The Problem with Christian Rock

Oh yeah. If you can't spot the "rack up the hits" bait with THAT headline, then you need to brush up on your SEO.

It's got "Problem" and "Christian" in it. That's drama AND religion. AND music. What's not to get frothy in the mouth about??

But back on topic. Don't know if you've noticed, but "Christian Rock" gets dissed on a regular basis. It's like the red-headed stepchild of music, the little sis to Rock Star, the Beaver to Wally Cleaver.

Never heard that one? Huh. Here's a couple of tweets we've seen in our interweb trollings -

Just bought an album I dug from a Christian rock band. There's a first for everything

(noirfans).

Why are you starting a Christian rock band, Landry? Christian rock is the worst thing ever.

(Buzzkill Made Flesh)

Overheard last nite (from a vegetarian): "I have had good vegan food, but a good vegan meal is like a good Christian rock band"

(Elysium).

What's with the contempt?

That's kinda rhetorical. This is a blog, and a blog is an opinion. Which means you're about to read one. So if you skip out here, if you decide to quit reading this drivel and move on, then you're off the hook, no one will throw stones at you.

OK, so you can blithely spit out "There are no good Christian Rock bands", and someone might buy that. And we're not experts on all things Christian Rock, but we have heard some exceptional music that bears the "Christian" label. Check out the latest from The David Crowder Band, "Church Music" - In some circles it's even been labeled as "too disco", which suggests a bleeding-edge endeavor from our typically-conservative brothers.

Or for something a little less preachy, try out Skillet. Or bang your head to some metallic Red.

OK, so there is some good Christian rock. Maybe it's a ratio thing? As in, %99 percent sucks, the rest is merely OK.

Dunno about you, but we're always leery of absolute statements. Always.

No, it can't be that - We'd guess that the good-to-sucks ratio is probably the same as it is for non-Christian (or "secular") music. Probably.

And we say that with absolute authority.

OK then, whaddup?

We say there are at least 2 factors that lead to the contempt.

1) "Christian Music" is a market, not a genre. You gotcher Christian Rap, your Christian Metal, your Christian Pop, etc. Why isn't it just Rap or Metal or Pop?

Because it's not just the genre, it's who's buying it. It's a label for an industry, not a stylistic rendering of an art form. It's the brainchild of a label executive, eager to do damage control for those PARENTAL ADVISORY stickers forced on them back in '85, not an artistic achievement.

[We could go on and discuss the ethics of this kind of behavior, but then we'd be wading into ethics discussions, and we're just not pure enough to pull that off.]

2) "Christian Music" can be propaganda. Not art, not a furtherance of the form, but merely a conveyance of a message into an unwary consumer's mind, a pill that carries a payload of rhetoric. It's not art, it's an agenda. We hate the Nazis for doing this, we hate it in our movies, and, yes, we hate it in our music.

So there ya go. An absolute answer to the question.

Tune back next week for less of our barb-witted, SEO-baited repartee.

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