Why I hate Christian Rock

Why I hate Christian rock
By Mark Judge    										2:18 PM  03/11/2011 
    
Read more: 
http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/11/why-i-hate-christian-rock/#ixzz1GKM1FQbJ

Before hitting the “buy” prompt, my index finger hovered over my iTouch.
Did I really want to buy a Christian rock album?
You’d think there wouldn’t be a problem. I’m a Christian, and I love  rock and 
roll. But my very love of rock and roll, and of Jesus, had led  me to a 
conclusion: Christian pop music isn’t very Christian.
The problem with Christian popular music, from Michael W. Smith to  Tenth Avenue 
North and Francesca Botticelli — whose album “Hundred More  Years” I downloaded 
off iTunes — is that it is triumphalist. No matter  what happens in life, from 
the alarm not going off to being gunned down  in a gangland drug war, is God’s 
will. He is in charge. So, although I  may get flustered by life sometimes, 
everything’s gonna be all right.  “You know exactly what you’re doing,” 
Botticelli sings to God.
I have a serious theological,  and aesthetic, problem with this. It makes for 
childish theology and  bad rock and roll. G.K. Chesterton once noted, 
“Christianity is the only  religion that allows God to be an atheist.” He was 
referring to  Christ’s moment of total despair on the cross: “My God, my God, 
why have  you forsaken me?” It is out of this feeling of abandonment that came  
the blues, the taproot for rock and roll. To be sure, African-American  
spirituals were in their own way triumphalist; they knew that in the  end, 
despite all their early suffering, they would return to the loving  gaze of the 
Lord. But they also knew that, as the late Richard John  Neuhaus once put it, 
the way to Easter is through the cross. The power  of their music,  and the rock 
and roll that followed, is that it expresses the suffering  of human beings 
while at the same time, through the sound itself,  triumphs over that suffering 
by creating something beautiful. The best  summation of this I have ever read 
was written by Whittaker Chambers.  The communist defector, Quaker and brilliant 
journalist understood more  about great popular music than the current editor or 
Rolling Stone. On  December 30, 1946, Time magazine ran a piece by Chambers on 
the gospel  singer Marian Anderson. In it, Chambers makes this observation:
The theme of the greatest music is always the birth  of the soul. Words can 
describe, painting can suggest, but music alone  enables the listener to 
participate, beyond conscious thought, in this  act. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto 
is a work secular beyond question. But when, in the first movement, the simple  
theme subtly changes, the mind is lifted and rent — not because the  strings 
have zipped to another key, but by a tone of divinity conveyed  through the 
composer’s growing deafness by an inspiration inexplicable  to the mind. The 
spirituals are perhaps the greatest single burst of  such inspiration, 
communicated, not through deafness, but through the  darkness of minds which 
knew nothing of formal music and very little of  the language they were singing. 

>Professional musicians and musicologists are still locked in hot  debate about 
>the musical origins of the spirituals and the manner of  their creation. One 
>simple fact is clear — they were created in direct  answer to the Psalmist’s 
>question: How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a  strange land? For the land in 
>which the slaves found themselves was  strange beyond the fact that it was 
>foreign. It was a nocturnal land of  vast, shadowy pine woods, vast fields of 
>cotton whose endless rows  converged sometimes on a solitary cabin, vast swamps 
>reptilian and  furtive — a land alive with all the elements of lonely beauty, 
>except  compassion. In this deep night of land and man, the singers saw visions;  
>grief, like a tuning fork, gave the tone, and the Sorrow Songs were  uttered.
This passage, which is more than 60 years old, is why I find it damn  near 
impossible to read rock and roll criticism. Our media has become so  liberal and 
secular that to rock critics, writing about music has  become an exercise in 
creative writing and taxonomy. In Rolling Stone, on Pitchfork.com and on 
PopMatters.com,  you’ll find new and creative ways to describe how a band sounds 
and  informed information about the genres within genres within genres.  Indeed, 
it has become its own code. In the middle of writing this piece,  I clicked over 
to Pitchfork.com, the respected pop music site. The  first review I hit was for 
a band called “Light Asylum”:
Coviello’s synth work and industrial beat programming  is the perfect foundation 
for Funchess’ outsized character. The drums  sound formidably cold and heavy, 
surprising in the regard that he seems  perfectly comfortable writing 
recognizable, catchy synth lines. “Dark  Allies” features a twinkling arpeggio, 
laser sounds, and an unctuous  low-end, but he never fails to reinforce the 
séance-like quality of the  song. And he wields his musical references 
responsibly: “Knights and  Week Ends” is a nifty update of Joy Division’s 
“Digital,“ and “Skull  Fuct” opens with the same iconic drum beat as New Order’s 
“Blue Monday.”
So what is this music about again?
Rock writers frequently use words like “transcendent,” “ethereal,”  “majestic,” 
and even “epic” to describe music. But why is certain music  transcendent, 
majestic, and epic? Does it point to God?
To me, the answer is yes. But it transcends not only because it  provides joy — 
the great music writer Chris Roberts once described  himself as “a cyclone” when 
his favorite song came on the radio — but  because it deals, head-on, with the 
pain of human alienation and  abandonment. It freely expresses doubt about God, 
about life, about  purpose. It has its moment of abandonment on the cross. Who 
can forget  “One,” U2’s masterpiece, and these lyrics:
You say
Love is a temple
Love a higher law
Love is a temple
Love the higher law

You ask me to enter
And then you make me crawl
And I can’t keep holding on
To what you’ve got
When all you’ve got is hurt

One love
One blood
One life
You got to do what you should
There is more humanism and Christianity in “One” than in the top ten Christian 
rock albums combined. It is rebellious but not resentful music that  questions 
God, not in the name of nihilism but in the name of morality.  It wants a just 
world and questions the value of suffering. But it also  accepts suffering as 
the midwife to wisdom and, as Chambers pointed out,  to the birth of the soul. 
U2’s songs radiate with dislocation and  computerized existentialism, yet in 
expressing this sorrow, the songs  themselves become beautiful and timeless 
works of art — they touch the  face of the God that they often deny.
Mark Judge is the author ofA Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ 
Roll.

Read more: 
http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/11/why-i-hate-christian-rock/#ixzz1GKLtnL3W

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