What do Bridgerton, Star Wars, the term goblin mode and the Barbie movie all have in common? That's right, the discourse, the constant, constant online discourse. And what that popularity tells us about society? So much more. Be sure to check out Material Girls Wherever You Get Your Podcasts or head to MaterialGirlsPod.com to learn more. That's MaterialGirlsPod.com. Okay, I am so excited for this episode and Melody has a song queued up that she's going to play for you, Leah. Oh, wonderful!
And then you're going to explain this song and what it means to someone who has no context for it. Okay, this is great, this is a good challenge. I saw me with a tag on this big tag bell, and you've wrinkled the bread like mother lay jelly. It took me a while to catch what it sang, but I had the magic and the rubbers rolling over heads. Jesus saved his point in way, and a difficult tag to breathe. He stored on a box in the middle of the city, and he claimed he had a brain.
What's more people think when they hear an apology to spring? I like that we're not that worried about them suing us. We're like, do you see talks not going to sue us? Okay, so Leah, can you tell us what that rap is? First off, I have to say I wish this podcast came with visuals because I was having a really good time watching Melody rock out to it because she knows the whole... She made me watch the video yesterday, which I hadn't seen in quite a long time. So, yeah, so okay, so the...
Who is this? In my book, I write about this as the peak of contemporary Christian music, the number one youth group band, a group called DC Talk, and this is... I would say they're most culturally influential album. It is called Jesus Freak. That single, it sounds a lot like Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit. In fact, if you play them on top of each other, you can find that on YouTube.
They're very, very similar, but it came out a few years later. That's what I think makes it like the ultimate contemporary Christian music. If you want to understand this thing called CCM, I can't imagine a better starting point than that particular song. Do you remember that song? Oh, oh my gosh. That whole album brings me back to a winter youth retreat for 9th graders at an old camp. Then it's like all the 9th graders from all the Presbyterian churches in the inland northwest.
And you're like, this is so cool because you're gonna meet all these other 9th graders. And then that's just plain as you come in, you're like, wow, cool. And then there's a talk about how you shouldn't masturbate or something like that. You pretty much got it. This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And I'm Leopane, and I'm author of God gave Rock and Roll to you a history of contemporary Christian music.
So we're gonna talk so much about like the actual, the music, like what actually makes the music, the ideology, all those things. But I wanna acknowledge at the very beginning that we are three people, and I'm including Melody here, who grew up around Christian music, and know a fair amount about it. And we wanna be careful because we have a really broad audience, not to make this episode too insidey baseball.
But we wanna speak to people who like absolutely knew what that song was, but then also to speak to people who are like, what in the world is this? And so I think what I wanna start with is underlining even if you know nothing about the history of Christian rock, why is it important for us to kind of recover this history and think about it in this context?
Yeah, I think there are a lot of reasons why I think it's important to understand one reason, probably the chief reason that I think somebody who doesn't know much about contemporary Christian music might wanna know about it, is that if you look at the music of this kind of nebulous music, kind of nebulous group that people label evangelicals, it's actually a mashup of a lot of different groups.
But if you look at the music of that group, you see the emergence of a group of people who were really trying to shape American public life. So if you wanna know why a lot of the energy behind conservative, particularly conservative white evangelical activists, a lot of times the music was the leading indicator of how people were thinking about what they should do.
So you know you talked about the youth group talk, there were a lot of youth group talks and music was a really important part of how evangelicals were trying to raise their children and the types of political and theological values that they wanted them to have. We see that, like for example contemporary Christian music artists were at the vanguard of efforts to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
And so if you look at the music, you see a lot of their activism, they were also really into wanting to shape how sex ed was done in public schools.
If you look at the music, there are lots of songs, as you mentioned, a lot of songs about sex and sexuality. So some of the things that you might not see if you look at how like public statements from denominations or like official documents, you see in these unofficial ways, the things that are happening in the youth group end up actually shaping how we think about our shared life together in this country.
I love this and I think you know what it brings to mind two things. One is that music can function as a form of propaganda and I think that we know that. But then sometimes when we get focused on like, oh this is just artistry or like, or oh this is beautiful, like a him is beautiful or more classical music, like we forget the ways in which it has been wielded historically.
And that's one of the things that I really appreciate about your book is it doesn't start in 1995 for the beginning of Jesus Freak. Like this is like Jesus Freak emerges halfway through the book. And I think there's an interesting way that we can talk about the power of these songs in terms of like emotional persuasion, the way that they functioned as part of conversion narratives, right?
