Even though it’s been a while, he recently rediscovered this video he shot of a couple of Mormon missionaries from West Africa singing the LDS missionary anthem, “Called to Serve” and he just put it up on YouTube.

With all of the potential pop-cultural misperceptions of Mormon missionaries resulting from the “Book of Mormon” Musical, I thought it would be useful to share a taste of real LDS missionaries in Africa.  Enjoy!

After Thanksgiving, my uncle, cousin, brother-in-law, brother, and various other Wilson friends and family came over to my parents home for a spontaneous jam session.  We had a blast laughing and dancing and suggesting new songs.  So I wanted to share our Good Ol’ Clean Mormon Family Fun with the rest of you.  Here they are with a spontaneous, improvised rendition of Sing Sing Sing (with a swing):

[Watch The Video on Google Video]

Just because we avoid vice and sin doesn’t mean we don’t know how to have a good time.  Brigham Young was known to encourage the Mormon pioneers, after a long day of pulling carts across the plains, to pull out their instruments and dance and sing.  That is part of our heritage, and joy is central to our doctrine.  Is everything perfect?  No.  We have real problems with lost jobs, no medical insurance, serious health problems, struggles with ADD, failed relationships, bankruptcy, sick kids, and on and on.  But just like the pioneers dancing out in the middle of nowhere, we don’t let our troubles keep us from finding joy and having a great time.

Now, you might not find a party like ours all that fun.  And that’s fine with us.  But I expect that our stone-cold-sober Mormon parties are more fun and more memorable than the alternative.  While we may get a brain-freeze head-ache from all the ice-cream, we probably wont ever wake up with a hangover the next day.  And we might come away having lost at a dozen games of Uno, but we’ll never wake up in bed with a stranger having lost not only our memory of how we got there, but our virtue.

So, if you are tired of drunken hedonism and are looking for some real happiness, come talk to us.  We’d be happy to let you and your family join the real party!  Your problems wont magically vanish, but you’ll have a great time anyway.

The Bishop’s Councilor read the First Presidency’s preface to the LDS Hymnal:

Music in Our Church Meetings
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Inspirational music is an essential part of our church meetings. The hymns invite the Spirit of the Lord, create a feeling of reverence, unify us as members, and provide a way for us to offer praises to the Lord.
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Some of the greatest sermons are preached by the singing of hymns. Hymns move us to repentance and good works, build testimony and faith, comfort the weary, console the mourning, and inspire us to endure to the end.
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We hope to see an increase of hymn singing in our congregations. We encourage all members, whether musically inclined or not, to join with us in singing the hymns. We hope leaders, teachers, and members who are called on to speak will turn often to the hymnbook to find sermons presented powerfully and beautifully in verse.
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Latter-day Saints have a long tradition of choir singing. Every ward and branch in the Church should have a choir that performs regularly. We encourage choirs to use the hymnbook as their basic resource.
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Music in Our Homes
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Music has boundless powers for moving families toward greater spirituality and devotion to the gospel. Latter-day Saints should fill their homes with the sound of worthy music.
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Ours is a hymnbook for the home as well as for the meetinghouse. We hope the hymnbook will take a prominent place among the scriptures and other religious books in our homes. The hymns can bring families a spirit of beauty and peace and can inspire love and unity among family members.
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Teach your children to love the hymns. Sing them on the Sabbath, in home evening, during scripture study, at prayer time. Sing as you work, as you play, and as you travel together. Sing hymns as lullabies to build faith and testimony in your young ones.
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Music in Our Personal Lives
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In addition to blessing us as Church and family members, the hymns can greatly benefit us as individuals. Hymns can lift our spirits, give us courage, and move us to righteous action. They can fill our souls with heavenly thoughts and bring us a spirit of peace.
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Hymns can also help us withstand the temptations of the adversary. We encourage you to memorize your favorite hymns and study the scriptures that relate to them. Then, if unworthy thoughts enter your mind, sing a hymn to yourself, crowding out the evil with the good.
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Brothers and sisters, let us use the hymns to invite the Spirit of the Lord into our congregations, our homes, and our personal lives. Let us memorize and ponder them, recite and sing them, and partake of their spiritual nourishment. Know that the song of the righteous is a prayer unto our Father in Heaven, “and it shall be answered with a blessing upon [your] heads.”

