Christian Music Sucks

Books, comics, TV, music
41

Yes. Christian music sucks when you find ways to exclude all good music from your narrow and personal definition of Christian music.

As others have pointed out there’s a bunch of great spirituals, hymns (when sung by singers and not random churchgoers trying to be heard over an organ played by a pensioned schoolteacher), requiems etc… it’s just modern christian music that’s a bit lacking.

This post was brought to you by an atheist that finds the music to be the only pleasurable part of the occasional visit to a church.

42

Go get a little background on Carl Wilson and get back to us. (Or, probably more importantly, Tony Asher and Brian Wilson–although Carl was the one who was really into God as far as your Beach Boys go.)

Nah, nevermind.

43

Well, the writing credit goes to Brian Wilson and Tony Asher and reading over the excerpts of their comments, there’s nothing that strikes me where I’d qualify it as a Christian song. Certainly, spiritual and religious, but only in how they are trying to convey this sense of love for another, but not in any theological sense.

But I knew that it would work, because by the second part, the real meaning of the song has come out: ‘I’ll love you till the sun burns out, then I’m gone,’ ergo ‘I’m gonna love you forever.’ I guess that in the end, ‘God Only Knows’ is the song that most people remember, and love the most."[1]

Their worry about God in the title had more to their demographics and marketing than worrying about selling or conveying a Christian message. I wouldn’t call it a Christian song, unless you think Christianity invented the concept of spiritual or eternal love between people.

If you have quotes that explicitly lay out its theology, humankind’s relationship to god and how that facilitates understanding self and interactions with others, I’m more than willing to see them. As it stands, it uses a common, casual phrase used to simply express what is a love song.

44

Yeah, put the wikipedia down, Mordrak.

Give this a read, and then if you’d still like to argue that “God Only Knows” wasn’t meant by Brian to be a religious song, I’ll be all ears.

(By specifically choosing that title and by specifically going back to Carl for the lead vocal, Brian was–as he told NME over a decade later–trying to give actuality to his own phrase that his songs were “teenage symphonies to God.” He truly meant to twist Asher’s title lyric to the meaning that the “You” in the object carried a double meaning of the “you” as the unseen apparent object of love in the song, but also that the object of love was actually God.)

Unless you are going to make the argument that the evangelical true believer Carl Wilson and his strictly-raised brother Brian were meaning a universal “god” (they weren’t), then you’re making an ill-informed, nay wiki-informed, argument here.

45

I’d like to see him explain “California Girls” as a “teenage symphony to God.” More seriously, this gets into issues of authorship and collaboration, but just because Wilson in his own head, thought he was being clever by “twisting” Asher’s lyric with some crypto-christian agenda, doesn’t make the song as written not its own piece.

Taking the song on its own terms, with what’s presented, I don’t see a Christian song… unless I was to use a definition based mostly on the heritage of writers/performers.

46

I don’t think you understand how Asher and Wilson wrote songs. Asher was a hired gun, no more, no less. The song ideas came from Brian.

I don’t think you get it. It’s cool, but I think you’re missing the forest for the trees.

Yep, still wrong. You’re unable to grasp it Mordrak, so probably just bow out since all you’ve really done is move goalposts in support of a flawed and incorrect initial thesis.

47

That’s fine. If the song is so ambiguous that you could swap Mary Lou down the street and God in the same pronoun without destroying the meaning of the song, I don’t think it’s Christian regardless of the performers inclinations. To me, because of the way the English language has co-opted Christian metaphors and imagery for universal ideas, three of the four songs of I listened to so far don’t strike me as Christian and I think even the one that was explicit, it could be argued isn’t either.

48

MAS*H’s version, best version.

49

For the roof over his and not the glory of God?

No wonder so many have stopped posting here.

P.S. Really his roof?

50

Christian music is variable in quality but include some of the great treasures of western civilisation. “Christian” music - music made to cheaply imitate popular secular styles of music while substituting bland paeans to Jesus for real lyrics - is universally God-awful… so to speak.

51

So, we’ve gone a full round. This is Dvoraks “New World”. Very Christian.

52

Most Christian music makes me cringe. There’s a lot of “God is great, God is good, crucified by the wood, he died for me, he lives for me, now I can live so now I’m free” stuff in there, where every song is the same and not really that good.

But even contemporary Christian music has some good stuff in it. No YouTube links, I’m at work, but let me swing through my iPod and grab a few of the (VERY) mainstream contemporary Christian songs I have.

Michael W. Smith has been recording contemporary music for about ten thousand years, and he’s the first one I listened to, growing up in a very, very, VERY Baptist house. While his early stuff is a bit eh, he’s got some gems in the early years like “Rocketown” and “Secret Ambition” (they come off better live nowadays versus the original very eighties versions).

What makes MWS’s music good is that he’s NOT writing the same song over again. “Missing Person,” the first track off of Live the Life, is the story of an adult trying to understand why his faith is shaken now that he knows more about the world, versus the blind and naive faith he had when he was a child.

