catapult magazine

catapult magazine
 

discussion

Why are Christians so easy to please?

Default

lrmydvrs
May 09 2006
08:20 am

Can we criticize the recent "Christian" take on music without criticizing the general modern American take on pop music? How much, by percentage, excellent music is produced by the general crowd of "musicians" in 21st century America? Added to that is the problem that Christians seem to generally be all about imitating what is popular (or perhaps what was popular 7 years ago) in popular music. It seems that we don’t like to generally think of our own formulas for things, so having seen that taking three pretty 21-year-old girls who may or may not be able to sing, throwing some words in front of them that speak in general and bad metaphors, and overproducing them in a studio has sold a ton of records in the secular world, Christians try to mimic it.

To me a lot of the poor quality of Christian music comes about because of degrees of separation. If current American pop music is a sythetic attempt at some sort of real music, and Christian pop music is a synthetic attempt at some sort of American pop music, then that makes it three steps away from real music.

For my part, I would rather listen to Gillian Welch sing an old bluegrass song with questionible "this world is not my home" sorts of lyrics or Connor Oberst struggle through his religious upbringing and whether or not he can accept the truths that were taught him than to listen to some "Christian" "artist" sing in a raspy voice about how great it is to spend time with God because Gillian and Connor make real music. I can actually believe what they’re saying.