This item spins off from comments in Mark's "Grab Bag" item, where senna wrote: #233 of 262: by In one ear and out your mother (senna) on Sun, Sep 28, 1997 (22:00): The music industry execs are groaning... unknown-label band Jars Of Clay debuted its new album high on the Billboard charts. I can just see Columbia attempting to promote them out of radio.. heh #248 of 262: by In one ear and out your mother (senna) on Fri, Oct 3, 1997 (01:12): ... Jars Of Clay certainly pisses off most culture (they come to the area November 9 or thereabouts, I believe) and they'll never get played much on mainstream radio (though I heard them on 103). Radio doesn't go for that sort of stuff. (Is Forefront a BMG imprint? such was not my impression) and lumen wrote... #250 of 262: by Jon the Arborean (lumen) on Sun, Oct 5, 1997 (19:15): ... I'm up for an item regarding religion in pop music-- but I myself would tread lightly there. Praise music is not an active part of my faith, and I sometimes find it a little trite at times. But then, there are no well-known Mormon pop composers. I believe it was Kenneth Cope who made a try for the Christian music scene, but he just didn't make it. So, here's the item: we can observe how a performer's religion affects their music, we can just list religious performers, we can talk about the Christian Music industry, whatever.33 responses total.
I find I can't stand the contemporary religious music that's played on Christian radio stations -- it's too treacly and too monotonous in subject matter for me to bear (and raises questions in my mind, too, about the differences between the artists conception of deity and mine. I find it difficult to conceive of a surprem being who would welcome such vapidity but then I suppose it could be that the music is primarily meant for those here on earth in which case I'm not getting it but then I'm not "getting" Toni Braxton or Bryan Adams, either....) In contrast to the contemporary religious music genre, there's little room to dispute that some of the most powerful and beautiful music ever composed and performed has been written to accompany religious services and experiences. Furthermore, the institutions of religion have, thoughout history, had a tradition of supporting, encouraging, and preserving at least certain kinds of music. Finally, I think some of the most moving religious music comes from surprising sources -- for example the impact of the Velvet Underground's plaintive and longing "Jesus" is immeasurably amplified for me by the fact that much of the rest of their music describes life in a shadowy and sordid world of drug addiction and abuse. For me there's not much excitement in a band whose every song is about "praise Him, praise Him, alleluia" -- too much of that sounds phoney, but an unexpected revelation of an artist's personal beliefs tends to leave an impression whether I agree with those beliefs or not.
The quality of religious composers sure has declined over the centuries. J.S. Bach was great! Of course, society is much more secular then than now. (That will be the sum total of my contribution to this discussion, since I don't follow current pop music at all...)
Bach's works, Mozart's Requiem, all of the fantastic masses that have been written -- these are certainly notable landmarks of religious music. Easier to overlook, but equally impressive and fascinating in a different way are some of the old spirituals.. It's not easy to imagine music today without either of those influences..
I am the soloist at the church I attend. My most recent pieces, off the top of my head: "Quality Time" -Iris Diment "This Is To Mother You" -Sinead O'Connor "Petit Poulet" -Sinead O'Connor "Closer To Fine" -Indigo Girls "Secure Yourself" -Indigo Girls "Orphan Girl" -Gillian Welch "By The Mark" -Gillian Welch "Abraham, Martin, and John" -forgot who wrote it "People Get Ready" -Curtis Mayfield "The Way I Should" -Iris Diment "My Life" -Iris Diment And over the last 3 years, I er, I've done Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, U2, Melanie, Carly Simon, James Taylor, John Prine, Janis Ian, Carole King, and others I can't think of. You can find a lot of spirituality in popular and folk music without it being religious music. I also canot stand modern contemporary Christian Radio Rock. Ugh. It's like fake music designed to trick people.
