As some of you know, I work at a magazine. Here is an excerpt of an article a friend of mine wrote, “reviewing” the Franklin Graham Festival that came through town a few weeks ago for the upcoming issue. I share it with you now.

An obviously horrified Jon Schledewitz arrives to take pictures for Uptown just as Newsboys lead singer John James (real name) begins to lead a cheer usually only heard at international hockey matches: “CAN-A-DA! CAN-A-DA!” thousands of voices cry out. Geoff and I both have the look of fear. Finally after a relentless evangelical seizure song by John James, the Newsboys are finished. The legion of screaming Jesus children fall quiet and walk like zombies to sit in perfectly ordered rows at the back of the floor. After a couple of hymns led by the Tommy Coomes Band with Tommy Walker, it’s time for the main event. Sporting a Harley Davidson motorcycle jacket and a resolute smile, Franklin Graham takes the stage and is immediately attacked by a yellow jacket. (Go wasps!) The preacher quickly kills the insect with a [copy of the Winnipeg] Free Press and then starts preaching some of his classic tunes. “Abortion is Murder” and “Homosexuality is a Sin” garner relatively little applause. Then he starts inviting those who have sinned to come up to and repent so Jesus can give them a sponge bath and wash their souls squeaky clean. Schledewitz follows a few of them only to be stopped by Graham security. We’re not so daring to get more tape. By now, our recorder is out of juice and there would be no point. I’ve had enough from the man who, on previous occasions, wanted to nuke Afghanistan and called Islam an evil and wicked religion. “He’s giving Jesus a bad name,” I tell Geoff as we quietly exit out into the streets. God bless reality.

Please, please go visit the old bill to read about his day at Folk Fest on Saturday, when he managed to get free tickets for some of his Somali friends. The mainstage bill that day featured the Refugee All Stars of Sierra Leone (musicians who were discovered in the refugee camps, playing music on makeshift instruments) and K’naan, a Somali rapper who now lives in Ontario. His friends got to spend a lot of time with the performers, even partying with them until they had to leave the next morning!

I officially am no longer annoyed with K’naan, who showed up late to the festival and missed his first workshop and then had “no time for interviews.” Media folk like me don’t take kindly to that kind of talk, until you hear that he had no time because he was hanging out with his fellow refugees.

I’ve never in a situation like the one African immigrants face, living in a completely foreign culture. The closest I ever came was being in non-urban Germany, where very few people speak English. I found the language barrier to be unexpectedly debilitating. When I travel in English-speaking countries, I feel pretty confident about being able to find my way, but when you can’t rely on your language skills, it makes leaving the house a lot more intimidating, knowing you can’t ask for directions or read a bus schedule. So I kind of try to multiply that by a thousand to imagine what immigrants feel like when they come here from far away.

I’ve talked before about how throughout my young life, I found the spiritual, worshipful “feelings” elusive. I’ve also said that I’ve had far more religious experiences in a smoky club listening to a band or rapper as I have had in a service or a Bible study.

So when the beginning of July rolls around and with it the Winnipeg Folk Festival, I get pretty excited. I get excited knowing that I’ll get a taste of that intangible, ethereal zeitgeist that results when thousands of like-minded people gather in one place in a spirit of celebration. Ostensibly that is what one could/should get in church, but we all know it rarely works out that way.

Today I had probably the best festival day I’ve ever had. I actually hoisted myself out of bed (I was up late shaking booty to the Refugee All Stars of Sierra Leone) and arrived in time for the annual gospel workshop. “Workshops” are concerts at the festival where two, three or more artists/bands gather on the same stage, under the umbrella of some theme (some titles are “Old Songs, New Songs,” “Percussion Junction,” “One Fiddle to Rule Them All”). Ideally, the participants of the workshop will join in on harmonies and guitar parts of each others’ songs, sometimes jamming and creating entirely new tunes, or adding a bassline or a beat where otherwise there would be none.

