---

My Faith Is In The Rock And My Name Is On The Roll
...if one spends much time listening to “Christian” music and one is aware of “secular” music, it is obvious that as a genre, CCM is derivative. CCM artists act as kidneys for their largely evangelical audience, straining secular pop culture and inserting Dogmatically Correct lyrics. Until the Jesus Movement, Christian music was largely old-time music, bluegrass, gospel, and drippy ditties performed by acts with Gaither in somewhere in their names. When “Christian Rock” was evolving, there was no infrastructure designed for it, and the closest thing was the small network of radio stations and labels that promoted gospel music being made by white people. The aesthetic and mores of that demographic determined the course of CCM up to today....

...Genre does not merely determine the style of music; packed with musical style are rhetorical patterns, ways of seeing the world, and attitudes. Blues musicians mustn’t stray too far from the blues’ essential dissatisfaction with the world; rappers, even those who find the bling-obsession and confrontational attitude of popular rap music distasteful, must still self-aggrandize. Bubblegum pop must address the high drama of teenage throwaway romances; industrial music must address and embody human despair and hopelessness. Some genres are therefore more suited to expressions of evangelical lives (there are almost no Catholic or liberal Protestant CCM bands; it is a wholly evangelical endeavor). The singer-songwriter genre, for example, lends itself easily to the kind of introspection one finds in the Psalms or the middle of the book of Romans; folk music, because it has always been prophetic, is easily put to the same use by evangelical folk singers. Genres that can’t be as easily imported must either bend the rather static evangelical doctrine to their requirements or lose essential elements of what makes them what they are.

It is in this importing process that the internal tensions of CCM arise. Usually the CCM artist allows the discourse of evangelical theology to co-opt the surface-level features of a genre (musical style, graphic design, costumes) while ditching the attitudes and ideas that make the genre function resulting in terrible or bland music; rock and roll that champions the causes of the establishment isn’t just a betrayal - it’s also boring....