Sorry, Tom, but Kim is hardly a fantastic singer.  Her voice is very thin and reedy and her delivery and stage presence suck.  She'd be great for funerals, I guess.  Or wan, wistful songs of longing and weakness.

One Foundation were a real trip for us, though, weren't they?  For one thing, there was all this tiny, little, mini-personality stuff around them. I mean, none of us could ever really relish in our personalities openly like that but there seemed to be this small bit of allowance from the Lord for us to mildly enjoy the supposedly "whacky" something-or-other of the guitar player, whatever his name was.  You know, like a real humanizing mini-moment, I guess.

Then there was the divinely sanctioned relationship between Kim and the other what's-his-name (Ross?) just when Rawat was staring down every relationship in sight and pushing his flock into the ashram.  Somehow they were exempt, at least that's how it looked to this rank and file Canadian ashram premie.  I couldn't help think that once in a while as I watched the band.  They got to do all that and do all this at the same time?   

After a while, though, their music really started to suck.  Their reggae was insipid and full of false happiness.  It's like the cult was borrowing from a culture it had no real affinity with.  And eventually the only good song was a weepy ballad of guilt and confusion.  Surdas the Gardener was good for the genre but how much of that stuff can a band play before it's just a religious lounge act?

Something particular confused me about those guys even then.  Remember that stupid reggae song with the fake Jamaican accent about the centipede that was doing just fine walking until he was asked about it?  Even then I thought the moral of the story militated against Rawat's teachings.  The whole idea was that if you don't think about things too much and just kind of do them, it's all good.  But wasn't Rawat trying to make us think about our breath, etc. exactly like that confused, demobilized centipede?  Weren't all the regular folk just following the advice of living easy, unselfconsciously, just like the doctor ordered?  Didn't make sense to me.  At times, I even wondered if Mr. Mind hadn't infiltrated the band.