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.
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