You know that feeling when you listen back to an album that you loved twenty years ago, and you realize that it’s actually kind of terrible?
Or at the very least, there’s a couple of songs you used to love that are now skips?
To my great shame and embarrassment, there was a period in high school where Limp Bizkit was my favorite band.
Every music writer in every magazine I read talked about how terrible Limp Bizkit was.1 Everybody and their dog made fun of Fred Durst.
I didn’t care. Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water never left my CD player for a long time.
Earlier this year, music reviewer Anthony Fantano made a video reviewing every Limp Bizkit album.
After watching Fantano’s video, I listened back to Chocolate Starfish, and wow. It’s bad. It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.2
In late high school and all through college, my favorite band was New Found Glory, and their self-titled was my favorite album. I still like it (some of their best songs are on it), but “Boy Crazy” is an instant skip now.
It’s, as the kids are saying, cringe.
A lot of times I feel like the church is like an album that I once loved, but now it just hurts me to think about it..
Some parts are cringe (a lot of the music, certain evangelism tactics, t-shirts that rip off pop culture things and write Jesus on them, way too smiley church greeters),
others are downright cruel (the abuses, the parenting techniques, the sermons that lead people to unaliving themselves).
My relationship to the church is fraught, for sure.
I can never decide if I should stick with it and try to make it better (like removing “Boy Crazy” from New Found Glory’s self-titled), or if I should abandon it altogether (like I did with that terrible Limp Bizkit album).
A few months ago3, a friend said to me that people who leave the church are going to need a pastor to help them through it, and suggested that it might be a role for me.
And, maybe?
It’s probably a good role for someone to have.
Sometimes (I’d guess more than half the time) I think the church is still worth existing.
But a not-insignificant amount of the time, I think the world might be better off without it. People might be healthier emotionally and spiritually if they walked away from the church.
And if people need/want to walk away, they might need help.
Faith loss is hard. So, so painful.
If some of us are ready to put down that Limp Bizkit album, we might need help finding a new album.
Does this metaphor work? Probably not
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What I’m listening to:
Sleepwalking - All Time Low
When I first listened to All Time Low’s newest album, I wasn’t a fan. But it’s grown on me a whole lot.
This song is a straight-up pop song, which is weird coming from them. But it’s really good, I promise.
The fact that they named their most recent album Still Sucks shows that they have a sense of humor about it now, so that’s good. But I’m sure at the time they were pissed.
Wes Borland is an incredible guitar player. He deserves better than Limp Bizkit.
Or a year? Or two? Time means nothing anymore.
I really love this analogy. It feels validating to hear others have similar experiences. My new favorite album is Taylor Swifts Tortured Poets Department, I’m playing until I’ll likely hate it because my brain works that way - but my favorite part is how liberated she is in the amount of times she says the “F” word.
God is still here. Out here, in these wild gardens, except it’s real and not manufactured.
Great piece, my friend.
Bruh, you know "My Way," "Rollin'," and "Boiler" are still bangers.