Welcome to the riot

 

This is the winner in this year´s Eurovision Song Contest (ESC): "Bangaranga" featuring Dara. It´s a crazy pop song and dance act, perhaps inspired by Ukrainian singer Ruslana´s old classic "Wild Dances". 

It´s also surprisingly pretentious for a pop song. The nonsense title is supposedly a Jamaican slang word for rebellion or disturbance. The live performance begins as a weird group therapy session (!) and ends in a riot (?) as the singer affirms her inner strength. 

"Bangaranga" is also inspired by the kukeri, groups of Bulgarian men in strange costumes who scare away evil spirits by dancing and making noises. Presumably, Dara and her dance troupe are trying to exorcize their own inner demons. OK, I admit that it may work better than traditional psychoanalysis, LOL.

Welcome to the world´s strangest riot. Twelve points!  

Jah Rastafari

 

Almost by accident, I found an English translation of some of the Ethiopian Bible books not considered canonical by other Churches in a used book store.

Or did I?

It turned out that my prize volume, "Books of the Ethiopian Bible: Missing from the Protestant Canon. Ethiopian Church", was even stranger than I expected.

I almost immidiately noticed that the name of God was rendered "Jah". Then, I noticed that at least one of the texts seem to be translated into some kind of Pidgin English. Oookay. So I checked the publisher, Lushena Books in Illinois, United States. Yepp, it´s an Afro-centrist outlet of some kind. 

In other words: the book isn´t published by supporters of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but by Rastafarians!

Not that I mind. The work was pretty cheap and I looked into Rastafarianism before. As opposed to, say, Pastafarianism. So I might consider taking a second look at it, Jah willing.    

Kamala Harris is...Indian!

 

I knew that Canadian cult-buster Henri Jolicoeur liked Kamala Harris (he mentioned her in an attack video on Tulsi Gabbard), but I didn´t know that Harris went to high school in Jolicoueur´s home town. But then, maybe his "home town" is Greater Montreal! The video above is a tribute to Kamala Harris´ Indian mother. Linked for information purposes.  

A stake in America

 

The Alt Right are weird sometimes. One common argument against Kamala Harris is that she doesn´t have any children of her own, and hence can´t have a "stake in America". But Harris is half-Jamaican, half-East Indian. Funny with all these Alt Right racialists suddenly wanting POCs to have babies...

Note also that J D Vance, Trump´s running mate, is married to an East Indian! You can´t make this shit up. So presumably his mixed race children will have a stake in Amerika, then?

But maybe I´m just misunderstanding something here. Maybe the complaints emanate from the Jewish-Mexican-Kenyan-Azeri-Chinese faction of the Alt Right? As opposed to, say, the gay faction...

A semblance of Docetism

 

A specter is haunting scholarship. The specter of Docetism, to be exact. Who were the accursed Docetae, who denied that Jesus had come in the flesh, indeed who claimed that the sweet Redeemer was just an "illusion" or "semblance"?

Very often, the Docetic doctrine (usually associated with Gnosticism) is depicted as quite absurd, as if the believers in this curious idea regarded Jesus as some kind of phantom or ghost. Indeed, he could shape shift, too! A bit like Odo in "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"? But how can you crucify a mere phantom? Absurd, I say, absurd!

But perhaps the real phantom is Docetism itself. Docetism sounds absurd because...well, because it is. And nobody really believed it in ancient times either...

So what on earth *was* Docetism? I see two possibilities. One is that the Gnostics were the original Mythicists. Perhaps their teachings had three levels. Let´s call them exoteric, mesoteric and esoteric. Or perhaps hylic, psychic and pneumatic? At the exoteric level, the canonical Gospels are real. At the mesoteric level, the Gnostic Gospels (with their strange stories) are introduced. And at the highest, esoteric, level? The initiate there learns that both the canonical and Gnostic gospels are really teaching stories, not to be taken literally. Christ is neither a sin sacrifice nor an angelic messenger. He is *within you*, the divine spark, which you can access by meditation techniques. This, then, is the "Docetism". Jesus was an "illusion" or "semblance", not because he was a disembodied spook from the séances of Simon Magus, but because he was seen as an allegory for the Spirit. Yes, the Gnostics did follow "well crafted myths"! The Docetism is simply the mesoteric level of teaching as further distorted by proto-orthodox Christians or bewildered modern scholars. 

