I have wanted to love Christian music for a long time now. Whenever I'm in the car with my kids, I want to turn to 106.9 K-Love (our Christian radio station), since I know at least the lyrics will be safe, but whenever I do I always end up saying to my wife, "this stuff all sounds the same." The running joke is It's About the Message, Not the Music! It's like monoculture in farming--acres and acres of nothing but corn and soybeans. It's good for feed and bio-fuel, and is a safe bet. I think Christian radio stations know this, and play to the masses. Safe. Mono. Feed.
It was good fodder for the cartoon South Park years ago, when the kids in the show wanted to form a band and go Platinum fast. So despite being the farthest thing from Christians themselves, they form a Christian Rock Band ("Faith+1") and hit it big. "It's easy guys. You just take regular old love songs and replace word 'baby' with 'Jesus.')
There are a handful songs I do like. Aaron Shust "My Hope Is In You Lord," Third Day's "God Of Wonders," and a few by Bekah Shae. But overall Christian music is like Christian film, which Catholic screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi astutely sears in an interview in Aleteia:
"What happened was that the Evangelical world started guerrilla filmmaking for itself and found a way to turn a profit doing it. By comparison with mainstream movies, the numbers are generally small, but the studios noticed and have been very happy to distribute the films to the Christians and make a few bucks in that space. Every studio now pretty much has a faith division where they’re looking for content for that niche market. This is good and bad. The good part is the mainstream industry is talking to people of faith instead of thinking of us as what’s wrong with the world. The bad part is that it’s ghetto-ized us, such that when you bring a really good project like Mary Mother of Christ or A Severe Mercy to them they say: #1, “This is too smart for the Christians; they don’t want to be challenged,” and #2 “You can serve this audience for a lot less than this movie will cost.” I’ve had both things said to me by studio executives.
So, in other words, they say, “Why should we spend 40 million on a movie with faith or transcendent aspects when we can make it for two million with no stars, no great director, no good script, and all you have to do is put some Bible quotes in it and come out as a sweet little melodrama and it will make 30 million for us?” So that is devastatingly bad for the Church, for art, and for the society as a whole, because it’s keeping any beautiful faith-inspired work from getting a serious treatment.
And here’s another really bad thing: What the Christians have learned is that the way to make money in movies is to make movies political footballs. Make a really awful movie, but call it “God’s Not Dead,” and tell the faith community to turn out and support it to “show Hollywood.” They’re trying to find the political spot that makes a movie something the Christian audience will rally around, as opposed to trying to make something beautiful. The truth is we don’t need a rally, we need to experience compunction ourselves, and we need to attract people who don’t believe that we believe."
I've always loved listening to music, but I'm kind of stuck in the early 2000s, since I don't know how to download stuff anymore and my ipod is so old I can't update it. I don't especially want to listen to the stuff I listened to in high school in college anymore, since that was a different time in my life "B.C." So I'll peruse Youtube from time to time, and that's how I came across hip hop artist Post-Malone a couple years ago.
Now, Post-Malone is the farthest thing from Christian music you can get. The lyrics are not clean, and he's completely secular. My wife and I got kind of hooked on him because he was just this goofy, insecure white kid from Texas who just loved making music, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, and hanging out with his friends. He moved to L.A. as a teenager with no money and slept in his friend's closet, learned to play guitar by playing the video game Guitar Hero, and needed a name when he started making music which he came up with by popping his last name (Post) in an online rap name generator. When he just threw out "White Iverson" on Youtube in 2015 with no management and no team "to just see what would happen" it got huge. He's the most unsuspecting triple-platinum artist, no pretension, and you can tell when he performs that he doesn't take himself too seriously. He's just having fun doing what he loves, making music. And I love that.
Pints With Aquinas has also become one of my favorite Catholic channels on Youtube. I started listening about five years ago, not regularly but while I was on the road for work, an thought it was great, smart, thoughtful content with quality guests. It's also hit in the top 1%, and for good reason--Matt (Fradd) has a kind of authentic and thoughtful way of having conversations with people of faith who actually have something worth saying. His guests are generally smart, joyful, down to earth, faithful, authentic, and normal. I imagine he chooses who he has on the show carefully, but he's also not afraid to have people whom might disagree with him or offer another perspective in order to have some real conversations. Matt himself seems like an approachable guy that you'd just want to have a beer with, and I think this resonates with a lot of people. His show isn't agenda driven. It's not exclusively just about the hits and likes. I don't know how he got started, but I'm sure, like Post-Malone, he's just doing what he loves and is seeing where it will go.
The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal are another example of not being so boxed-in by religious ideology that they can't think about how to serve the real needs of God's people in different ways. I actually visited St. Crispin's Friary in the Bronx years ago to discern with them and found them joyful, authentic, and true to their charism. I was drawn to their orthodoxy and love for the poor, which can sometimes be at odds in the Catholic world, but then again..."why can't we be both?" seems to be their attitude. They admit to the messiness and grittiness of doing their apostolic work with the poor, and that the poor essentially have no filter and just forthrightly ask for what they need. "We're all just doing the best we can," one friar admitted, which I thought was pretty honest. The guys may be in adoration in the friary while people are cursing outside or blasting unsavory music on the street, and they aren't even fazed by it. If you've never seen the trailer for the documentary about them and their work living the Gospel on the streets, check it out here. It always moves me.
I suspect I'm not alone in being wary of people with agendas who are less than honest, whether that's in the Church, politics, or whatever. My BS meter has become pretty well tuned over the years, and less forgiving. As a Church and a people we are craving authenticity, but an authenticity grounded in something more than just drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and hanging out with our friends. My conversion to Christ actually began here, because this was exactly how I spent my high school years and would catch myself thinking in the quiet moments "is this all there is?" I admire the people who are taking that faith and kind of just getting out there and saying, "well, let's try it. Who says it can't be done?" in order to bring Christ to the world. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, but at least when you are true to yourself (and maybe even having fun doing whatever it is you are called to do) you really have nothing to lose.
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