Like the singing and listening to music was very much part of the overall project of converting people, right? Getting people to this emotional space where they felt like they wanted to convert. And then also think too about how like the creation of an entire industry was part and parcel of this larger project on the part of white evangelicals to create an alternative cultural sphere, like inclusive, called not inclusive as in well.
People, but a place where like if you were growing up in one of these households, you could get movies and music and books that all function within this universe that was as was called at the time and still non-secular, right? Right. Like we don't listen to secular music in this house. And this was always like a huge thing at the camp that I went to is that you weren't allowed to play secular music on the boom box. And what was considered secular and what wasn't like, oh, is that a for debate?
Oh, yeah, because this was also when I was a counselor in particular, so there are early 2000s, it was like, is creed secular? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Like, or can you read these lyrics into it? Is U2's 40? Like, can we listen to U2? If there is a song that is based on a Bible verse and that we also sing like another song about, you know, like around the campfire.
So all of these questions though, I think, you know, understanding that this was part of this larger project that we can see now in the movement to like create charter schools and make it legal to homeschool in whichever way you want to cross the nation. And building a world that is apart from the rest of the world.
Yeah, it's so interesting. I'm so glad that you brought that up. And I think that's something that a lot of people who grew up and it felt, but wouldn't necessarily think to articulate in part because it's just, you know, it's like the air you breathe. Right. And until they sort of bumped up against some of the boundaries of it for many different reasons, because it was a fairly strictly managed community, like the boundaries around it.
And I think one of the most interesting things to me about it is that it's a separate sphere, but with similar consumption patterns. So it's like the idea is not to stop being an American consumer, but to express through your consumption, the ideal, you know, citizen according to these evangelical values. And I think that's the thing that makes it kind of puzzling to people on the outside.
But, you know, the idea that you're going to show your devotion through what you buy, I think is at the heart of it. And so it's like, you know, you buy this book, you buy this particular album. And one of the fun things about when just the interesting things, one of the quirky things about the music is that the core customer of this music was actually not teens. Those are the people who people, you know, the industry people wanted to be listening to it, but it was the moms of the teens.
That's the core customer. So it's like, it's a world created and maintained. And a lot of times very strictly enforced by a particular set of moms. And this is funny to me because my mom, I think, really disliked all Christian music, even though she was like a later in the youth group and stuff. And that's because she loved all other sorts of music. And we can get into some of the like conversations about whether Christian musics could later.
But I think that she always was like, are you sure when it was into this? But the whole idea, and this seems so different from the rest of like music production, is that you had these people saying we are worried, like our teens are vulnerable to the secular world. So in order to protect against them, let's like create music that is ostensibly for them. Like let's like create a bubble around them almost. Yeah, you can really tell that these ideas gained traction before the internet.
Yeah, because now, you know, like now you could not do this. It's just be impossible. Right. There's too many ways to sneak things for teenagers. And so one of the earliest versions of trying to save and protect the young that I write about in the book through music is T-todalling songs, like temperate songs. So from an early, you know, from the early 20th century, there's this idea.
It corresponds to the rise of celebrity culture and the rise of mass media and the rise of the United States is being like the largest purveyor of that. Yeah. And you can kind of see how people think, okay, look at this incredible power, you know, radio and film, and you know, all these things like, what could we do? And for a certain group of people, it seemed like the natural extension of that would be let's create media that engages young people.
And for a long time, they really struggled with music because rock and roll was like a big, right transgressive problem. They eventually figured it out by the time you get to Jesus freak, that's like everything's kicking into high gear. They figured out a really successful strategy for that, but it was a tough not to crack originally. They had a hard time.
Right. Right. Yeah, like that's such a funny point that like because rock and roll was so closely associated with a certain type of lifestyle, like the music itself could not be appropriated for Christian use for many decades. And then something begins to switch in the 90s, right? So in the in the 1950s, a lot of the problems that people had with with, well, there are two sets of problems that are kind of like overlapping. One is that rock was originally associated with black culture.
So for white Americans generally, that was a problem. And I'm not the first person who said this other historians have argued that conversations about rock became kind of like a proxy conversation about civil rights in the United States.
But then for both black and white communities who were penicostle, because a lot of rock and roll came out of penicostle communities, they were frustrated by rock because they felt like it was taking the sounds of their church music and putting it into like these terrible things like singing about things like sex. Like one of the songs, Great Balls of Fire, the phrase Great Balls of Fire was originally a reference to like the Holy Spirit descending like tongues of fire on the practitioner.