I repeat again-- Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) have pop composers, but they aren't well-known at all. Perhaps it is because the music doesn't fit the traditional "praise" format, or perhaps it is because that kind of music isn't ingrained into our faith. We really discourage popular religious songs in our services, and rather will use arrangements of well-known hymns. It's because we are trying to let the congregation have their own spiritual experiences, rather than to focus their attention on the talent of the performer. In other words, we would rather let the music speak, rather than the performer, and we would rather have music that speaks of the faith in general rather than such that reflects an individual's opinion. Fake music? Hardly. I've met good Christians who just listen to praise music because the standards of that music are more like their own. It's hard to abstain from pre-marital sex, drugs, alcohol, etc., etc. if you listen to music that glorifies it or states it as the norm. I agree it's trite sometimes, with its endless references to "Jesus," but you can't always reach an audience with subtler statements. However, I agree wholeheartedly, Katie, that secular music can contain a lot of spirituality. My own church leaders advised me to use my own good judgment in selecting uplifting music. Sometimes my friends murmured and supposed they only meant church and classical music, but that's not true. All I can say is that one can't be too careful-- so many musicians turn to things that don't give lasting solutions to the pain. The superstars are the worst (actors, musicians, whatever) because that kind of life just reaks hell on you. Ok, I'm babbling. One group I found that is very religious but doesn't fit the praise category is Seals and Crofts. Maybe it's because they're Ba'hai. You mentioned U2-- they are considered to be a pop Christian band. Well-- at least their old stuff heavily reflects their Irish Catholic backgrounds.
While we're discussing non-Christian religious music, I'm surprised someone hasn't mentioned Qawwali, which has been reciving a good bit of attention of late. I was fortunate enough to catch Nusrat Fateh ali Khan when he was in town a few years ago, and was impressed by the energy of the performance - surprisingly similar to gospel music, actually, with a good bit of vocal improvisation and call-and-response. And I must say, endless "Jesus" references are no more tiresome than endless "My Girlfriend Left Me" references you find in pop music.
Amen, Dan-- but it's more like "101 Reasons why Love Sucks." Don't even get me started on country music-- it seems to be just as trite or more so, as well.
African-American gospel music is pretty good, though. It's the white stuff that sucks.
I disagree. To not like one form of music is sort of elitist, imho. Not all country music sucks. I'm not a big fan, but I have my share of CD's by country artists (LeAnn Rimes, Lester and Earl, Chet Atkins and George Strait). I will admit that some country songs leave much to be desired, but when you hear a well sung, well written tune, you know it. I have been known to listen to opera one minute, and then put on some rap. Music is just a way of expression, and some people have different ways of showing it. Please don't lump country up as one big heartbreak.
I've found that at least "hit country" (which of course is a stupid way to judge an entire genre) is pretty pathetic. Everybody wants to sound like George Jones, but I'm an Eddy Arnold fan. :)
I like the Irish group, Iona. It's like Clannad, only Christian. I have heard that some folk performers I really respect are in it, but I can't think of which ones right now. Anuna is another Irish group that has some wonderful Christian music, but they tend to do more, um, choral/chant stuff. Very nice.
Tim Harries, who is the bass player for Steeleye Span, is also in Iona. (There's an Iona album floating around the house somewhere; unplayed, dammit.) I have suspected that Harries came into the Steeleye Spaan through a common interest in religion with Maddy Prior. Prior did a very preachy album around 1983, GOING FOR GLORY, billed to Maddy Prior and the Answers, which seemed to be quite an autobiographical album about her religious conversion.
I'm very fickle in my pickings of religious music. Most of the contemporary christian stuff being thrown out is something less than good, in my tastes, but there are a few really good bands out there. My favorite element is the way in angers the uptight pc secularists unprepared to handle that sort of a barrage. Christian Music's endless songs about jesus should come as no surprise.. it's not like they're not claiming to be christian or something. It's not like other bands arent' single minded either... you can count the numnber of songs not having to do with desprair by NIN on one hand, and have some leftover fingers. Even if it does get inane, nobody's forcing people to listen to it.
Of course, there is the issue of good music marred by the lyrics. I find this leans in two directions - either the lyrics are so trite that I can't help but dislike the song, or the lyrics are so intense that I feel uncomfortable listening to them. Christian music tends to stray a bit far in one direction or the other. Either it's droning on about Jesus, which is just as tiresome as any other kind of droning, or it's so fervently telling me that I'm going to Hell that I feel a bit out of place listening. Most Christian music I've heard that I enjoy, I enjoy because the music is so good I can just pay attention to it and ignore the lyrics.
Actually, almost no christian music is condemning. i haven't heard any of it.
Depends on where you're listening. Get snowth to describe the music on the radio in The Middle Of Nowhere, Illinois sometime.
If you say so, but my experience matches senna's -- haven't heard any "you're going to hell" Christian music on the radio, despite spending a fair amount of time listening in the west Michigan bible belt..
I was going to. But give me a couple days.. I have to figure out how to word it. If I just ad lib, it's likely to end up on some rant on Christians in general.. which would be bad. Also, I want to look up the lyrics I rembered at the time.