But there is another possibility. Maybe the accursed Docetae viewed Jesus as a Hindu avatar? We can take Chaitanya as an example. Everyone (I think) agrees that he was a real historical person. A human, in other words. Yet, the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition - if I understand their position - consider him to have been 100% divine. That is, he was fully ontologically divine. In contrast to Jesus in traditional Christian theology, who was both human and god simultaneously. That is, a real ontological human besides also being really ontologically divine. But Chaitanya, by contrast, was "only" divine. Thus, his human form was "just a semblance". It was part of his divine play. It wasn´t a phantom, to be sure, but it was nevertheless just a temporary form taken by the Supreme Personality of Godhead. (The whole thing is *somewhat* more complicated, since strictly speaking everything in the universe is "divine" in a certain sense in most Hindu theological systems. But that´s the gist of it.) 

From a Christian theological viewpoint, this too would presumably be Docetism.

Note that the Alawites in Syria regard Ali as Allah. Now, I´m not a *yuge* expert on the esoteric teachings of the Alawites, but could this be similar to the Hindu notion of an avatar? Ali was really 100% God, although he temporarily took a seemingly human form. The same idea seem to pop up again and again in the history of religion. The Rastafarians of Jamaica regarded Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie as God. The Nation of Islam regards W D Fard as God. And so on. Same thing?

My guess is that the Gnostic option is more likely in this particular case.

To an ordinary believer, it presumably doesn´t matter much whether or not the god-man you´re worshipping is "both god and man", "fully god but with a human form" or "fully god". But to theologians, that´s apparently very central. Presumably because of the sin sacrifice of Christ on the cross. The other god-men mentioned here didn´t sacrifice themselves in that way. 

Mystery solved. You learned something new today.  

Abraham´s wayward children

The term "Abrahamic religions" or "Abrahamic faiths" is extremely popular. It´s also entirely bogus. Why? Because there are no "Abrahamic" religions. The term has no historical significance whatsoever. It´s obviously a political term. A pro-Muslim political term, to be exact. It´s a term promoting unity between Islam, Judaism and Christianity, but with Islam at the center.

Think about it. Why "Abrahamic"? Sure, all three religions "recognize" Abraham, but so what? All three of them recognize Moses, as well. So why not call them "Mosaic"? Christianity isn´t about Abraham. It´s about Christ. Judaism isn´t about Abraham, either. In human terms, it´s of course about Moses. Only Islam emphasizes Abraham above everyone else except Muhammad. Islam is the *last* "Abrahamic" faith and therefore the one most obviously dependent on the two others, but according to Muslims, Islam was the *first* "Abrahamic" faith. Acording to Muslim belief, Abraham was a Muslim. Together with Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs, he supposedly built the Kaba in Mekka, the most holy shrine of Islam. Thus, by calling Christianity and Judaism "Abrahamic", you are really calling them "Muslim-derived". That´s the hidden meaning of the term. 

Once you see it, you can´t unsee it. 

As a scholarly term, "Abrahamic faiths" is useless. Sure, Christianity is derived from Judaism. Islam is derived from both. But so what? All three may have been heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism. So why aren´t they called "Zoroastrian faiths" or "Zoroaster´s children"? Ancient Judaism was very different from modern Rabbinical Judaism (at least in its exoteric form). Indeed, the religion of ancient Israel was probably more similar to modern Mormonism! It was much more "pagan" than modern apologists care to admit. Christianity is a Jewish-pagan syncretism. And Islam syncretizes Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Arab paganism (Kaba wasn´t built by father Abraham, but by pagans worshipping a moon god and his female angels). None of this complicated history is covered by the artificial term "Abrahamic faith".

Similar objections could be raised against the term "dharmic religion". Where on earth does *that* term come from? The Buddha rejected the Vedic corpus in its entirety. Why try to assimilate him with Hinduism by calling both religions "dharmic"? Sure, both used the word "dharma", but so schmucking what? I don´t know, dude, maybe they spoke the same language or something... 