And it's about speaking in tongues. But then if you know the song, most people do Great Balls of Fire. It's a very thinly veiled reference to sex. So you can imagine church people, it's not even, it's not veiled, you can imagine church people just being like what you took the sound of our worship and then you did this other thing with it.
So it was a really, like there were a lot of reasons why people had a hard time with it. But around the 1970s, there were a group of people all over the country, but a lot of them were on the West Coast. Hippie converts to Christianity, people called Jesus People. And yeah, yeah. So if you, I mean, if you're familiar with that world, I'm sure you knew about like Keith Green and people like Randy Stonehill and Larry Norman.
And those folks created music that people like Billy Graham, another kind of parental figure who wanted to engage the young with media, he recognized, oh, they've done something here that we could harness for in their minds, the good of evangelical kids. And so then an industry takes off because there's like a partnership between the people who are making it, the younger people who are making it, and then these media makers who were actually really smart about it.
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And all those dollars and cents pool together make this a viable project. No matter which way you're able to support us, we're so grateful. So thank you and now back to the show. So we have so many questions I was delighted by the diversity of questions that we received. And so many of them when we, because often in our, in our little submission form, we ask for recommendations for a co-host. We already knew that you were going to be our co-host, but that's just in the form.
And so many people recommended you as the co-host. What? Oh my gosh, it's so honored. I know. So to sort through this history for the last 25, 30 years, we're going to get into the questions. And this first one is from Marda. What was the machine behind Christian rock and pop in the early 2000s? Where was all that money going? Were the bands actually practicing Christians or devout? Or was this just a way to break into the music scene?
Some bands seem to have had legit staying power. Bands like Switchfoot or Reliant K. Why? I just want a deep dive into this whole world. Okay, Marda, we have the book for you. I love it, Marda. Oh my gosh, this is great. But let's pick apart her questions. Okay. So the first question, and this I find really fascinating. What was the industry behind the boom of Christian music in the late 90s early 2000s? And you were part of this world, so I'm... Yeah, yeah.
That's such a good question because the answer is that by the late 90s and early 2000s, the Christian music market had done what any growing market does, which is it consolidates. Yep. And is overtaken by corporate interests. So by the late 90s and early 2000s, the vast majority of music that you would have heard on the radio that you'd classify as contemporary Christian music was owned by non-church-related entities, corporate entities.
So by that time, the money that you would get from like royalties from hearing something on the radio or album sales, a lot of that went to these massive corporations. And so in a short answer is that. I would say in the late 90s and early 2000s, this is the peak. So there were a lot more artists that were able to make a living then.
So I think that the question is getting at like, by the time you get to that era, it's basically the same people that are making money off of Britney Spears are making money off of these groups. And so there's not really a distinction in terms of where the big money is going. But there were a lot more bands too. So if you liked that world, you had a lot more options because the kind of the big selling groups could fund some of the less profitable groups.
And of course, that's almost all gone now. So what about this second question about, and maybe we can kind of be meta about this? Sure. This question just generally about like, are they actually practicing Christians? Yeah. I think that a lot of people wonder this just because with celebrity in general, there's a lot of performance of a particular image. Right. And faith is a complicated thing. And like a lot of these, a lot of these artists were people in their 20s and 30s.
And probably on their own faith journeys in so many different ways. So how have you thought about this in the course of writing your book and doing this research? I would say like in one sentence, I would say that most of the folks who got into this business did so to use a bachelor term for the right reasons. I think most of them were personally quite devout. They felt like they wanted to do something for God. I think that's the vast majority.
I think the label of Christian and how it was defined in that world was very specific. Yes. So I think that there were a lot of people who ended up being labeled as defectors or apostates, who they themselves would claim Christian identity, but it's not that really specific version of a really particular kind of conservative Christian.
And so throughout the history of contemporary Christian music, there were people who would be sort of dissenting voices that might get labeled by people inside it as outsiders. But if you talk to them, they're like, hey, I'm a devout Christian. I'm just not this kind. Right. And then one of the things about the early, the late 90s and early arts is that there were some artists and bands who came to see contemporary Christian music as a kind of farm team. For the general market.
Yeah. So sometimes, you know, they would be seen as insincere. And I don't necessarily label them as non-practicing Christians. They had different aspirations. Like they wanted to play stadium rock shows and they didn't want to play churches. So I don't know. Sometimes I think people interpreted that as being hypocritical. But I think in the late 90s and early arts, there were a lot of examples of that kind of thing working.
So some of them, they were performing in youth groups and they'd rather be performing in clubs. And does that make them insincere? I don't know. You know, when I think about what I was thinking when I was 19, I had no idea what I was doing. So I think, you know, people put a lot of weight on what teenagers were doing. And I guess that's the nature of American pop culture. But I sort of feel empathetic for a lot of them because I'm like, I'm so glad no one was following me around.