“Working on a Building (Gospel Workshop)” featured American bluesmen the Holmes Brothers, local Mennonite bluegrass quartet House of Doc, and my personal favourite, Austin singer-songwriter/guitarist Ruthie Foster. Ruthie was raised singing and playing in the church in central Texas, and there really aren’t words to describe the magic she is on stage. Her voice is so massive and effortless, she really does merit comparisons to the great ladies of song (those comparisons are tossed around so often. This time I mean it). You listen to her voice and you just believe that everything is going to be OK. She’ll raise the roof even if there isn’t one, like at an outdoor festival when the only roof is the sky and so she’ll just raise that. In the workshop following the gospel one, she shared the stage with Bruce Cockburn and Richard Thompson and completely held her own. That’s how good she is.

She sang a song she wrote inspired by her mother, who, when Ruthie was in college, told her that education was fine but “you’ve got a soul to save.” She sang the song she sang at her grandmother’s funeral, two weeks ago. “It’s alright,” she said, “She’s fine. She’s here today… she’s everywhere.” And then she went on to sing a variation of Amazing Grace, about how God saw past her faults and saw her needs.

It’s stuff like that that can almost make a girl believe.

I mentioned Bruce Cockburn, who is well-known for being a “secular” Christian artist. I ranted and whined last week about Christian music, and Bruce indeed is one of those rare artists who manages to be Christian and also good. He sang “All the Diamonds” today, and… well, it was just really beautiful. Go read the lyrics if you’re not familiar. He also did “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” which was also beautiful.

I’m not sure what my point is here. Maybe to say that I can understand why so many people are so attached to the church, because there are so many qualities of church in a festival like this: the fellowship, the transcendence of music (which I have come to believe is inherent to music itself, in some sort of magical, unknowable way, and not at all unique to Christian musicians, as a former choir director of mine actually claimed), the knowledge that you can go to this one place and be rewarded for your efforts with this amazing feeling.

Or maybe that inspiration can be found in many places. That one woman’s voice can be a salve, just as a few lines of poetry in the Old Testament can be. That dancing in the sun is what we should have been doing all along.

technorati tags: folk, music, bruce+cockburn, ruthie+foster, christianity, religion, church

I listened to two new albums today, each in its entirety. As a result, I made two discoveries: first, that Thom Yorke’s forthcoming solo release The Eraser will indeed live up to the hype and will probably make my year-end top ten list even though I’m not much of a Radiohead-head, unlike 90% of the people everywhere.

The other discovery is that Sufjan Stevens seems to be such a prolific font of creativity that he can, one year after the release of Illinois, put out an album-length collection of outtakes from it and have it be as coherent and engaging as its predecessor, with depth of lyric and instrumentation.

Sufjan Stevens is a true anomaly. Not only because he’s in the top 10 per cent (you know, that old adage about 90% of everything being crap?) but because he’s a Christian musician whose music does not suck. There are other Christian musicians who do not suck, but they are few and far between and in some cases, such as in the case of Sufjan’s gloriously cacophonous friends Danielson, not nearly as accessible as he.

I’ve come a long way from my days surreptitiously making tapes of the local hit radio station, cowering in fear that my doing so would meet with my parents’ disapproval. The edict was more of an implied one rather than one explicit — I wasn’t supposed to listen to non-Christian music. Secular music. As I said, my parents were never so vulgar as to utter the phrase “devil’s music,” but Focus on the Family publications came awfully close, and with those I certainly was inundated — Brio magazine and then Plugged In. In the case of the former, the magazine was devoted to drilling its moral messages into our heads, issue after issue. The primary message was, of course, do not have sex or even think about sex until you’re married. The second was a concentrated dose of heteronormativity training, distilling already strict gender roles into even more confining, debilitating ones (I’ll note that the boys’ counterpart to Brio did the same thing).

