Recent Discussions on Music

Several articles and discussions on music have caught my eye recently. Music remains a controversial subject with strong opinions on both sides of the debate.

Stephen Altrogge praises God for Coldplay (Wikipedia). Erik Davis traces the Christian Rock movement to the Jesus People of the 60s. Harrison Scott Key tells the Jesus People to take their music back. Libby Purves points out a satirical music video, “Christian Rock Is Cool.” Webster Young contemplates the dilemma of Vatican II’s mandate to use “the music of the people” in light of the baseness of popular music.

• Stephen Altrogge at The Blazzing Center: Coldplay and the Cross

In the summer of 2005 I saw the band Coldplay in concert, and it was the best concert I’ve ever seen. Coldplay is not a Christian band, and I don’t endorse all their lyrics, but I love their music. God has given Chris Martin (lead singer, songwriter) the gift of melody and song. He has given Chris the ability to combine notes in ways that stir my heart and grip my emotions. Listening to Coldplay brings me much pleasure and serves as an inspiration for my songwriting as well. And listening to Coldplay is an opportunity for me to thank God for the glorious gift of music.

Read the whole post.

• Erik Davis at Slate: I’d Like To Dedicate This Next Song to Jesus: The freaky origins of Christian rock

The Christian embrace of hip youth scenes can be traced, like so much, to the cultural ferment of the 1960s. Given that we are all weathering a Summer of Love flashback, it might spice up the tired images of the Haight Ashbury rebels to realize that a few of them were Christians. These mystic hippies sparked the mass Jesus People movement, which injected a distinctly Christian feeling for love and apocalypse into a counterculture already up to its mala beads in love and apocalypse. By the early 1970s, a new Jesus had hit the American mind—communal, earthy, spontaneous, anti-establishment. And this Jesus continued to transform American worship long after the patchouli wore off, inspiring a more informal and contemporary style of communion and celebration that, while holding true to core principles, unbuckled the Bible Belt from American Christian life.

Read the whole article.

• Harrison Scott Key at WorldViews: Jesus People give more than 10% of their music

The Jesus People gave the world Christian Rock. Dear Jesus People, please take it back.

Read the whole post.

• Libby Purves at Faith Central: Is Christian Rock Cool?

Two musical religious satires Ca$h in Christ and Jihad the Musical, billed as putting the “fun” back into “fundamentalism,” have hit the Edinburgh Fringe.

They’ve both caused the requisite amount of outrage. Ca$h in Christ sends up the growing trend for “mega-churches” in the UK. Here “Pastor Bob” sings “Christian Rock is cool.”

Read the whole article and watch the video.

• Webster Young at National Catholic Register: On Vatican II and the Music of the People

Today in America, up to 90 million people have muzak forced upon them daily—and it ranges from trivial pop music to the most debased forms of rap music. Musical ignorance is on the rise among the populace, and musical taste is in decline.

Where once musical amateurs used to play the piano and sing, some amateurs today beat on tribal drums. Under these circumstances, would the framers of the Vatican II documents want this kind of “music of the people” to be brought into church?

I use the word debased mostly from a musical standpoint and not a moral one, although the moral is also relevant. Popular music is debased from a musical point of view. It is weak and unaccomplished when compared to finer music. Moreover, there are many forms of folk music in the world that are superior musically to pop and rock music.

In spite of this fact, every country in the world today has come under the dominance of rock and pop music and is arranging its ancestral folk music to the rock beat.

Today it is possible to hear a mild rock beat (such as might have been found in the Everly Brothers, for example) in almost every kind of music in the world—even in new church songs. Folk guitar players, too often, don’t know what to do but strum their guitars in mild rock rhythm.

. . .

From a technical-musical point of view, most pop music is unaccomplished as music. However, there can be no question that this is now “the music of the people.”

The participants of Vatican II could not know that “the people’s music” would soon mirror, all over the world, the juggernaut of American popular music—one of the weakest folk music forms in music history, and yet a superpower in music.

Read the whole post.

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