Looking to me as a moral and spiritual exemplar when I was 19. The closest I had to that was like being a camp counselor. And like I'm kind of even weirded out by that memory. I do, you know, and I think we should be explicit that like this world, it was a very tiny box that you could be in in terms of like, like things that could get you excluded from this world or like seen as being bad or apostate. Like, you know, all these different things.
If you were queer, if you cheated on someone, if you had sex before marriage and someone knew about it, if you used drugs and alcohol and someone knew about it. And this is the thing, as you point out, lots of Christians drink, lots of Christians have sex with them. And it was drink, lots of Christians have sex before marriage. Like there are, but this was the interpretation within this particular white evangelical, very conservative world was that those things were not good role models.
Like that, you were not being a good Christian role model. And so that was not allowed. Yeah, that's one thing that I thought was so interesting. One thing I found that I wasn't expecting to find was that there are actually a really small group of people who created contemporary Christian music. And the vast majority come from three different groups.
But one of them is a group called the Holiness Movement, which is a really radical movement that got going in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century. But these people practice this idea that you want to demonstrate the power of God in your life through really radical external things. So you don't drink, you don't dance, you don't gamble, you wear very modest clothing for a lot of women in those communities, no makeup, don't cut your hair, no jewelry.
So that movement created a lot of the music. And so a lot of the people in contemporary Christian music were like the grandkids of those people. So you can kind of see, like that's a really specific way of being Christian. Like you said, this is so anecdotal and I wish I had better statistics on this. But I've talked to so many people who were like, I grew up Presbyterian or I grew up Methodist.
And their parents were kind of freaked out when they started getting involved in the CCM world because it was like this kind of holiness culture that the parents were like, where are you getting this? I think that that absolutely happened. And also was a symptom of that moment in the 90s and 2000s where a lot of what are called mainline Protestant churches. So things like Presbyterian churches, I don't know if any Episcopals who got into CCM, but maybe that happened like Method.
Yeah. Just like that there was this evangelical turn and it was especially happening in the youth groups and in the youth movements. The other thing, so two things, one, I went to, maybe you went to this too, I went to a youth, a Christian rock festival called Creation at the Gorge, which is like the premier festival site in the Pacific Northwest. And my mom let me go because it was a Christian rock thing. We went with boys. We didn't have any parents. It was amazing. I got so sunburned.
I was so, in hindsight, I'm so mad because I didn't go see Lil' Fair, but I did go see Creation. But I have an incredibly, incredibly vivid memory. So this is in Central Washington in July. It's like 90, 95 out. And a bunch of people, including me and my friends, had our bikini tops on because it was so hot. Oh, you're daring, dear. From the loudspeaker, the announcer said, we need the women, the godly women in attendance, to be mindful of tempting their Christian brothers. Oh wow.
And basically put on some clothes. I'm like that. I just, I'm a loudspeaker. What was that like for you as a team? That would be so embarrassing, I would imagine. Well, it was just, it was, this is kind of the reconciliation process that I think a lot of people listening to this music or a part of this culture were going through. I didn't go to private Christian high school. I didn't drink or do drugs when I was in high school.
But I made out with guys and had impure thoughts and wore bikini tops. And so, every day of trying to manage this messaging that was coming from both the music, but also from other authority figures in my life, how do I personally feel about this? Was what eventually led to my own, what's often called, deconstruction of one's faith. That's a term that's become popular recently and moving away from the church in general.
I know that there are some artists, and this is part of the question, there are some artists who have publicly deconstructed or moved away from the faith. I'm thinking of Jennifer Napp, who was actually playing at Creation and who I loved. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Came out as gay. And how are there, are there more that I don't know about? Yes, and I have to say that Jennifer Napp was a source for this book. And so, my parents didn't, my dad really didn't like contemporary Christian music.
So, sounds a little bit like your mom. He thought it wasn't good music. And so, he didn't, it irritated him, so he didn't have it in our house, which is so funny. So, of course, I was raised around that world. And, you know, it was like, just like the air you breathe. So, it's not that I wasn't familiar with it. It's just, it didn't have like the same home life that for a lot of people who are raised in it.
Yeah. So, I think maybe I just didn't take it quite as to heart like you would if it were, but. But, Jennifer Napp, I remember because I saw her in college, and I remember thinking, wow, that was great. Like, she was great. And she is great. And we should tell listeners that her sound was very much in tune. Like, she could have played it a little fair. Like, she was her and her guitar and like beautiful, soulful songs that were very confessional.
