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While the discussing the emotional power of the lyrics, Prime writes:
[T]here is no doubt that the men involved in the creation of Christian Rock are of a different caliber. They are generally married—in a traditional way, that is, they aren’t likely to be beta-ized. They live their message, and they do not hold back from reaching out to their fans, whether personally or spiritually.
Making money, getting high, and pulling poon are often the priorities of your typical rock musician. And I’m not saying that these things are quintessentially evil, but you have to tip your hat to the guys who could be doing all these things on a regular basis, but instead forgo these ‘sins’ for a life of confident, creative expression in traditional morals and religiosity, or sometimes, not so traditional religiosity.
It's validating to know there are guys like this. I can't really claim it for myself -- marriage was a really good deal for me in the sense that the trade-offs Prime mentions were highly speculative in my case. So I don't really know if I would have had the conviction to resist the temptation of a different life had it actually been offered to me.
But while I pray for the success of their marriages, and hope their personal lives do not become the embarassment that those of my generation's Christian rockers' (Amy Grant, Sandi Patti) did in their day, I also hope nobody invests their own personal faith in them. Given the number of acts that Prime lists, and given the scale of temptation involved, its a statistical certainty that some of these relationships will go sideways.
7 comments:
Sorta reminds me a little bit of this:
Bassist Unaware Rock Band Christian
hehe . . .
I spent a while sampling the bands Prime listed, and I gotta tell you: these guys aren't really my taste anymore. I'm firmly in the NPR demographic, with some occasional country.
Part of this is that the lyrics were sometimes hard for me to make out, and then sometimes hard to understand when I read them.
I'm not really the target audience, but I do like religious music provided that it meets the same musical criteria as other stuff I like. I actually have a stub on how significant (influential? helpful? something) Country-Christian (or Christianity within country music) was at a prior point in my life.
So do you not really listen to music anymore (except periodic country)? Interesting. I didn't listen to music much when I was younger. Rap was the in-thing and I kept trying to like it but found that, even in the 6th grade, I prefered news radio. It wasn't until high school when the family was on a 6-hour drive and we were listening to some of their radio-capture tapes and I remembered that I actually do like music.
I listen to classical music (i.e. NPR) in the car, except when my children are with me, in which case they want me to play their music: HSM3, praise music, and a mix of patriotic period music like "Ballad of the Alamo" and "Battle Hymn of the Republic".
And I like it when they play 80s guitar rock at the ice skating rink. Yeah, musical evolution peaked out with Journey and its been downhill ever since.
One of the things I like about country music is its ability to weave in religious themes in a populist, non-didactic way.
By "stub", I assume you mean a half-written blog post? I look forward to reading it.
I dunno - I have mixed feelings. I'll die a heavy metal fan, and hence I want to like Christian metal, but as yet I just haven't found any Christian metal bands whose music really does rival the best secular metal. I loathe CCM for the most part.
marriage was a really good deal for me in the sense that the trade-offs Prime mentions were highly speculative in my case. So I don't really know if I would have had the conviction to resist the temptation of a different life had it actually been offered to me.
So true. It only frustrates me to be congratulated for having lived a clean and sober life so far, because that was all I really knew how to do. If I had been the star receiver of the high school football team, or the lead guitarist of the band that won the school battle of the bands, with girls throwing themselves at me, who knows what I would have done?
I listen to classical music (i.e. NPR) in the car,
Ahh, okay. When I think NPR, I think about their news reports and not classical music. That's why I thought of my own news radio experience.
Oy. I dislike 80's music. Well, I do like bands like Journey and Foreigner in small quantities, I guess.
By "stub", I assume you mean a half-written blog post? I look forward to reading it.
By "stub" I mean I saved a Draft that included a proposed title (or reference to subject matter) and put in a small outline or description of what I want the post to be. If there are any links, I'll paste them in there to so I don't have to look them up later. It basically serves as a reminder of something I wanted to post about. The chances of the post actually getting written are 50/50, though this one probably will get written because it'll tie into a more strictly theological post (also stubbed).
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