Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Tuesday's Musical Notes - "Human" (The Human League)



Good Tuesday to ya friend!!!  Welcome to this week's Tuesday's Musical Notes!!! 

Have you ever had one of THESE kind of days?
If you have please consider yourself part of the family!!!  The family of humans.  We encounter our humanity every day it seems.  Some of us even encounter it multiple times per day.  This doesn't make us accident prone or a jinx, and let's face it karma is something that doesn't really even belong in a believer's vocabulary.  It seems as humans we were born to make mistakes.....

 
 
In 1979 The Human League would release their first album.   Reproduction featured an all male lineup of instrumentalists and vocalists and was one of the reasons the band became known as part of an eclectic group that would be the originators of what would eventually become Electronica.   Aided by the new technological advances in synthesizers and drum machines, The Human League would begin a musical career that is still going today.

The peak of The Human League's popularity came in 1981, when their album Dare was released in the United Kingdom.  It would set the standard for the '80s synthpop sound and be the standard by which all future Human League albums would be judged.  Their biggest hit was the last track to the album and one the band felt was the weakest.  "Don't You Want Me" went to #1 in December of 1981 with the support of its heavily rotated MTV music video.  Dare and "Don't You Want Me" would continue to reign on the charts bolstered by its release in the United States in 1982.

Reeling from the success of Dare, the band released the EP Hysteria, to keep fans plugged into The Human League while they worked on their next full length album.  After some tensions during the production of Dare, The Human League tapped Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam, fresh off of their success with Janet Jackson's Control album, to produce the follow up.  In doing so, the band gave up alot of control over song selection and royalties as some of the tracks were written by Jam and Lewis.  Crash released in 1986. While Crash provided the #1 track "Human", the album failed to live up to the expectations of fans and critics alike.  

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth."  This is how the Bible begins what many believe is the "human" story.  Genesis 1 is familiar to many around the world as the story of creation.  Man is created in verse 27.  In verse 31 the Bible tells us that God called all that He had created, "good".  Imagine that.  The God of perfection called us and everything else in this world "good".  As we look around the landscape of our world, I'm not so sure we can call it "good" in the same terms that God defined it at creation.  Yes, there are many good aspects to our world, yet, they are all a dull image in comparison to that one time in our history where God called it all "good".   So what happened?  As the song says, we're only humans right? After the expulsion from Eden, God never refers to humans as "good" ever again.  This is tragic.  Perhaps this is where the phrase "we're only human" originated.  While reading the creation and the fall stories, it would be easy for us to judge Adam and Eve for their poor judgement and blame the enemy for his temptations.  But we must realize that each day of our lives, we have the opportunity to do our part in reclaiming Eden.  Paul calls this the "renewing of our minds" in Romans 12:1-3.  Each day we must realize that the reason Adam and Eve sinned was because they took their eyes off of the creator and placed their eyes on themselves.  Every day we must realize that while the Bible is a historical, poetical, and prophetical piece of literature, it is primarily the story of reclaiming Eden through the sacrifice of Jesus.  It enables us, as we read it, to realize God's standard of what is "good". Then base our lives on that standard.  Yes, we will make mistakes but because the Bible is the story of God's redemptive power, we are still loved and forgiven if we will only believe......in-spite of the fact that we're only human....
 
 
'Til Tuesday,

Serving HIM by serving you,

Randy

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