To me, like, they felt like they felt very much in touch with like how I was feeling as a teen. Yes. And she was on a little affair. She did, she played a little affair. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, she's here totally right. She was, she wasn't as excellent. Yeah. And I think one of the sticking points for how people interpreted her when she came out, the big issue was that she would not renounce her Christianity. She's like, I am a Christian.
And so, that was a really interesting, you know, like then all of a sudden that kind of puts her outside the folds. But if you ask her, you know, she'll tell you that. So, but yes, there were lots of lots of people who end up getting sidelines. Some of them go quietly. Some of them made noise. One of my favorite stories in here is from a woman who was really popular in the 80s. Her name was Leslie Phillips. And Leslie Phillips found the world to be very suffocating.
And in interviews, she has talked about how people, like, A&R people would tell her, you sound too sexy. And she's great singer, by the way. And so, she'd be like, well, what am I doing? That's, you know, it's just my voice. You know, what should I do? And they'd be like, they didn't really have an answer, but, you know, knock it off. So, at one point, she basically tells them, because they're, the contemporary Christian music labels, oftentimes, had morality clauses.
And there are other, you know, that's not that unfamiliar to a lot of musical, like, secular or non-CCM albums. Yeah, classic, classic Hollywood, it was a thing. Exactly. I mean, there's still some version in a lot of, a lot of stars, and pulses. Right. Right. So, that's not that unusual, but it was a fairly specific version of it. And she essentially told her label, listen, I've had sex outside of marriage. I don't mind if people know about it. And then they let her out of her contract.
According to her, according to her. But, you know, the interesting thing about her, I just have to say, she went on, she changed her name to Sam Phillips, and she did the Gilmore Girls music. She's excellent. So, look her up. That's just a fun Easter egg for people. I didn't end up, that part didn't end up in the book, but I feel like your listeners would be like... 100%. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. Okay, thanks for coming out of here for her.
This is a great segue into our next question, which is about the sound of the music itself, and this comes from Sarah. I have a long standing theory that Christian Rock has an identifiable sound beyond its miracle content. In other words, I am convinced that I can identify the genre just flipping through radio stations. Is there a musical production style or something else at play here? Am I delusional?
A bit of context. I was a self-proclaimed Jesus Freak in my teens, so I was heavily into switch foot and DC talk and the like until I left the church around 2004. Okay, I agree with Sarah. There is a sound. I know exactly, like if I'm flipping through the radio stations, 100%, I know what it is.
And then the other thing that I will say is that there is a sound of what I think of as like the very right now Christian music, which is music that plays at all of Chip and Joanna Gaines' properties in Texas. And it sounds like the luminars. And it doesn't explicitly reference Jesus, but I know what's going on. Like I just know. And also at any of the Christian or church-owned coffee shops, like cool coffee shops that don't announce that they're Christian or church-owned, but you know.
Yes. And part of it is the demeanor of the priestess. Yes. Always no. So what are your thoughts about this particular sound? Oh gosh, so many. I'm having like 50 all at once, but yes. Yes to the question. I think some of the sound comes from as CCM grew as an industry, it found itself in Nashville, Tennessee. And there's an actual national sound that is very polished as a certain type of songwriting, certain types of harmonies.
And I would say that a lot of people who know how to identify contemporary Christian music have had, at one point in time, a very like a flash of a thought, is this country or is this Christian? So country music and contemporary Christian music, they're both located in Nashville. So they, one reason is they use a lot of the same session players, like it's a lot of the same people who are creating it. So that's part of the sound.
But also, I think contemporary Christian music was really tailored, especially in that era, to white suburban life. Yes. And my... And my... It has to be palatable the most. It has to be moms. Moms have to want to listen to that stuff in the car. Right. Now, when I'm with my children in the car, I have young children. And I listen to the music I like, so my children listen to food fighters. So, but that's because I'm a woman of my, you know, of a certain age.
But, so, but what I'm saying is I control the music. And so it had to be music that conservative Christian moms living in the suburbs would want to play. In fact, there are some funny stories about some of the edger bands, like bands that were on labels like Tooth and Nail, that had very, a very different aesthetic, not the national sound. And moms didn't like it. So sometimes kids got away with listening to kind of subversive messages from Christian punk and Scott and Metal.
Mostly because their moms didn't like it. So yeah, a lot of it's like the mom sound is what you're hearing. Was POD one of those? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they were, they were such an interesting band. And I talk about them as sort of the end of that era because they had a mainstream record deal. They didn't come up, you know, when you were talking about being at a Christian camp. A lot of the sites for Christian music festivals were the same sites that a hundred years earlier.
