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Why I Stopped Caring About Christian Music| | Lately I've been looking at the most recent additions to my CD collection, my iTunes library, and the things I've been spinning most often in the car, most of which probably give my wife a puzzled internal reaction along the lines of "Where in the F does he find this stuff?", but she's either too polite to say anything, or too tired to care (other than to commandeer the volume knob on days when she's really tired and some "clearly not American Idol-caliber" singer is a little too ragged for her tastes). Long story short, I've become a bit of a wannabe indie rocker. I say "wannabe" because I'll still quite proud of a lot of my glossy mainstream favorites. But due mostly to a handful of Internet friends who know how to dig deep and who seem to have a relentless taste for musical exploration, you'll now see my Xanga entries boasting bands with odd names such as Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, and to include some non-zoological names, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The New Pornographers. Stuff where I'd probably have thought a few years back, "Oh, come on, you just dug that one up to prove you're more out there than I am. No way I'd listen to bands with such silly names who probably sing about total nonsense." And now here I am, championing some of these bands while wrestling with my mixed reactions to others, but enjoying the exploration all the same.
And despite the massive amount of time I spend listening to music (it's how I make it through 8 hours of coding on the average work day with my sanity intact), there are still only 24 hours in the day. All of that exploration of the obscure has to displace something. And you know what it's mostly displaced? Christian music. I used to listen to nothing but CCM. I'm a bad boy now, I guess, because I used to look at a lot of my InterVarsity friends in college, the ones who had all sorts of interesting and obscure names in their CD collections, and wonder why most of these people didn't listen to any Christian music despite being Christians. It's only within the past few years that I've discovered the occasional "secular rock" gem from the 90's and realized that I was missing out. And that's not to say that I didn't find anything on my own in the CCM world back then that was genuinely good. I still believe in a scant few records that I think could hold their own among such company. But let's be honest, I was mostly interested in playing it safe and listening to catchy rock music without having to worry about what might offend my prudish sensibilities at the time. A lot of that stuff, I liked more due to what it was not than what it was. Hey, it's the way I was raised (more so by church culture than by my Mom). It took me a while to learn how to listen and discern for myself.
This all changed somewhere around 2000, with the advent of Internet file sharing. Suddenly, I was free to take a peek at full albums by mainstream bands who had radio hits that I thought were pretty catchy and not innately offensive in any way, and before I knew it, I was into a lot of those "Star-type bands"... you know, the ones they play on your local "Star" radio station. Some of that stuff was pretty superficial, some I can still relate to, but basically I learned that most "secular music" was reasonably innocuous. After a while, I guess I started to realize that I'd heard about 10,000 different versions of the "Matchbox Twenty template" and the "Linkin Park template" and so forth, and I started to become more interested in some of the stuff my online friends were digging up circa 2003 and 2004. Up until then, the Christian music was still competing reasonably well with the mainstream stuff, since pretty much all of it was reasonably glossy and immediately catchy, and I started to realize that I was more drawn to the artists who could pack a solid hook while keeping the phrasing interesting. If it was "Christian", I didn't want the Bible or the same old Sunday school lesson directly quoted at me. I wanted it expressed in someone's own creative phrasing, and I wanted honesty about how hard it was to actually be a genuine Christ-follower, and not just a bunch of "I will follow You forever from this point forward and never mess up again"-type platitudes. If it was "mainstream", it was most likely about relationships, and that was fine, so long as it dug into the complexities of how men and women are drawn to each other, are spurned by each other, fail to understand one another, reconcile with one another, etc., rather than just a bunch of "I love you and I'm giddy" or "You dumped me and you can go to hell"-type songs. My interest in lyrics took a leap forward, and that was a big draw in the direction of a lot of the indie stuff, even if the music was often a little too ragged or took too many detours for my tastes. I didn't want to be able to call the next move five seconds before it happened every time.
Looking back at how my interests and my subsequent music purchases changed over the following years, I can see how it might look like I changed in a desperate effort to keep up with the curve and maintain some sort of credibility in my role as an amateur music critic. My eyes have certainly been opened to a lot of different ways of approaching music as a result of this. But I don't think this change was all brought on by me trying to prove something, or by friends trying to mold me into something. (They just found good music and made good suggestions. Nothing wrong with that.) I think the industry changed, too. Maybe it was the same "Internet revolution" that led me to so many music discoveries and supposedly started to eat away at the sales figures of the big record labels in both Nashville and L.A. Whatever the case, playlists noticeably shrunk, and it wasn't too long before I found that I couldn't stand Star or KROQ (mainstream stations) or Air1 or the Fish (Christian stations) any longer. It was like they were scared of taking chances because a listener base was now harder to maintain, so they kept a smaller roster of artists on tap and played each of them more often. So it wasn't long before I became more or less unaware of what was hitting it big on any radio station, unless someone happened to turn me on to a band they happened to like at right around the same time that band happened to have a hit single out. (Evanescence was a good example. They were 100% mainstream in terms of their sound and their goals, but when I was first made aware of them, all that was available for me to hear was their one "indie" album. Radio wouldn't have done that for me.)
