When I was a teenager, I used to listen mainly to Christian Contemporary Music (CCM). That wasn't forced on me - it was my decision. The reason was that I found myself being too easily influenced by some of the lyrics in secular pop music, which I was only just beginning to get into when I gave up listening to it.
If I was now advising someone like I was then, I'd given them a copy of Desiring God by John Piper, a load of Matt Redman CDs and some U2. But I didn't really know about U2 and the cutting edge (pun intentional) of worship music at the time was Martin Smith and songs like "These are the days of Elijah" and "Do you feel the mountains tremble?" And while those songs have some merit (Days of Elijah has a great chorus), the verses are too, well, untrue, for me to get on well with them. So CCM it was, and even then I was pretty picky.
As a result of this, I got to know a lot of CCM before I knew much secular pop. Now that I listen to quite a bit more pop music, one thing has really struck me. An awful lot of the award-winning CCM artists, people I thought were really musically inventive and so on, ripped their best tunes off secular pop music. I don't think DC Talk or the Tribe did, but a lot of others certainly did.
Now, let's view this through the lens of the US Culture Wars. In the US, or so I understand, there are a significant number of people who only listen to Christian music, even to the point of rejecting secular pop. However, many of their heroes in the CCM scene are lifting their tunes from secular pop, which means that they themselves are listening to quite a lot of it. Hmmmmm....
3 comments:
I picked up a copy of DCT's Jesus Freak album in Cheadle recently (you didn't ever donate a copy to Oxfam, did you?) Anyway, when I listened to the Jesus Freak song itself, I realised quite how loaded it was with influence from 'Smells like Teen Spirit'. They may not have nicked a tune, but with that (1995) song they weren't very far off. It's amazing what I notice now, which I didn't when I started going to summer camps in the late 90s and this was the hottest disc around.
Personally, I'm glad I never got into the whole Christian music thing. Creating my own bunkered Christian culture never seemed like a particularly good idea.
No - I don't think I ever donated stuff to Oxfam or owned a copy of Jesus Freak.
What you say doesn't surprise me too much though. They're still my favourite CCM band...
And I agree totally about bunkered Christian culture. We should learn to be in mainstream culture and shine for Jesus there.
The problem I have with CCM is that it's... rather bland.
I have one Tim Hughes and one Matt Redmond album and apart from a few cases, if you picked a song off of one of those albums, played it to me, and asked me whose song it was I wouldn't know. Why do white Christian men have to sing with an antipodean twang? Are they more holy down under?
I don't know why this lack of variety has to be the case. Sure, the lyrics of CCM songs are going to focus on certain themes, but there's no reason that so much of it has to be in the same key signature, or be some musically 'safe'. It doesn't help dispell the perception of Christians as 'nice but dull', and it doesn't help engagement with non-Christians who like a bit more variety in their life.
Give me 'Be though my vision' or 'Tell out my soul' anyday. Or a bit of Bloc Party or Jeff Buckley. Essentially, anything that shows some kind of musical dynamism. Otherwise it's like eating nothing but cornflakes.
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