Those kids grandparents had been having like tent revival meetings. Yeah. And POD is not, they are not from those networks. So they came up from Southern California. They're not like white evangelical youth group kids, although they're quite evangelical. But they just didn't come up from that network and they had a mainstream label. And so they sort of proved that you could be super duper Jesus-y, but not be in that particular world. So it's kind of the beginning of the end of that, I think.
I think there's also something to be said for Christian music, also sounding like sometimes like the B-version of a particular genre. Do you know what I'm talking about? Of course. So there's this band third day that I was really, I just loved third day so much. And they sound, I don't know, like they sound like watered down, life house, which is kind of this one of those crossover. Maybe it's Christian band, which sounds like watered down creed, which sounds like watered down Pearl Jam, right?
Oh, yes. So it's like all of this sort of derivative-ness all the way down. Yeah, do you know what I'm talking about? Absolutely. Yes, that's a very, there's no doubt about that. And I think, you know, one of the things that's so interesting to me about that is I would say that for the most part, that was by design.
And the reason why it's not that people wanted to make less good versions of it, but the whole industry because it was created, one of the first big executives in contemporary Christian music, a guy named Billy Ray Hurne, was a Southern Baptist youth pastor before he became a record label executive. So he is the kind of guy who wants to keep Southern Baptist kids, Southern Baptist. And they were worried about like what rock and roll and other kinds of music were doing to the young.
And so what they did was they looked to the general market and then looked for positive and encouraging alternatives to the general market. So it's by design, it lags. And that was a really, yeah, yeah, yeah. There were people who were very frustrated by that. People, I talk about a couple of them, a guy named Steve Taylor and a guy named Charlie Peacock, and I used to work for Charlie Peacock, who were very frustrated by that model.
And basically said the philosophy that is upholding this is not going to get us anywhere. We need to just create good art. And people will be attracted to whatever message we say if we create good art. Steve Taylor signed a band called Six Pents and the Richard. Oh, yeah. And they had a mainstream trajectory, Charlie Peacock signed Switchfoot and another artist named Sarah Mason, who had, you know, they were the kinds of bands that you would hear in the background. WB shows like Teen Romas.
So that's like mainstream music. But yeah, I think for a lot of the bands, they were constantly frustrated. And that's why I ended up not being sustainable because once you get to be a certain age as a teenager, you can figure that stuff out for yourself. You know, like when you're 11 or 12, it might not work. But by the time you get to 16, you're kind of like, wait a minute, I could just listen to Pearl Jam.
You know, like if I really like this, I put up story in the book about marketer or CCM marketers would create these charts where they would, and it was for youth pastors and moms and some kids where it'd say, like if you like this band, you should listen to this band. So it's like if you like Pearl Jam, you should listen to third day or something like that.
And a lot of them are kind of absurd, the comparisons don't make sense. But one of the funniest quotes that I came across in my research was from this young woman who was like, I was told if I liked the Beastie Boys that I would like Audio Adrenaline, which those two groups sound nothing. But and then she said, and that's how I found out I love the Beastie Boys. You know, so it's like they kind of reverse engineer. So it's like what you get to a certain age. It doesn't work anymore.
Oh my god, first of all, laughing so hard if you like the Beastie Boys with like Audio Adrenaline. So we have, there's a question that I'm going to paraphrase here because it kind of, it's a good way to continue this.
And it's from this listener named Joanne and she was talking about how in the early 2000s, she saw in her experience a lot of youth group leaders and people in the church looking to mainstream music, like Life House, which I mentioned earlier, switch foot, like she mentions the fact that switch foot was definitely on the Walk to Remember soundtrack. Yes, I remember.
But she thinks that there's something interesting going on like post 9-11 that made people search for religious meaning in mainstream music. But I'm also interested in like these bands who maybe saw that they could have it both ways or maybe that this was also a classic proselytizing.
Yeah, come on right where you're like, oh well if we hook people outside of Christian music with these songs, then maybe they'll come to Jesus through listening like as a gateway to the rest of the music and the rest of I don't know faith. So, yeah, that's a great. I think first off, I definitely think there's something to the 9-11 connection. I do think that that was a time. I mean, I remember it quite well. And if you were anywhere near adulthood, it's changed all of our lives forever.
But I think the best example of that I would point to would be when Creed played the Super Bowl in 2000. There are some like fascinating videos of that where they were doing, won't you take me higher? And people were very distraught in that time. So it would have been like September 11th. And then I think that those types of groups really did strike a chord when people were really searching for meaning.
