DARWIN Part Deux

Point/counterpoint:

The New Creation: Dig! The Origin of Man

Baba Brinkman: Creationist Cousins

Last week when I was visiting Chicago I made a point to visit Intuit, the outsider-art museum. It's a fairly small spot, but it has a performance stage (Jan Terri played there years ago!) and an amazing store that has, among it's many wonders, some outsider music CDs. That's where I picked up the New Creation album "Troubled," a reissue of a phenomenal 1970 private-press (only 100 copies) "Jesus-freak" record from Canada.

A mother & son combo (can't think of too many of those) + friends with only the most basic of technical skills but plenty of song-writing smarts, The New Creation's sole album is a charming chunk of garage-psych. It kicks off with a really weird 4 minute sound collage before launching into a song called "Countdown To Revolution!," reminds the squares that Jesus was a rebel ("The Status Quo Song"), and sing some folk-rock gems like "Yet Still Time" that may or may not have anything to do to with Christianity. Their stance on evolution in the posted song "Dig!" seems more bemused then anything else. It's a catchy tune indeed, probably because it borrows quite a bit of it's melody from the '50s hit "Red River Valley."

Baba Brinkman (also Canadian, eh!) first appeared in these pages with his rap version of The Canterbury Tales. His new album "The Rap Guide To Evolution," (available from his site) is, well, just that. It's scientifically accurate, musically solid, even funny sometimes. But dealing with biological complexities can make the songs amazingly wordy, e.g.: the finely funky song posted, set at a dinner table as our hero tries to reason with a stubbornly unscientific family. I'm certainly aware of the large number of religious creationists out there, but the feminist who says gender has no basis in science threw me for a loop. Are there still people who think like that? I thought that was a relic of '70s hippie-dom.

Me? I wouldn't bother arguing or debating. Darwin's discovery of Natural Selection is just part of a long chain of biological advances, from Gregor Mendel's genetics experiments, to Watson & Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA, right up to the recent Human Genome Project. Whether someone likes it or not is irrelevant. There's no getting rid of it, and believe me, the Communists tried. Ah, evolution - can't live with it, can't live without it...

Thanks to Pete!.