“Calling Heaven” is a prayer to God, asking about everyone in the world who doesn’t know – “what of the noble who are searching for the truth with truest of intentions and yet they’re jaded by hypocrisies behind cathedral walls” – among others, the agnostics, the aborted, the doubters, and he’s hoping and praying that God has a place for these as well, alongside the “standard” faithful.

“This Is Your Time” is his song regarding Columbine and the Cassie Bernall incident. I find the song incredibly powerful, and it’s both a song in memory and honor of Cassie’s life and also asking if the same question was posed to him, or any of us, what would we say. The message of the song isn’t “say that when prompted,” it’s “live every moment, leave nothing to chance.”

He also was one of the first Christian artists to get in some trouble for writing about things OTHER than how great God is. On almost every album of his, you’ll find a song for his wife or one of his children. He got some flack for this back in the nineties, when Christian musicians weren’t allowed to plug their instruments. (I’m exaggerating, but you get the point.)

He’s done two Worship albums, live recordings of more praise & worship music, less contemporary stuff and more the type of music you hear at churches, but these have a lot more energy on account of the recordings being done at huge concerts. There’s one song on Worship Again, “You Are Holy (Prince of Peace)” that gives me chills every time I hear it because near the end everyone in the band stops singing, and you hear the crowd singing just as loud, and I am such a sucker for those moments they bowl me over.

And that’s not going into his work as a composer. Starting with Live The Life, he started putting on the occasional instrumental song. “Song For Rich” is a beautiful piece of music, just with bagpipes and a guitar. “Rince De” is an infectiously happy fast-paced piece of music that kicks off a song about his wife on This Is Your Time. That album is ended with a reprise of the title track, using piano and strings, and it’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful. After his success with these, he made the album Freedom, his first work as a composer, and probably my favorite album of his. I’ll put it on repeat when I’m writing.

Steven Curtis Chapman is my other example. I don’t have as much of his work on hand as I do MWS, but he went through an even more incredible musical shift during his career. SCC started off the same as any other typical contemporary Christian artist at the time, Christian standards and horrible bouncy music. I don’t know what he did to convince his record company to let him sing in his style, but once they did, they got an acoustic guitar-filled body of work that sometimes heads into masterpiece.

His album Speechless is his best work, I think. The title track might be the strongest on the album; he remarked in an interview that it was the first time he got to work with an orchestra, so he had to fight the desire to overuse them. “Speechless” is a more typical song about the grandeur of the Lord, but one that actually conveys the grandeur with its use of symphonic background underneath the guitar melody, versus just asking you to take the singer at his word. “The Change” isn’t quite a Take That, but it IS saying that it doesn’t matter how much Jesus crap you slap on your car and your body if you don’t actually practice what He preached. “Whatever” is what happens when you let a few guys who are good at playing the guitar just jam out a song together, and it’s got a folksy energy to it that I’m hesitant to explain further because I’m very bad at it. Not off this album but from Declaration is “Bring It On,” my pick for the most badass Christian song ever. I know, not a high bar to clear, but there’s some actual angry energy in here, like Steven Curtis Chapman has traveled to a wide open plain of parched ground ready for a no-holds-barred throwdown against the devil himself, and only one of them is going to walk away from this.

There are gems out there.

53

Well, maybe it takes a non-Christian to make Christian music rock.

As evidence, I submit Ronnie James Dio’s “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”

54

Like Matt says, above, while there are plenty of awful acts working within the Christian music industry, there’s also plenty of great stuff. (I’m not really on board with Steven Curtis Chapman or Michael W. Smith, but hey, to each his own.)

Here are a few of my favorite acts from the 80s and 90s who record on Christian labels. (Nothing more recent for two reasons - first, I’m not really active in that scene anymore, and second, modern artists similar to these guys no longer get trapped in the Christian music ghetto.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTArpippBqE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZe5yzwXTOk

55

Here is a famous and pretty catchy Christian song about how God will be with you always:

-Tom
56

Wow Tom, Rockin’ it old school.

57

I don’t have any links handy, but I know there have been a lot of Christian bands over the years that I’ve really enjoyed. I was big into a group called pfr back in the day, I enjoyed some of dcTalk’s later stuff, Third Day, Skillet, Pillar, and still really like Disciple.

The problem is Christian RADIO. They tend to only play the light, fluffy, pop-y stuff like Amy Grant.

Look at the pop music scene and tell me a lot of it isn’t crap. Percentage-wise, I don’t think there’s a smaller amount of good Christian music, you’re just starting with a smaller pool.

58

As much as I’ve tried to distance myself from christian music since middle school, I will always love Mr. Knott. He’s my favorite junkie alcoholic Christian.

59

Exactly. A listener may not like Skillet, but as compared to…Fall Out Boy or Breaking Benjamin or whoever, there’s no particular reason to point to their Christianness as to why they suck.

60

You’re on pretty shaky ground here – Mozart wrote his Requiem for Count somebody-whose-name-I’ve-forgotten (It’s been a long time since I studied this stuff…) so that the Count pass it off as his own work. Mozart was doing it for the money, no particular religious feeling involved.

Bach is probably a different story, and I’d invoke Arvo Part as a great modern composer who’s overtly religious. No real reason to choose Mozart as your great example of a religious composer.