I think it was a Super Bowl. It might not have been the Super Bowl. But I'll have to check that out. Yeah, I think it was at a Thanksgiving football game half-time show. I don't know if there's like many games on Thanksgiving after 9-11. Okay. And looking back on it, you can see like, oh, people were really into like making meaning out of that time.
But I think the era where there were these bands, I think a lot of that has to do with the arc of the industry itself. So as corporate interests got more involved in contemporary Christian music, it actually allowed bands that had crossover capacity to try to get out there. They had other distribution networks.
So a band that could have mass appeal, the larger non-religious record labels, they don't care. Like they just want stuff to sell. So if they're not going to stop anybody from connecting with mainstream audiences. A lot of bands felt that they were stymied in some ways by the Christian marketers because they branded, once you get branded as contemporary Christian, it's like the least cool thing ever. So once you, you know, that was really frustrating.
In fact, there are instances I point out where bands get so frustrated. A lot of them, or some of them ended up even trying like legal action, like stop marketing us this way. We want to be a regular band, but it's sort of the kiss of death because contemporary Christian music had within its branding such a parental thing. I mean, I think all of us know that the worst thing that you can be is mom and dad music to it. Right. 15-year-old.
Right. Right. Yeah, no, that's super interesting, right, that they couldn't get away from it. So the best move would be to try to like not start with that label in the first place. Right. Right. And I think you're totally right, just I'm thinking about like all of the culture that was popular in the post-9-11 world was they were using forms of melodrama to try to make meaning and also try to make the world morally legible in some ways.
Yes. So like stuff that was very, very low, very, very high, like stuff that allowed you to feel emotions in some way, whether that was anger or glory or, you know, whatever things. Like the, I think we latched onto them. Yeah. And so some of those things too within, you know, saying like this is about God. Absolutely. Which, I don't know, do you think that that do you think higher is about God?
I think it's got to be some kind of spiritual something. Just knowing about the lead singer group in Pentecostal circles. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a funny era because there are groups like Evan Essence, for example, that had a similarly epic sound with a female lead vocalist, which is kind of unusual for rock bands.
But anyway, there was always tension with those groups, especially. And you know, when you think about them as very young people, they're trying to like find a place in an industry. And there are lots of other mechanisms that are people want to capitalize on these groups in a lot of different ways. So there's like the, there's a youth group world like youth pastors are always looking for new material to keep the kids in youth group, keep them engaged.
And so moms are trying to make sure their kids don't listen to sex and swearing and drugs and, you know, on mainstream. And then, and then the kids themselves, you know, for for many kids in the late 20th century in the United States, music is a way to express yourself and to distinguish yourself from your parents.
So they're looking to, you know, subvert a lot of that stuff. So there are a lot of different motivations going into like how these groups are received. And for those groups, yeah, I did want to say about 9-11, there were a lot of like non crossover bands and artists that used that opportunity to stoke patriotism in evangelical circles.
So I would say that on the flip side, the groups that had no mainstream appeal that were only kind of internal. It was very useful for George W. Bush and his administration. In fact, Michael W. Smith of huge in contemporary Christian music world, if you don't know who he is, he performed at the Republican National Convention and supported George W. Bush and wrote a song all about 9-11. So 9-11 in the internal, like the subculture world was huge.
Right. Yeah. Well, and that's where you get into some of like the white Christian nationalism that a lot of other scholars are working on right now in terms of like there's all this paraphernalia around like I didn't interview with Christian Kovas, you may about white nationalism. And Jesus and John Wayne is the name of her book, which is so good. And she talks a lot about how evangelical Christianity even like co is co-opting William Wallace from Braveheart during this time.
Right. So there's a lot of other co-opting that is going around that is part of this larger white nationalist project as well. Okay. We have a question next from Christine and Melody is going to read it. Christian rock, I loved it. Why was it so quirky and whose fault is it that everyone switched to worship songs? Okay. So Melody brought up the example of a newsboys song that is called breakfast. Oh, right.
And the course is as follows. When the toast is burned and all the milk has turned and Captain Crunch is waving for well, when the big one finds you made this song remind you that they don't serve breakfast in hell. It just reminds me of how sometimes you said there's a little bit of a farm team for the rest of the music industry. A lot of these songs are like, oh, this is the song that my friend and I made and then we practiced in our garage.
