt Daniel
Spoon, Kill the Moonlight

In occasion of the newest greatest album on Billboard (Transference). They finally made it big. Good for those guys. They’ve been coming out… with great albums for a while now and they have never been recognized for it, and it doesn’t matter how “indie” they are, everybody likes fame and money. I mean, as long as they keep coming out with great albums who cares if they become rockstars. Everybody needs to be recognized for what they do that is noteworthy. A lot of the hate that this album has had since it came out (which isn’t really a lot, but it is there in the depths of the horrible indie community), I feel, is because it aims for the masses, and not because of it’s content, Spoon is still coming out with the same awesome characteristic music that they’ve always done, but because Spoon has finally reached that point where they become mainstream. It happens to every good artist. Like it happened to Vampire Weekend early on, it happened to My Morning Jacket with “Z”, To Conor Oberst with “I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning” and the same goes for a lot of other artists. It usually comes (this “tipping point”) when they make a big step forward, when they make an album that is quite an upgrade and is very marked from their previous releases (like, “Z” and “I’m Wide Awake…”, their predecessors “It Still Moves” and “Lifted” are very good, but the new ones both mark a change for the sound and production of the band’s material, notice they are a lot shorter and more concise and focused), but for Spoon there hasn’t really been a great leap, only small steps and they continue to put out solid album after solid album. Kill The Moonlight was pretty close. It got solid reviews but it remained pretty indie. I guess with Transference they have hit that point, -the Billboard point-, where they can’t hide anymore. And very well deserved, Transference is a great album. 
And yes, this rant was influenced heavily by Malcolm Gladwell.

Now on to the second rant: Religion. As most people know, there’s 2 things where it’s pretty much impossible to achieve universal agreement: Religion and Politics. So I won’t get into why I think religions are uncool and all that, instead I’ll focus on what I see most people do within their religions. Where I live, (it’s a small city, and a little boring), and in the “social class” that I fall into, most people come in terms with a religion mostly because it’s a social thing. Now I won’t get into whether they actually believe in it or not, because I’m not supposed to judge that, but I can say that I see a lot of people going to church because they’ll know that they’ll see people they know there. And if they see people they know, then they’ll have something to say about them (not to them), that way they’ll have something to talk about with their friends on the weekend. Because their lifes are so boring they have to entertain themselves talking shit about everybody else, I guess it makes them feel better (there’s actually a quote from the TV show House that talks about this, I’ll see if I can find it later) and it makes them feel like they belong with those friends because they’re actually talking. Yeah, it’s complicated. But you know how it goes, some of you do it and if not at least you’ve heard it. “Did you hear ___ is pregnant?”, “No way, she’s not even married”, “I heard it’s from ___”, “Shut the fuck up!”. Exactly, shut the fuck up, because nobody gives a shit.

Also, they go to church because it’s the right thing to do. It’s what correct people do. They believe in something. Or at least they fake it. And here’s the most hypocritical thing: these awful people do whatever the fuck they want to dd during the week (especially stuff that religion forbids), and then they go to church like nothing ever happened. Like they didn’t do anything wrong. They’re good people. Correct people. It’s not like I’m completely against religion. Actually I’m the opposite, I think that believing that life ends when it ends and that there’s nothing else to it makes me sad. Like, really fucking sad. It makes me emo depressed. But there’s also the man-construct that is the church, and it makes me not want to believe. Because nothing good ever came out of men.