He then explained that we, as members of the congregation, were invited to come forward to the pulpit, when prompted by the Holy Spirit, and direct the congregation to a favorite hymn in the hymnal and share how that hymn has influenced our testimonies of the Savior and the Restoration of His Church. We were encouraged to read one stanza of the hymn aloud and then the congregation would sing one or two of the other verses. To allow enough time for people to share, no more than two verses would be allowed.

The meeting that followed was wonderfully inspirational. Members got up and told short experiences that made their specific hymn of choice special to them and shared their feelings of worship and devotion to the Lord. We must have sung almost 2 dozen hymns during the course of the remainder of the meeting.

One sister in particular nearly brought me to tears. She and her husband have an adult son who suffers from fairly serious Autism who attends with them every week. She got up and said that she would like to stand proxy for her son because he cannot speak for himself. She described how much he loves the hymns of the church. She then read from the words of the second verse of hymn #227, There is Sunshine In My Soul Today (download MP3):

There is music in my soul today, a carol to my King,
and Jesus listening can hear the songs I cannot sing.
Oh there’s sunshine, blessed sunshine,
when the peaceful, happy moments roll.
When Jesus shows his smiling face,
there is sunshine in the soul.

We all raised our voices to sing, and when we reached the words ”…Jesus listening can hear, the songs I cannot sing,” I nearly had to stop singing because of the emotions I felt as I watched our Autistic brother, rocking back and forth to the music as he sat with his family in the pew.

Often our meetings focus on doctrine, personal experiences, and teaching. This was a meeting where worship ruled. And it was a blessing.

There really was sunshine in our souls last Sunday. I hope we do hymn testimony meetings regularly.

Q: What if the Beatles covered the classic Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven”?

A: The Beatnix

Watch the video on YouTube

Over-focus is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, when my focus does shift to something that needs to be done, I am capable of long periods of sustained focus with a great deal of attention to detail and I get a lot accomplished. On the other, if my focus does somehow turn to something else before I have completed that upon which I was previously focused, it may be a long time before I manage to get back to it. And when I am over-focused I overreact negatively to even minor interruptions, tend to give undue weight to perceived slights or criticisms, unnecessarily go over the same idea repeatedly in my head, over-focus on the negative in general, and I don’t get anything else done, no matter how important it is.

Controlling this behavior involves influencing the levels of Dopamine and Serotonin in my brain. It is a tricky balance to strike because I need to become unfocused enough to not be over-focused, but still focussed enough to be productive. Often the effort results in an unhappy choice: I can be a pleasant, happy person and make my wife and children happy to be around me and be completely unproductive, or I can be highly productive and a miserable excuse for a husband and father. We have been praying that Heavenly Father would reveal to us a better solution to my disability.

Recently I have taken up running or jogging in the mornings as a way of trying to strike the balance. It appears to be helping.

I have never been a fan of body-building or physical exercise as a path to accomplish physical goals. I get very little personal satisfaction from being able to do a certain number of push-ups, or from running an impressive distance, from competing with others, or even competing with myself. What I am discovering, however, is that I do love physical exertion as a form of mental exercise and, more especially, of divine communion.

Many people I know who exercise regularly use an iPod or some other music player to provide a rhythm to their motion and to occupy their thoughts while they work out their bodies. I love to listen to music, and I love to dance, but I am too stingy to spend money on music technology. So when I started running I would run in silence; the quiet noises of the early morning street, the sound of my inadequate shoes on the pavement, and my own wheezing breath to entertain me.

Running without an iPod got me thinking and brought back some memories of my youth:

Years ago, when I was a 17-year-old preparing for an LDS mission, Brother Cox, the instructor for our priest’s quorum, gave some advice that has stuck with me for many years. He advised us to not spend too much time with headphones plugged into our ears. He said that wearing headphones simulates in many ways the sensation of thinking, except that the thoughts in your head are someone else’s and not your own. He described it as a form of substitute or proxy thinking. He also warned that the Holy Spirit speaks to us in our minds and in our hearts, but that it would be difficult for him to speak to our minds if they were constantly filled with simulated thinking pumped into our heads through headphones.

My father served in Vietnam. Since then he received a degree in Law and later a PhD in Social Psychology and has practiced law for most of my lifetime. As a teen, I remember him telling me a little about his boot camp experience, looking back on it with a social psycologist’s eye. He can correct me if I misremember, but if I recall correctly he said that when he arrived at boot camp part of the training involved long marches and runs. As part of that conditioning the soldiers would sing Military Cadences as they marched. The cadences served various purposes. Physically, they helped the soldiers regulate their breathing throughout the march. Emotionally and socially they unified the soldiers with one voice. They also helped mold the soldier’s thinking. Many of the cadences were very vulgar and offensive and designed to dehumanize the Vietnamese. At first my father refused to sing them. However, by the time he finished boot camp, he sang along with everyone else.