I just think you got more of that stuff that made it onto the album than in some other forms. That's my explanation for the Quarkiv. You have one quickly before we can get into the worship music. Oh, yeah. Well, Steve Taylor is somebody who you can thank for the Quark of that particular song. But I think some of the quarkiness had to do with, I mean, you know, the 90s did have a lot of sort of quirky bands just generally.
Yes. So I think some of that has to do with there was sort of a, I don't know, kind of a silly quality to some rock music. So I think this is the, what's funny to me about that particular song is that it's talking about actually something kind of serious if you're in those circles, which is hell. Yeah. Talking about no cast in crunch and hell. Yeah. Like if that's not going to inspire Holy living, I don't know what will.
But yeah. So just making like this silly stuff part of the conversation too. I can see my brother like really liking that totally. But when he was like 10 and then the worship song, I didn't even think about this until I read this question. I was like, oh my gosh, right around 2001, 2002, when I was a camp counselor, suddenly all of the new CDs that we were selling at camp were all of the like live worship things. Right. Right.
And there was in some ways, it was brilliant, right? Because the songs that you were singing during worship were also the songs that were available for these CDs, but it felt like it cannibalized this entire quirky industry. Yeah. So what happened there? Oh gosh. Okay. I'm going to try and do it. I go into it in some detail in the book, but I'll try and give like the shortest version of that. And one, I think has to do with how people worship now.
So Americans worship less often in larger congregations statistically, especially evangelicals because evangelicals dominate the mega church scene. So one thing that really damaged CCM was losing medium size churches because medium size churches were a part of like a development network. So if you were a band, you play small churches and coffee shops first and maybe youth groups.
And then you move up to medium size churches. And then the aim is to get into those mega churches because that's where you could connect with more fans and actually sell merchandise and stuff like that. So the medium size church disappearing, which they are disappearing really quickly, leaves it's a whole in the development network. So you can't like get a band to go.
The other thing about mega churches is they have incredible resources like if you see if you look at kind of the it churches right now, Maverick or not Maverick City, they're not a church, but elevation church. But if you look at Maverick City's music videos, which are very like set in a church, you kind of they can go toe to toe with almost any mainstream production music, Call it up. They're killing it.
Like they don't need an external band to come and give them a show, right? They're creating like really compelling stadium rock concerts as worship. So some of that is just that a lot of it also has to do with the, I think the internet is amazingly responsible because young people could very easily get around their parents and could find music that they wanted to listen to.
That wasn't necessarily mainstream, but also the artists themselves, it came to feel less attractive to try to like make it in that industry, if your band like switch foot, they had mainstream success like they.
So I there are a lot of other reasons, but in some of it has to do with like the fragmenting of evangelicalism just generally like there are, because there are artists who are connecting with people just period, you know, they, but they don't need those networks to do it, they can develop an audience through Spotify or YouTube or TikTok, and they don't need the kind of structure that was contemporary Christian music.
One way of looking at it is that worship music is sort of what's left of the business in house powerhouse. Yeah, it's like it starts in churches. It kind of goes out into mainstream. It ends up kind of back under the purview of churches. And then another way of looking at it is that worship music is also transnational.
So a lot of contemporary Christian music, if you look at the moral imperatives, a lot of it's domestic. They're like, this is the kind of country we want. These are the kind of citizens we want and worship music, and it can be used for a variety of political causes. I talk about a few there. So it can be politicized. It is politicized, but it's also not exclusively American.
They're people who are like trading songs all over the world, Australia, Brazil, Guatemala, Singapore, you know, like it's going all over the place. And so in our global economic world, it sort of makes sense that that's the industry that survives. I don't know if that that's probably too much, but. No, no, no, no, I could honestly talk about this for another hour, but for now, paid subscribers, you get to stick around for advice time.
Lee is going to help me answer a question about telling people that your faith has changed. Oh gosh. I know I cannot tell you what a pleasure this has been. I've been looking forward to this conversation. I am just really honored and the book is so good. And I really think people, whatever their relationship is to this music, we'll find it really fascinating. It's accessible in so many different ways.
So if people want to find more of you on the internet, where can they find you? They can find me at dralea pain.com, which I only use that because there was another LEAHP, AYNE already taken. So DR and H, on most social media platforms. And I'd love to connect with people I love hearing their stories. And I have to tell you that I'm a big fan of your work. And I called my friend Erica, my best friend who we talked to each other all the time.
And I was like, guess who I'm talking to today. So from Erica and I, we love your work. We appreciate it. Thank you so much. This was so great. And everyone, the book is God gave rock and roll to you. And if you want to buy it at bookshop.org, use promo code culture to get 10% off. Thanks for listening to the Culture Study podcast. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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