And why is Sikhism considered a dharmic religion? It´s a syncretist faith, blending some kind of mutant Vaishnava devotionalism with Islam. How is that "dharmic" (Vedic)?

Are we dealing with some kind of Hindu imperialist agenda here, or what? 

Wikipedia also proposes the term "Indian" or "Indic" religions, and introduces us to yet another completely artificial category, "East Asian religions", which lump together movements as disparate as philosophical Taoism, Confucianism, Chinese folk religion, Shinto, Mongolian shamanism and various apocalyptic cults. Most humorously, Wiki classifies Rastafarianism as an "Abrahamic" faith. Why, Rastas read the Bible and believe in Yah, so there!

These artificial, meaningless and politically loaded terms should be purged from the vocabulary of any serious scholar of religion. Indeed, everytime I hear a scholar use them, I know he´s a basic bitch. I´m not going to declare my dhimmitude under Islam by using "Abrahamic faith" as a description of, say, Lutheranism anymore than I´m going to declare my submission to PM Modi by calling Buddhism "dharmic" (in the crypto-Hindu sense mentioned above). 

This BS really has to stop. 

Made my Christmas great again

Boney M's Christmas collection seems to exist in a number of different versions. So many, in fact, that I wonder whether they released the same album every year for Christmas, but with different covers?

As I said in a review of another edition, I played this on a very high volume in mid-summer when my neighbor went mustang with Britney Spears songs. It was a veritable culture war, Christmas carols versus Daughter of Sin, LOL. You *could* play this on normal volume during the actual Christmas season, too, if you like that approach better…

I usually find Christmas carols boring or plain terrible, and some make me feel weirdly uneasy (I mean, “Silent Night”, what's up with that?), so I suppose you could say that Boney M saved my Yuletide sanity and made Christmas Day great again!

Five stars.

Islands in the sea

“Peoples of the Earth” was a series of popularized anthropology books, published during the early 1970's. Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard was the editor of the series. This volume covers the Caribbean, the islands of the North Atlantic (except Greenland and Iceland) and the ditto of the South Atlantic. This gives the book a somewhat peculiar look, since it includes articles on such unrelated places as Cuba, the Canary Islands and the Falkland Islands.

Many of the articles are written in a slightly condescending style - brace yourself for expressions such as “one fat Negro woman and four Mulattoes”. Jamaica and Haiti are solely represented by pieces on Rastafarianism and Voodoo, respectively. Other articles seem to be authored by anthropologists with a longing for poor, pristine and noble savages. That being said, I admit that I found this book fascinating. It mentions islands or ethnic groups I never heard of before: the communistic clan society at St Kilda in the Hebrides, the British settlers on the Bay Islands, the last remaining Caribs on Dominica… One article covers Tristan da Cunha, a small volcanic island in the Atlantic and the location of the most isolated human settlement on Earth. But yes, I did hear of Tristan before reading this volume. The photos are equally fascinating, one showing a female leader of the Haitian Ton Ton Macoute militias. Another picture shows American businessmen during an orgy at a hotel in Jamaica!

Unfortunately, I haven't seen any other books in the series, and since this volume was published in 1973, the information is probably in need of an update. That being said, I was sufficiently intrigued by this little gem (I bought the Swedish translation at a library clearance sale) to give it…five stars.

I feel stressed, alright

Daddy Freddy and "Stress". Featuring guest stars with names like Tenorfly and Asher D. The songs have titles like "Go Freddy Go", "Daddy Freddy's in Town", "Haul and Paul Badboy" and "Ragga House (All Night Long)". Yeah, like I wouldn't know the feeling. My brother had a raggamuffin-raggamuffin-hip hop period, during which he played CDs like this one on super-load volume. NOOOOOOOOO... I was waiting for Ya to destroy the ragga music industry with a flash of lightning, or something. In fact, Freddy's hair-cut reminds me of my bro's ditto about 25 years ago. No, Daddy, you're not welcome back to my private dance hall, LOL. Only one star for driving me out of my flippin' mind!!!

