Rock and Soul

Sometimes on Sunday mornings – including this past one – when I’m drinking coffee and getting ready for church, I put on some music to motivate me.  But where many people might throw on some old-timey gospel or contemporary Christian pop-rock tunes to set a reverent tone, I’m more likely to be found playing anything from Kiss to Divinyls, Alice Cooper to Jefferson Starship, Alanis Morissette to Michelle Branch.

I’m sure to a lot of you, a couple of my choices might seem pretty sketchy and blasphemous.  Kiss and Alice Cooper?  On Sunday morning???  The fact that Cooper has been a born-again Christian since the mid-1980’s aside, that’s only one example of the music that cranks my gears and gets the synapses firing, if you will.  Music is a constant companion in my life, but the ironic thing about my listening to it on Sunday mornings before church is that none of it includes anything from the aforementioned contemporary Christian genre.  Why?

The honest truth is that I don’t think the contemporary Christian music genre is any good, for the most part.  I don’t make that declaration hypocritically, however, because I have listened to a lot of it.  There’ve been many times when I’ve tried incorporating it into my music collection and listening habits, and sometimes the gesture would last anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months.  I’d try to like it, to let it sink in and … transform me (for lack of a better phrase).  Part of that came from some strange sense of guilty duty that as a Christian, I was supposed to be listening only to that or God would look down and catch me listening to Rush’s Moving Pictures instead and zap me into a pile of ash with a lightning bolt.  “`Tom Sawyer’, huh?  Take that!”

I subscribed to CCM Magazine.  I went to the obvious purveyors of Christian music, including Family Christian Store, and I picked up some of the artists – DC Talk, Newsboys, Jars Of Clay, Audio Adrenaline, DecembeRadio, Burlap To Cashmere, Third Day, David Crowder Band, et al.  I even tried tolerating bland, middle-of-the-road artists like Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, and Steven Curtis Chapman for good measure, but that definitely didn’t last long.  Despite a rare good song here and there from a few of those acts, really choice cuts with any substantial meat on their bones seemed few and far between.  And of those, none had the basic musical craftsmanship that would give them long-term staying power.

But maybe the contemporary Christian genre has never been able to transcend the embarrassing stigma of early clunky, by-the-numbers bands like Stryper and Petra, both of which were the musical equivalents of Cheese Whiz.  Contemporary Christian has always seemed like it’s constantly trying to compete for attention and prove itself.  It’s an over-baked slice of the music industry pie that is always digging for a foothold of relevancy against the behemoth of secular music.  (Christian rap.  Christian metal.  Christian punk.  Shall I go on?)

It’s just that, taking aesthetics into account, contemporary Christian music lacks originality.  By its very nature, it has to stay within a certain prescribed formula that’s set by the industry tastemakers who serve it up to the masses and say “Here.  Consume this and feel assured that you’re listening to safe, family-friendly, non-offensive Christian music.”  Of course, that’s a prevailing modus operandi in the secular music industry too.  However, the problem with the contemporary Christian formula is that its songwriters, singers, and bands fall into lockstep mode as dictated by their recording contracts – mostly playing the same chords and writing the same kinds of lyrics that say the same kinds of things about life and faith and our relationships with God.  So, what often, if not always, gets left out in the process are real ideas about real struggles, real emotions, and real questions that so many people of faith grapple with on a daily basis.  I think maybe the only such genre acts I’ve heard that seem to truly delve deeply into these themes are Switchfoot and Kevin Max (the latter formerly of DC Talk and now frequently labeled a maverick outsider from the industry establishment).

Now, I want to clarify that I’m not saying that all contemporary Christian music is completely devoid of any meritorious qualities whatsoever.  After all, the human urge to creativity is a gift from God, and everyone creates differently however he or she is inspired.  But I am saying that the genre as an entity always plays things too safe and doesn’t always seem to accurately reflect the way many Christians – myself included – feel about life under God in general.

That’s why I’ve always come back to secular music as an unlikely kind of spiritual outlet.  Even if a secular artist might be only borderline spiritual or as far away from Christianity as a person could possibly be, I’m much more apt to find some measure of true expression of the human condition in their music than I am in something by Amy Grant, Newsboys, or whoever else.  And exploring life through secular music can often make me feel more connected to my Higher Power than contemporary Christian does, even if it’s singing along … badly … to Joan Osborne’s “One Of Us,” George Harrison’s “What Is Life,” Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky,” or, yes, even Alice Cooper’s “Prince of Darkness” (which – if you actually read the lyrics – is one of Cooper’s Christian-inspired rock songs about Satan’s fall from grace, its greedy reach for human souls, and its ultimate fear of the truth and light that is the glory of God).  Those are just a few off-the-cuff examples, but hopefully you get my gist.

In 2005, I interviewed Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls for a Southern Voice newspaper feature about the publication of A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music As Spiritual Practice, an excellent book she co-authored with her father, the Rev. Dr. Don E. Saliers, a now-retired professor of theology and worship at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.  During our chat, Emily said the book expressed “how there is a spiritual path in both secular and sacred music, and how the deep human yearnings in them are one and the same sometimes.”  She went on to say, “You hear people talk about spirituality and being named and known by God.  When you’ve been lonely or homeless in your soul, when you finally find a home [through music], that’s a spiritual gift.”

That’s so true.  So, maybe the music that moves your spirit may not move mine, and vice versa.  But perhaps as long as we each continue to remain faithful to whatever does move us and allow it to be the gift that keeps on giving, our hearts will always sing along on the way home.