So what's all this got to do with Christian music, specifically? Why would I stop caring about an entire community of Christian musicians just because the few who actually made it to radio didn't appeal to me? Isn't that like pretending you don't know your old nerdy friends just because suddenly the "cool" crowd has decided you can be one of them? Well, no. I would say that the individual musicians I liked who still passed muster in terms of the aspects of music I was realizing meant the most to me (a somewhat unique musical approach, an ability to express things well in their own words, an actual personality that wasn't afraid to let the flaws show), I continued to follow, and I follow many of them to this day. But one by one, it seems like almost all of them have jumped ship on the "Nashville machine" and are doing their own thing in terms of how their music is recorded, who owns it, and how it gets distributed. The only "Christian" CD I've acquired within the past six months that has even a prayer of getting played on Christian radio would be the Jars of Clay album currently in my "Now Playing", and even that was recorded independent of any label input. (Their old label just jumped back in at the last minute to get in on the distribution, probably realizing they had lost a valuable asset when the band left them in favor of more creative freedom.) Sure, there are other bands I still follow, like Falling Up or Switchfoot or Anberlin who got their start in the CCM world and whose fanbasess are probably still largely made up of Christians. No point in ditching any of those; they make good music (with varying levels of spiritual content). I don't care if some people still go, "Hey wait, I know those guys started out as a 'Christian band'! You can't fool me!" and turn their noses up at it without giving it a chance. I'll still recommend those guys in a heartbeat.
But turn on a Christian radio station nowadays, and it's torture for me. Most of the big names making the short list for the yearly WoW compilations now, I've ever never heard of, or if I have, I'm thoroughly disinterested in their music. Jeremy Camp? Boring. Mercy Me? Dullsville. Brandon Heath? No personality. Casting Crowns? A lot like getting lectured by a middle-aged youth pastor. Even groups I used to like, such as the Newsboys, have gotten so stale to me that I barely even notice when they put out something new. I'm convinced that groups like Switchfoot and Relient K (who I do genuinely still enjoy) only remain popular with Christian audiences because of the crossover effect - we're proud of them for making headway in the mainstream, but we still only play their safest songs with the most obviously Christian content on Christian radio. (Jars of Clay's ongoing popularity, if I'm really truthful about it, probably owes a lot of its current spins on Christian radio to their brief flirtation with mainstream rock popularity in the 90's due to "Flood". Not that they haven't made almost uniformly excellent albums all the way through, but people still haven't gotten over that expectation that the band will somehow remake that first album and let them all relive their youth group glory days.)
Sometimes I have fun making fun of how banal it's all become, and then I have to remember what Christian music is like before it was even open to anything that sounded remotely like rock music. Stylistically, it's probably gotten better. Chris Tomlin would have probably been accused of being devil spawn in the 1980's because he had actual electric guitars; now Christian record labels want to bottle his essence and paste other faces on the label and sell it hundreds of times over. The focus has gotten narrower. An industry that started out as a very grassroots sort of thing in the 60's and 70's, with no pretension of being popular and having any "mainstream" relevance, but just content to speak hard truths to whatever lost souls stumbled across it (and not that some of that stuff wasn't unbeilvably cheesy, too - I've heard Love Song!), realized somewhere along the way that you find something everybody will buy, and then to make more money, you sell a trillion copies of it. That's business. That's not exactly headline news. But that's why I can't stand Christian radio, or CCM culture in general any more. Most of my favorite artists are sick of it, too - even some of the ones that Christian radio will still play. Some of 'em might get along with the folks who run Nashville and play nice for those folks when asked, but it seems like their creative ambitions are elsewhere. (David Crowder Band is about the only group I can think of who seems to still sit absolutely comfortable within the walls of CCM, and who I still have a reasonable amount of artistic respect for. They are a worship band - sometimes a very simplistic one, actually. What makes them stand out is that they don't care how untrendy or geeky their sound might be - if they want old-school electronics or banjos or samples of old Gospel recordings, they just go for it.)
So take a closer look at all of those unfamiliar "indie-sounding" names that pop up on my playlist and that probably make me look like some indie kid trying to stay ahead of the curve. Many of 'em are actually Christians. None of the bands I mentioned at the top of this article (the ones with the zoological names and so forth) identify as such, but consider these names: Sleeping at Last. Sufjan Stevens. Over the Rhine. Copeland. House of Heroes. The Listening. Thrice. Eisley. mewithoutYou. Future of Forestry. Cool Hand Luke. Deas Vail. Most, if not all of these bands are made up of Christians, or at least have primary songwriters who are Christians and explore Christian themes in a literate and intriguing fashion, even if you have to dig a bit to find the true meaning. This isn't "hiding your light under a bushel". Some of them are actually very straightforward about their religious origins, but it still takes some work to figure out where a song ends up and why the writer chose to go there. It's simply a case of a God-given gift - the ability to create, and in some small way, to imitate the Creator - that a person cannot ignore, and the things that are most important to the person worming their way into the songwriting just because the writer can't help but discuss what they know and feel and love and hate. Christian radio moguls have likely never heard of these artists, or if they have, they're probably forbidden from playing 'em, and not due to objectionable content, but due to the major label players crowding them out. You could likely name many more that I have yet to discover, or that I'll never have the good fortune of discovering due to how deep and wide the "indie music world" reaches. If given a chance, a lot of these artists could prove that being a Christian isn't the kiss of death for creativity and artistic viability (or for just plain making good music). Some actually have proven that to a select few who have been open-minded enough to listen and judge for themselves despite the "Christian band" tag that the artist may or may not event want. These are the folks who remind me that "Christian music" is actually alive and well, just extremely disjointed and operating in an extremely fractured, grassroots, renegade, do-whatever-works-for-your-niche sort of world. And maybe that's just the way it's gotta be for the time being, as the larger "industry" goes through a crisis that forces them to take the whole structure down and rebuild it with a renewed sense of purpose.
So, if it seems weird to you that, as a Christian, I express so much disdain for "Christian music", it's only because I've seen the potential for what it could be, and I'm bummed that those Christians, who continue to be such an inspiration to my own faith and a reminder to look closer at the true meaning of the things I say I believe, aren't getting their voices heard by more people in the Church who could likely find a lot of joy in their music.
And to my college friends, whose relationships with God I judged as superficial based on their CD collections - that was stupid of me. I'm sorry.
| | | Posted 7/3/2009 10:40 PM - 8 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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