His recollections have stayed with me for many years now.

Some weeks ago, these thoughts and memories running through my head as my body ran through the darkness, I was inspired to start singing Hymns while I ran. If the military could use the combination of physical exertion and singing to change men physically, mentally, and emotionally into soldiers, perhaps I could use the same combination to invite the Lord to change me physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually into His soldier.

The Hymns became my Military Cadences.

In their roots and in our religious texts, the words Spirit and Breath, and related words, are semantically and functionally intertwined. As I ran, my feet becoming a physical metronome, my breath ceased to be simply breath and became spiritual, as each one was forcibly formed into devotional song (muttered and gasped at first, but over time increasing clear, confidant, and controlled).

In his book “The Screwtape Letters,” C.S. Lewis observes that human beings “are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.” The Lord taught me to unite physical exercise, mental exercise, and spiritual exercise into one. Using hymns as military cadences changes my run into a physical prayer, a peculiar devotional dance sustained longer than most of my other prayers; binding my body to the words of Christ and molding my thinking toward eternal truth.

Instead of pounding, step-by-step, the dead gospels of rap or rock through headphones into my head, I enjoin my body, mostly against its will, to breathe out words of voluntary worship: mind, body, and spirit.

And it is good.

My over-focus is not gone. But with the help of Jesus Christ and my morning physical prayer, I believe that the Lord can teach me how to turn that weakness into a strength.

Also among my closest friends is the hyper-talented Lowe Family. This past September, we traveled to Branson Missouri where they have been performing for some years now. They treated us like royalty and we had a great time.

The Lowe Family has self-produced a music video for their original song “We Will Go On,” written by my friend Doug Lowe.

Earlier this year they performed with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir during the broadcast of ‘Music and the Spoken Word.”

My favorite is their arrangement with the choir of “Hurry Home” by Jon Anderson (vocalist of the progressive rock band “Yes”):

Go watch the higher quality version of the music video as well as selections from the video of their performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and highlights from their live show on their website at:

http://www.thelowefamily.com/video.html

Click her for Concert details.

And just to get you in the mood, here is a video mashup of Skook’s song “Popularity” with the incomparable Jerry Lewis dancing from a scene of the 1963 version of The Nutty Professor:

[Watch video at Google Video]

See you there!

If you live in Utah or will be visiting during the week of Independence Day, bring your family over to the Tahitian Noni Auditorium in north Provo, near Provo Canyon, on July 6th for an evening of family-friendly music and dancing with the former members of the local Ska Band Skook. The concert is free, but they will be accepting voluntary donations for LDS Humanitarian Services.

Brothers Ben and Joe Wilson formed Skook about 10 years ago in Cache Valley as a ska-influenced punk trio. Soon thereafter they moved to Utah Valley where they added some excellent horn players and their sound evolved into their own flavor of ska. From the beginning Skook was decidedly anti-popularity, and the theme is reflected in their lyrics. From the sarcasm of “I wanna be a suave mac-daddy man” to the still popular anthem “I shop at D. I.,” Skook was cool because they rejected what was “cool.”

Listen to a 5 minute sample mp3 of excerpts from nine Skook songs

Excerpts: Popularity, I Shop at D.I., Y2K, Obladi Oblada (Beatles cover), Da Bomb, Elephant Skank, With or Without (U2 cover), Cheese, Mac-Daddy Man

(most of these were recorded live without sufficient recording equipment so forgive the sound quality and enjoy the music)

Skook disbanded, as is usual here, when the members all left on LDS missions. Since then they have done a few reunion shows, but most of the members have their own musical projects now, several of them performing with some of the most accomplished musical groups on BYU campus.

This will likely be Skook’s final reunion show as the members move on to graduate and medical school. Each member will showcase his current musical projects as opening acts with the original Skook band as the headliner.

The 9th Street Jumpers
Cut a rug to Jump-Swing Music in the style of the neo-swing bands of the late 90’s like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

timothYoung
Deep dance beats, soaring guitar lines, lush chords, and thoughtful songwriting in a staggering variety of musical styles—and every sound you hear is produced, live on stage, by one human voice.

