A Love Song for Valentine's Day, or, How I Sold My Soul for Björk

I was seventeen years old when I found Satan in the junior's department at J. C. Penney.

They had recently installed a bunch of televisions showing music videos while you shopped, to make the place seem more hip, less like a J. C. Penney. I wasn't used to watching MTV, because we didn't have cable, and I mostly only listened to Christian music: Amy Grant, Point of Grance, Michael W. Smith, or, if I really wanted to rock out, maybe D. C. Talk or Audio Adrenaline. My stepdad had a video, Rock and Roll: a Search for God, that explained how listening to AC/DC would brainwash you into sacrificing babies for blood rituals. If I did listen to secular music, it was usually jazz, because everyone knows that music becomes inherently pure and innocent once it's old.

So I was browsing through all the high-waisted jeans and Tweety Bird shirts, when I heard what sounded like a really cool jazz song, but with screaming in it. I looked up, and there on the TV was some chick dancing with a mailbox; it was pretty much the greatest thing I'd ever seen.

I grew up in an extremely conformist community. Everyone was a conservative Baptist, everyone loved sports and barbecue, the girls all curled their bangs and dreamed of having four children with their high school sweethearts, and the boys all dreamed of having bigger trucks. If you deviated from any of this, you kept it to yourself. Rock music meant Hootie and the Blowfish, because they were from South Carolina, too! Looking back, I think the reason I didn't listen to secular music back then wasn't because I was deeply committed to my Lord and Savior so much as I just hadn't ever heard anything good.

Björk changed everything, though. After a few months of asking myself the hard questions--Was "It's Oh So Quiet" ok, since it was a jazzy song? Would that fact that I couldn't understand most of what she was saying neutralize any Satanism present in the lyrics?--I purchased Post on cassette tape (while on a mission trip, no less).

So here it is, the song that cost me eternal salvation. And happy Valentine's!