Before I completely go off the rails here into a rant about Crazy Jim Dobson, I’ll digress. Now I edit an indie music magazine and that means I am a full-fledged music snob. Music snobbery is a point of much contention; I contend that there are different versions of music snobbery. One form is genre snobbery, the belief that one type of music is inherently superior to all others. I do not suffer from this affliction, and indeed I can say that I truly appreciate all genres that exist. I cannot say I enjoy all genres, though (I can really only handle one track worth of metal, and even then it has to be Sepultura). I’m just the kind of music snob who believes that most of what you hear on the local commercial radio station is crap. These days my tastes run towards experimental electronica, new weird folk, and some indie pop. Also hip hop, funk, and soul.

I fear I have failed to make anything resembling an argument towards my thesis statement. If I ever had one in the first place. Oh, right — it was Christian music sucks. Looking back at my listening habits in the ’90s there are only a few discs on which I look back with any critical approval — Jars of Clay’s self-titled debut was good (too bad very little they’ve done since has been), and dcTalk hammered out some inventive stuff as far as the Christian rap/rock genre went.

I think what it comes down to is the fact that Christian music, while only a segment of the mainstream music market, is a part of the mainstream music market. Meaning it exists to make money. And as we know, very little music in the mainstream is good; we can apply the 90/10 rule again, here. When you apply the 90/10 rule to the Christian market, which is but a smaller proportion of the mainstream market, the number of aesthetically acceptable acts dwindles to a pitiful number.

Which brings us back to Sufjan Stevens — a Christian musician who invokes the name of God and other Christian tropes in his work, and one who is also critically acclaimed (and not just by me).

In my experience, Christian music tends to spend too much time in the nebulous God-talk and not enough time in the narrative, experiential aspect that draws me to the music I love. This is where Sufjan Stevens succeeds, of course. Take, for instance, this lyric from my favourite song of last year, “Casimir Pulaski Day:”

Tuesday night at the Bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens

When I first heard that lyric, my heart nearly jumped up my throat and out of my body. Who, of we who have experienced the Tuesday night Bible study, hasn’t been there? Right there, in the moment of that lyric?

Maybe if Christian music talked more about the times when we call out to God and nothing happens, I’d take it more seriously.

Well, that and if there were more handclaps.

technorati tags: sufjan stevens, christian music

I suppose iTunes realized this week that not everyone is a music geek and spat out a random list that’s far more accessible than the last. (Read: there are seven bands/artists on this list that you have no good excuse for not recognizing!) (Unless you’ve been in the mission field, or something.)

“Alright (Blackwatch Radio Mix),” Kinnie Starr
“There Is a Light that Never Goes Out,” the Smiths
“Sing for Absolution,” Muse
“She Bop,” Cyndi Lauper
“Belleville Jungle,” Les Triplettes de Belleville
“Death to Death,” Stars
“L.O.V.E.” Frank Sinatra
“Black Math,” the White Stripes
“Transatlanticism,” Death Cab for Cutie
“Good Music,” the Roots

In other news, today I am grateful for Twisty and her principled stand against the scourge of online communication, the ellipsis. If I were a famous blogger I’d institute the same policy.

Before my engagement with the “real” blogosphere (that is, the blogosphere that is not LiveJournal and its clones), I assumed “real” bloggers did not engage in this kind of self indulgent memery. I was wrong! They do. And so, in an effort to fit in with the cool kids, so do I.

Friday Random Ten
1. Bloc Party, “Banquet (Phones Disco Edit)”
2. Ruthie Foster, “Real Love”
3. Memphis Minnie, “Ma Rainey”
4. DJ Vadim feat. Sarah Jones, “Your Revolution”
5. Joan Jett, “I Love Rock & Roll”
6. Kinnie Starr, “Cee God”
7. Son Volt, “Tear Stained Eye”
8. Magnetophone, “Rae and Suzette”
9. The VaGiants, “Alright”
10. The Hummers, “Au Feu”

It seems iTunes was feeling a bit feminist this morning and that is more than all right with me.

Can’t talk more now, have to leave for tai chi.