Joy to the world

A review of "20 Greatest Christmas Songs" 

Boney M was a disco band based in Germany, although the band members were Caribbean. Their Christmas album exists in several different versions, suggesting that it must have been very popular. This seems to be one of the longer versions. I admit that I like these pop-disco enhanced versions of various classical Christmas songs, including “Hark the Herald Angel Sing”, “Come all ye faithful”, “Zion's daughter” and “Joy to the world”. I admit that I sometimes listen to Boney M's songs even in the dead heat of summer! But then, that's me. Five stars.

Works on Christmas, too

A review of Boney M´s "Happy Christmas" CD album

This is one of several versions of Boney M's popular Christmas album. Most of the songs are the same, but there are a few differences of importance to the hard line fans. For instance, this particular edition doesn't include “Joy to the world”.

I have “Happy Christmas” at home, and sometimes played it aloud in response to my naughty neighbour, who listened to heavy metal or Britney Spears on very high volume. “Hark the Herald Angel sing”, “Oh Christmas Tree” or “Mary's Boy Child”, ha, take that! Right in the middle of the summer, too.

Works perfectly during the Christmas holidays, as well.

Never gonna get enough

Written before I heard about the tragic accident in which both members of this duo lost their lives. Still, this is how I felt on re-discovering their old hits... 

Oh my God. The London Boys. I forgot about the London Boys! Purely by chance, I re-discovered them at Youtube the other day and...well, it turns out that I can still sing along to all of their songs?!

A creepy feeling.

Musically speaking, London Boys are so-so. It sounds like a cross between euro-disco (perhaps Bad Boys Blue) and "real" chart music. They have that strange gay image typical of euro-disco as well, although the songs are "straight".

And yet...we all love them. Never gonna get enough, never gonna get enough, I LOVE YOU.

:D

London Boys are worth five stars, even today. Jehovah himself wants you to follow "The Twelve Commandments of Dance"!

Gold made in Germany

Boney M was a German disco band, popular during the late 1970's and early 1980's. The band members were Jamaicans and Arubans, but the real mover behind Boney M was the German producer Frank Farian, who actually sings (uncredited) on many of the tracks. Indeed, many of the "band members" were actually dancers and photo models who didn't really sing on the actual albums. Belatedly, I also realized that many Boney M songs are covers. Others have melodies or lyrics pilfered from traditional folk music. But then, who cares? Boney M is sheer entertainment.

Still, I'm intrigued by this band. Many of their songs have unusual lyrics, at least for disco music. What are we to make of "Rivers of Babylon", based on two psalms in the Psalter? Or "Ma Baker", which is about an (apparently fictitious) female robber in the Wild West. Then there's the bizarre song "Rasputin", with the equally bizarre line "Ra-ra-rasputin, Russia's biggest love machine, it was a shame how he carried on". And yes, the song is about *that* Rasputin. When Boney M performed in Moscow, they were explicitly prohibited from singing this particular tune.

And while Boney M weren't religious, as far as I know, they also recorded religious songs about the Virgin Mary or the Fall of Man. It seems Farian was experimenting with different styles and concepts, anything but the usual love-and-heartbreak formula.

I must say I somehow like the result...

This isn't particularly deep music. Indeed, the constant up tempo beat (almost no ballads on this CD!) might get you really annoyed after a while. Still, the strange lyrics and weird choices of subject at least make it possible to pretend that this is something out of the ordinary.

Very light dessert

A review of the Boney M greatest hits album "More Gold".

Boney M was a German-based disco band, popular around 30 years ago, but still commercially viable enough for compilations to be released.

The best of Boney M can be found on another album, simply called "Gold" (the one with the blue cover). "More Gold" feels more like a very light dessert.

The songs are very easy going, sometimes bordering the childish. I'm sure your toddler can swing along to "I shall sing" or "I see a boat on the river". Or what about the love song "Jimmy"? Gee, is it puppy love or something? There is even a song with something sounding like an accordion playing in the background. 

I also wonder about "Going back west", a song about a Black pop star who gets "played" by his manager. A self-ironic song? Boney M's flirtation with reggae and Black Power ("Da La De La") is also quite entertaining. Come on, these guys lived in West Germany. They probably never came closer to Afrika than some tourist magazine featuring lions and zebras, LOL.

Still, if you like Good Old Pop Music, both "Gold" and "More Gold" are probably essential additions to your collection...