Something that I know about myself: I have highly selective and inconsistent taste in music. Blame it on my raisings. My mother listened to ‘oldies music,’ a genre of radio rarely found today that play(s/ed) music from the 1950s to very early 1980s, and my dad listened to, what I call, real country music (most country music pre-9/11). Readers may note that I have rudely strong opinions about music already, but my fervor grows to vocal distaste when I hear modern Christian music. As a former college radio DJ and station manager, I listen to all kinds of music with one rather obvious outlier: Christian music. My radio show was even based on the idea that religious themes exist in music not explicitly engineered for religious listeners, Hip Hop being my favorite example. In seminary, a dear friend and I often wondered how we could know that we stumbled upon a Christian music radio frequency based on hearing three cords or less. My seminary friend and I could separately surf stations without looking at the display and know we did not want to hear a station based on less than four cords. Why?
Well, for one, I think poetry is important to humanity. I can admit my own ignorance about poetry, that I know very little about 21st century poets, that I have never memorized poetry, that I have never written poetry, and that I do nothing to seek out formal or purpose-written poetry for my life now. What I do know about poetry, though the sum of my knowledge may be held in a mosquito’s mouth, is that poetry has to say something. This does not mean that poetry must be political, confrontational, nor worldview challenging. No. I only mean that poetry is a vehicle for demonstrating ideas. Music, at its heart, needs to be poetry. Plenty of secular music lacks poetry. Religious music has tradition that should be addressed poetically, and failing to do so is – in my opinion – “cheap grace.”[1] Form, specific meter, and rhyme pattern are not a part of my request – even I know that poetry does not require any of these qualities. However, as in poetry, there should be some deeply rooted idea in every piece of music. How strange is it that such an entity as God receives so few attributes in popular Christian music? Christian music that is played on the radio[2] has long lacked original ideas that expand and encourage believers or Christianity. Conveying confessions of faith, devotion, love, and praise are all absolutely necessary factors of Christian life, and I respect the positivity that Christian music injects into popular Christianity, but humanity has a wider range of emotion than these often-simplified aspects of our walks.
In re-reading Psalm 105 this week, I have been reminded that songs of celebration and praise can be more than repetitive confessions of faith and praise, and that scripture points to a tradition of celebratory praise much older than The Church or the New Testament. Readers are reminded that God causes liberation and that freedom is part of the psalmist’s celebration. I would only highlight one critique. The psalmist is not sharing entirely accurate details about the transition between Hebrew slavery to Israelite freedom. The quails did not come because the wandering Hebrew speakers just thought to ask one day, the rock did not split simply because they wondered what was inside, the wealth of the peoples of whose land the children of God came to possess was not handed over by the peoples in wrapping paper, and the 40-year-long walk was not constant singing. Yet the Psalmist highlights the wonderous liberating power of God from the bonds of chattel slavery, from depravity, and from.
[1] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship.
[2] I recognize that this ‘selling out’ problem is not unique to Christian music. One of the strongest patterns in music, from punk to Hip Hop, country to grunge, is the idea that radio kills artists spirit. I can absolutely believe that money and fame change a person and complicate fan relations – Eminem is an excellent example.
Minister With 