Now, that's good listenin'

Damn The Avett Brothers for making it difficult to put together this week's edition of the Revolution 21 podcast. I can't put the whole dadgum Emotionalism album on the show, and it's hard to decide what cut to use.

Everything on the CD is that good.

What's wrong with them boys from Greenville, N.C.? Bands just aren't THAT GOOD anymore.

OK, Arcade Fire is, but not many more are.

HERE'S THE THING . . . look at the top 50 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. See the Avett Brothers there? No, of course you don't.

Do you reckon that 80 percent of the stuff on there is crap, with some of it toxic waste, even? Of course. No debate.

No, to The Avett Brothers are found on the indie charts . . . and here, on the Internet. The record companies, of course, want to sue their file-sharing customers into oblivion and bleed Web radio to death.

The crap is easy to find. It's on your local contemporary-hits radio station.

IT'S ALL VERY BIBLICAL, isn't it? What we embrace in popular culture -- and what the mainstream rejects -- is kind of analogous to what Paul says about sin in Romans, Chapter 7:

15 What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.
16 Now if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good.
17 So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
18 For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not.
19 For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.
20 Now if (I) do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
21 So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand.
22 For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self,
23 but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.
24 Miserable one that I am! Who will deliver me from this mortal body?
25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Therefore, I myself, with my mind, serve the law of God but, with my flesh, the law of sin.

GO FIGURE. You know?