A Worthy Reunion

While other godlier bloggers are off at GAs, reflecting on Christology and other serious matters, I spend my time running in the sun (the 90 degree mark separates the men from the boys, I am convinced) and reading Private Eye, in which august journal I notice that the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band are getting together for a fortieth anniversary reunion, though sadly without their lead singer, the late, great Viv Stanshall.  Late?  Well, he was a close friend of Keith Moon, never a very good idea. For Americans who have probably never heard of this band, they were the geniuses behind albums such as The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse and many wonderful tracks like `I'm the Urban Spaceman,' `In the Canyons of Your Mind,' `Can Blue Men Sing the Whites' and the remarkable `The Intro and the Outro' which includes a very relaxed Adolf Hitler playing a brief solo on the vibes -- the only time, I believe, he performed live with Liberace and Sir Kenneth Clark.  In short, they were to rock 'n' roll what Monty Python were to the British class system -- a lethal satirical force who outdid Spinal Tap almost twenty years before Christopher Guest used that amp that went up to eleven.

Theological significance?  None at all, really, except to the extent that they demonstrate once again the vital necessity of parody and satire as a means of bringing out otherwise obvious, plain as a pike staff truth.  Rock in its most self-obsessed and serious moments (e.g., anything U2 ever produce, the worst bits of Dylan) is so silly in its self-regard as to be virtually impossible to parody; but the BDDDB somehow did it to lethal effect.  Parallels with some strands of modern evangelical theology, so confident of their own wonderful insights and contributions that they dismiss all criticism as motivated by anger or jealousy or ignorance, thereby insulating themselves against any and all critics?  Self-appointed bodies writing new church (!!!) confessions for the next millennium outwith the bounds of the church courts which might regulate and authorise them? Such pomposity and narcissism needs to be punctured good and proper before it does any real damage.  Time for the theological equivalent of a vibraphone solo from Adolf Hitler.  Servetus on Hammond organ, perhaps?