Tag: Christian Music

Mor(e )on Christian music

Two interesting tidbits to add to my crusade against cringe worthy Christian music… 

The first, is an opinion piece in The Age where an atheist journo went along to a PlanetShakers experience*… it’s got all the echos of the South Park episode I mentioned a few weeks back – just so you know I wasn’t exaggerating the issue here’s a quote…

“Christian pop, ’80s power anthems, Metallica meets Cheap Trick. A mosh pit for Jesus was jumping with teenagers in rapture and a balcony of Planetkids went off for Christ. Music blared from the stadium sound system while the screen seduced us with slick videos edited so fast the phrase ‘‘subliminal image" kept popping into my head. Lyrics flashed up: "Come like a flood and saturate me now." I wondered what Freud would have made of the disproportionate use of such words as ‘‘come’’, ‘‘touch’’ and ‘‘feel’’, and the phrases "move within me" and "being filled". My favourite was "King of Glory, enter in".”

Secondly, There’s apparently an article somewhere where Matt Redman – cliched songwriter extraordinaire – repents from his ways of writing love songs to God. I’ll find that article when I get home and update this post.

*As a side note – this gonzo journalism thing where atheists try to experience Christian stuff from a true outsiders perspective is an interesting phenomena and is probably worth listenting to for those people trying to catch the atheist cultural zeitgeist. Other examples are the Guardian’s Alpha experiences and the Friendly Atheist Hermant Mehta’s book on his experiences in churches that he went to after an ebay campaign where confident churches could buy the right to try to convert him.

Soul Music

This GraphJam assessment of Christian music (not church music the "commercial" part of Christian music that is an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars per annum) reminded me of this classic South Park episode where Cartman starts a Christian band and writes songs by substituting "you" for "God" in classic songs… these may be offensive to Christian music fans…

Here’s John Safran’s classic segment on Christian music…

I hate the bands that you like

Generally speaking I’m not a big fan of Christian music. Usually because it’s a cheap and nasty rip off of perfectly acceptable (if not sanctified) secular music tailored to a gullible Christian audience who will fork out money for poor quality material thus perpetuating the existence of bad Christian music by creating a market for it. Wake up people. Stop buying bad Christian music just because it’s Christian.

Here’s some of the baddest Christian music ever released (at least judged by the album art) – while these are all thankfully stuck in the past there are modern equivalents who were no doubt performing at Easter Fest over the weekend. And will be turning up at a Youth Alive event near you.

I wanted to follow up my post on humility with a reference to possibly the most arrogant Christian brochure I’ve ever read – where a guest speaker – a youth worker from Townsville – was hailed as a “voice of a generation” and a “once in a lifetime evangelist” – and I’d never heard of him. And I live in Townsville. But instead you get these.

And – if you like the heading of this post you can get it as a shirt from the Red Vs Blue store.