My experience is like Mike and Senna's as well.
I don't know, maybe it was just a bad day to be listening to the radio. But while I was in the middle of Illinois (around Peoria) I spet about fifteen minutes listening to the Christian radio channel, and there were two songs on that I just found really *obnoxious*. The first one was along the lines of "I believe in God because He makes me." (Really. That was the courus) The second one, which got to me even more, was all along the lines of putting bibles back into public schools. It wasn't even well done, it was just some guy ranting above the music. Some of the lines I personally found most annoying were "..when people would rather come out of the closet then clean it up.." and "..instead of handing out condoms to high schoolers, hand them the word of the lord.." Besides those, he had "statistics" as to how our nation is slowly going to hell. The one I remember (there were more, but this was the one that stuck in my head) was "..(This nation is) #1 in illiteracy!". And while I'm not going to argue that there aren't illiterate kids in this country, I think there have to be third-world countries out there where there is no standard of education, and how many of those kids have decent reading and writing skills? Sorry 'bout all that. It really got to me. <Rant: off>
I'm not familiar with any of the lyrics you mentioned, though they do sound rather inane. Actually, one thing I've noticed is the large number of Christian musicians and related groups promoting child sponsorship and relief missions for third world countries. My sister sponsors a child herself, apparently.
Iona and Anuna tend to do most of their overtly Christian lyrics in either Latin or Gaelic. Makes it a *whole* lot easier to listen to, and actually is rather cool, since I can just shut my eyes and pretend I'm back in the Celtic Christian era (many lyrics are poems from that time, too.)
This may be off topic, but it's my observation that religious music is no different than other musci in this regard: It can be good, musically speaking, or it can be bad. I.e. "quality". That's a separate issue from a badly-written song of praise accomplishing its aim - to give praise.
To criticize worship music for focusing completely and totally on Jesus seems kind of silly to me... the definition of "worship" that I am most familiar with being to focus on Jesus and praise Jesus. Worship is not just music, but a lot of the time it is in that form. There are worship songs, and then there is the type of music you can get on 88.1 (our local Christian rock station) on Friday or Saturday night... wacky alternative songs, techno songs, funny pop stuff... which is what people listen to if they feel that they have been convicted by God to give up secular music. Its a stand in because, as stated before, pop music glorifies premarital sex, drugs, whatever, and while these people may not want to listen to that, they want to listen to something that sounds like it. I guess its like drinking decaf coffee if you really like the taste of coffee, but can't stand what caffeine does to you.
I like the analogy, but IMO Christian rock isn't just a weak substitute for 'real' pop music. I'd rather listen to 88.1 than any of the local 'real' rock stations, because there's less emphasis on attitude, so there isn't so much posturing to get in the way of decent music.
Christian rock has a much smaller talent pool than mainstream pop. That, and there is usually a desire to remove what are perceived as "dangerous" influences.
<snort> contemporary x-ian muzac is propaganda jesus disco.
I won't dispute that for the majority, but then I've got similarly cynical
opinions about the majority of modern "rock" music (almost an oxymoron),
"alternative", current "country", and the syrupy mess that passes as R&B
these days.
It's certainly not fair to judge a genre by the quality of the average
offering. I don't know how the very best "Christian" and "praise" music
stacks up to other categories ("praise" music makes my skin crawl, so I'm
fairly confident I wouldn't like even the best of it..) but I won't presume
to judge it by what I hear from flitting between radio stations.
I don't know if this has been mentioned, but one of the things my dad and I have notaced about christian pop is that the words are almost always much easier to understand. I suspect this has something to do with it being difficult to "spread the word" if nobody can understand what they are!
right...we don't want our fundie x-ian propaganda to be garbled. that's what satan would do.
I actually really enjoy Jars of Clay (This should really surprise those that know me. :), and another favorite one of mine is Marc Cohen. He's not really religious, but more spiritual, but he's got alot of really great songs. :) Other than that, I have listened to some of the christian rock on 10something, (accidentaly found it one day, and listened to it), and for the most part was a little appaled to hear how 'beat you over the head you must love God and Jeasus' it was. But hey, each their own. It's not my style, but I don't really approve of alot of other topics in music either, so...
<shrugs> I don't really care much about smaller talent pool, or dangerous influences, or whatever. The only thing I listen to pop radio for these days is catchy background noise, and the local Christian station (88.somethingorother) plays stuff that sounds better than what the rock stations play.
forget
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