Hymn Mashup Madness
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
Now I have my own blog, I can indulge in a bit of a grumble every now and then. Probably not very often, you’ll be pleased to know. But if you don’t want to hear a middle-aged man bemoan how things have changed for the worse with church hymn-singing practices, turn away now.
I don’t know the history behind hymn mashups, but I wish someone would rewind it, so that we can just get back to singing the old hymns without mashing them up into an unpalatable sandwich that has too many discordant flavours.
There are tried and tested sandwich combinations like peanut butter and jam/jelly, ham and cheese and so on. It’s true that every now and then you hit upon a great culinary combination that just works, even though it is a bit out of the ordinary. When I was at school, a weekly staple for breakfast (it was a boarding school) was French toast, or eggy bread as we called it. One day another boy was spreading marmalade over his eggy bread and encouraged me to give it a go. So I did. It’s really good! I never looked back.
Some mashups work and some don’t. It’s the same with hymn mashups, the practice of taking an old hymn and inserting a modern chorus between each verse. Most of the time, however, they don’t work. It’s not because the mixing of old and new is unsavoury. It’s not that at all. Renovations can be tastefully done; and old can meet new in complementary rather than clashing ways.
The reason hymn mashups invariably don’t work is because the tension is never allowed to build, momentum drains away, and you end up going round in interminable circles, the musical equivalent of driving around Milton Keynes, where you keep ending up encountering the same roundabout all the time. Ok, I exaggerate a bit, but I remember the good old days when voices in the congregation would soar as we reached the final stanza. That doesn’t happen when the car is always breaking for the next roundabout and can never properly get up to speed.
Or, it’s like I’m watching a police procedural with my wife, and the plot is thickening and the tension building, but I press pause on the remote and ask if she can remind me of who Stella is and how she is related to Bob, or whatever my confusion is. I do that a lot. Probably every 10-15 minutes. She’s so patient …
There is a serious point here. The Bible is full of different genres, and each has an important place in forming us into the likeness of Christ. Even in the Psalms, we see different genres collected together. Some certainly do have refrains (e.g. Psalm 136), but most don’t. And, significantly, the whole Psalter itself builds to a climax of praise and delight in the final five psalms. The whole Bible follows a similar trajectory, taking us through much sin, pain, exile, and confusion, followed by moments of relief, restoration, renewal, and then further pain and loss, and so on, until we finally reach our home, the Lord dwelling with us and us with him in unbroken, unending rest and joy, with the Lord himself wiping away our many tears.
My point is this. As well as songs which fix on a great truth about God and salvation—songs with repeated refrains are great at that—we need those songs and hymns that tell us a story, that create tension, and lead us to resolution. We really need that. At least I do. It’s part, I believe, of how we can help each other to grasp hold of the hope that is set before us, by placing ourselves within the great unfolding drama of salvation, of knowing that we are caught up in something so much greater than the discordant mess, confusion, and heartache of our daily lives.
And many of the old hymns do that so well. Please don’t insert a discordant chorus into them. Not because the chorus isn’t great; not because old is good; not because there aren’t ways some of the golden oldies of the hymn book could be improved; but because it’s just not how most hymns work. They are better left as there are.
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