From an artist’s perspective, I agree with you completely. Yet, that said…

I do believe that there are distinctives, good and bad, of the experience of the Christian community, the body of Christ. I think that those distinctives are best portrayed by those who are a member of the Christian community. And while Christians can join the rest of the world making redemptive art, there is also a deep need for the more distinctively Christian stuff.

A recent example of this would be Back on Murder, by J. Mark Bertrand. As the story continues, it shows a fascinating portrait of a megachurch–its truly Christian values, its human resistance to those values, its pain and (to a small extent) its glory. Not every work of art by Christians needs to focus on these subjects…but Back on Murder seems a book that would not have likely been produced by someone outside of the Christian community.

It is, to use a word borrowed from art history, “Religious art.”

We don’t need good “Christian” music. We need Christians making good music (just like we don’t need “Christian” paintings or novels or photographs; we need Christians creating good art, writing good books, composing good music).

I can understand your feeling, but don’t judge all of CCM by what local stations play. First of all, about the *only* Christian stations that play tend to cater to a very specific niche–unoffensive pop tunes with positive themes that won’t contain offensive content. This is because Christian music is already a small market, and anything that drives listeners away is a no-no.

The Christian bands that do make excellent music tend to be underground or outside of the mainstream. They also often are overvalued by people (like me) who don’t listen to most CCM but love to hear a band that blends artistic skill with lyrics that reflect Christian distinctives. But they do exist.

In the meantime, I don’t believe CCM radio is going away any time soon. Those who listen to it aren’t looking for musical excellence, so the mediocre talent pool isn’t a problem. What they are looking for is music further from the nihilism or empty sensuality that pervades so much of our cultures art (the better as well as the worse). That isn’t a bad thing, even if it does encourage less-than-excellent music.

One (somewhat confessional) example: I love Ballydowse, the raucous Yiddish-Celtic-Scots punk band that sang protest songs about America’s foreign policy alongside anthems to marriage or Inklings-tinged medievalist visions of providential history. They certainly can’t be said to be unoriginal, and my temptation is to see them as a great band. This is true even though some of their songs can only be viewed as failed experiments, and individually they aren’t necessarily the most virtuoso of musicians.

I also enjoy Superchick, whose commercially viable, polished (and sometimes sentimentalized) punk anthems tend to celebrate Christian individuality and the sufficiency of women before God (an act, in its own way, of protest against our culture’s determined attempts to define women in terms of their sexual attractiveness and relationship status.) My temptation is to dismiss them as derivative. They’ve been preceded by more intense punk; no one’s going to be blown away by their sheer innovation, though many people have responded passionately to their message.

The CCM industry at best has encouraged the growth of bands like Superchick while denigrating truly innovative (and politically unpredictable) bands like Ballydowse. I’m not sure it’s productive to just talk about “excellent” music–it *does* make this article seem like a denigration of the megapopular bands of Christendom. I think what we need to say is that there needs to be an attitude for nurturing challenging and difficult music *alongside* the more overtly “positive” and useful music CCM is known for. I don’t think it is a question of mere quality, but also of difficulty, ambiguity, and other things that aren’t necessary for good music, but are necessary for a healthy music-producing community.

mewithoutYou

The Chariot

or MuteMath – who is somewhat Christian.

i have no idea why he isnt big yet, everyone needs his music, over oceans and jacranda are two of the best albums of all time

If you want to reach people you have to become all things to all men. These guys do an excellent job of looking enough like all the other boys in the hood to be credible, while at the same time presenting a completely different message.

Sure, unless the kid’s preference is hip-hop and he can’t stand Arcade Fire (I weep for his limitations) or The Decemberists (OK, I’m kind of with him, they bore me too). I picked hip-hop as an example genre but I wasn’t all that clear that’s how I was using it.

But I could replace the words “as overtly Christian” with the word “today” and the sentence would still be true, so I can’t get all that worked up about it. A kid listens to someone rapping poorly about how all the ladies (a word he most assuredly does not use) can’t get enough of his arrogant, irresponsible self or he listens to someone rapping poorly about the love of God and following Christ. Either way he’s listening to junk, so why not hope he listens to junk that doesn’t glorify thuggishness, misogyny and immediate self-gratification?