How Things Go Wrong

Adam brought in his CD by hand. The CD's in a white sleeve with simply "Adam" and "In the Beginning" written in Sharpie on it. The CD is theoretically for sale through his Web site, but with a stage name like Adam, Google can only do so much.

In the Beginning is, as you might expect, Christian music - Christian hip-hop to be exact, but without drum machines or any programming. As such, it often sounds like little more than a collection of demos. The one winner is "Sweet Sixteen." Bad title that promises cliches a-plenty, but the Spanish guitar figure and a backing singer cooing "Take your time" gives the song a fleshed out quality that little before it has had. Adam's flow's pretty good, and for a moment, you can imagine this as a possible slow jam hit.

Then the words start to add up and the cliche I feared turned up. Sweet Sixteen skips school to see a 22-year-old guy who knocks her up, then in cad fashion straight out of a Jack Chick comic, suggests that she sees "the special man." In New Orleans, that's a hard line to hear with a straight face because for years, it was the slogan for a commercial for a discount furniture store. People with no credit or bad credit would go see the special man, and he'd say, "Let 'em have it." It would be great to think that Adam was making a connection between abortion and discount furniture, but more likely it was just slack writing. "The special man" phrase is the only live one in the song; everything else is commonplace and forced to fit to make sure the point isn't lost.

UPDATE: After writing this, I decided to try to find Adam and found Google more powerful than I thought it might be. Here's a link to "Sweet Sixteen" on YouTube.