The Aaron Southerland Trio

Sean and Isaac Hess

Ben Wilson

Come enjoy the music and donate to LDS Humanitarian Services if you can. I’ll be there with my family, so if you’ve been reading my blog, bring your family and have some fun with us.

The artists of that era were truly amazing performers and their energy and talent is often missing from our modern entertainment industry.

Watch the amazing video above, from the film “Stormy Weather.” It showcases the extraordinary talents of some of my favorite performers from that bygone time: the fantastic Cab Calloway and the stupendous Nicholas Brothers . Fred Astaire said this sequence was the finest piece of tap dancing ever filmed.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I went to check out a news story on Governor Huntsman playing rock music in the basement of the governor’s mansion and found my uncle Brent wailing on his guitar and singing with the governor accompanying on piano.

Check out the online video of them playing classic rock songs (scroll down for links to video of individual songs):

http://kutv.com/topstories/local_story_141222707.html

Most people probably don’t know that Brent is also the uncle of the relatively famous classical pianist siblings, The 5 Browns, who are my cousins.

Maybe the governor will invite them up to his basement too and they can do some classical piano arranged for six pianos. They could call it “5 Browns and 1 Musical Politician from Utah that isn’t Senator Hatch”.

However, I am annoyed under certain circumstances by obvious grammar mistakes. Three recent bad grammar sightings that annoyed me:

1. My wife, our two daughters, and I were waiting in the office of our family doctor for the nurse to come out to tell us that the doctor was ready to see us. I grabbed a couple of the children’s books available there to read to the girls while we waited. The first book was one of the books from the “Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library” series. (This was a few weeks ago and I don’t remember the specific title, though I think it was “On Beyond Bugs: All About Insects ”).

Perhaps I am somewhat prejudiced because I have never been very impressed by the third-rate Dr. Seuss knock-offs that have been produced using his characters. Anyhow, about half way through the book there was a severe verb agreement problem. If I get a chance to take a look at the book again I’ll copy down the exact phrase, but it said something like “There’s three of them…” I know that is common for people to misuse “there’s” in everyday speech (I have done it myself), and perhaps the editors approve of bad grammar in order to keep the meter right (though the meter in the rest of the book wouldn’t seem to indicate a real concern for such). In any case, the mistake really annoyed me and I stopped reading and commented about it to my wife.

2. There is a song by the modern progressive rock band, Coheed and Cambria, called “The Suffering” that I like a lot. However, throughout the song there are various phrases that begin with the construction “If it was up to me, I would have…”

Now it seems clear to me from the lyrics that these portions of the song are supposed to be what in grammar is called the past subjunctive mood. The past subjunctive is used to to describe an occurrence (or hypothetical) that the speaker presupposes to be contrary to fact. But the correct construction of the past subjunctive is “If … were, … would ….”

So every time I hear the “If it was up to me, I would have…” in the song, I just shudder and think “If it were… if it were!”

You can hear a 30 second clip of the song with the offending phrase from amazon.com (Windows Media ).

It doesn’t annoy me enough to stop listening to the song…yet.

3. The last example is from a song that I don’t like, by a band that I generally don’t like. System of a Down’s music has been called nu-metal, and progressive rock. I call it Anarcho-AgitPop. Their music is primarily concerned with socio-political commentary. Their most recent radio release is called “Lonely Day.” It is hard for me to take their generally liberal socio-political lyrics seriously when they can, in all seriousness, sing the grammatically grating words “The most loneliest day of my life” over and over and over again. Arrrrggghhh! Listen to a clip from amazon.com if you can stand it (Windows Media).

Anyway. I guess I am just in a griping-grammar freak mood. Good night.

Well, The New York Dolls, without Kane who passed away in 2004, have released a new song and music video: Dance Like a Monkey.

The catchy song makes a lot of fun allusions and references to the modern Intelligent Design vs Darwinism cultural debates. The video has a lot of awesome visual references to modern events, as well as cultural monkey references (watch for a cartoon Charlton Heston pounding the sand before the remains of the Statue of Liberty, Darwin dancing with a Galapagos Tortoise, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster of the Pastafarians⁴ ).

Personally, I find a lot of merit in the criticisms of Darwinism from the Intelligent Design movement, I have friends and family members who strongly disagree, but it is fun to step back from the debate and laugh at it a bit.

Watch the Music Video at Google Video