still reading that silly puritan revolutionary nonsense. well, my head's just been throbbing....slept for something like 90 of the last 100 hours...i'm awake now, finally. hope to be done by the end of the night.

live just randomly struck me as the proper soundtrack for this stuff, 'cause it intersects properly into that area of christianity that i have a lot of respect for. be nice to people. have some fucking integrity. well, i'm an open socialist - on a basic definitional and historical level that largely means i like the morals and reject the theology. engels informs us of the difference between historically utopian (religious) socialism and his new brand of scientific (marxist) socialism. i digress. but i don't think that jesus would have been a hippie, really. he would have been more of a punk, out to smash the corporate state.

this record has a lot of errors. it's more of a guilty pleasure, really. i've grown to love it's flaws (funny how that happens, sometimes), but roughly half of it is admittedly undefendably awful. and this is certainly the last record they did before the singer got too preachy to listen to.

...but i've got a really weird soft spot for this disc, explicitly *as* the christian rock it is.

well, i think another reason they went downhill after this is that they stopped working with jerry harrison. that's probably not a widely understood narrative.

also, i'm again confused as to what the difference is between this and emo, other than that this is better than essentially all 90s emo i've heard - on their own basis of "emotional songwriting", "introspective lyrics" and "developed vocal melodies".

yeah. i'm doing far too many things at once. there's still that music history site i want to do, and here's the thing: i don't think we should have a thing called emo at all, dumb marketing, but if we're going to, and people are going to write this history, then this isn't just it but is some of the best of it. even if nobody realized it. *i'm* realizing it and will have to write it in.