My Summer Job 11 comments

By Joel Hartse

For most of my life, I’ve never had a really fun summer job. I’ve bagged groceries, sat alone in an office and answered a rarely-called hotline, and shouted in English at Chinese schoolchildren.

But I guess I’ve finally paid enough dues, because this summer, I have decided on a new job, and one that I really like—writing about weird Christian music.

This summer job does not pay all that well, but maybe for the first time in my life it is one I actually want to do. I’ve gotten paid to write before, and sometimes, even paid to write about stuff I was actually interested in, but quite a bit of the music-related writing I’ve done over the last decade or so has been either for very little money (I did naively believe, for a while, the questionable notion that one ought to write for free for a while as a way of “getting your name out there”), or about music that didn’t do all that much for me (I wrote two articles a week for a daily newspaper in a tiny town whose music scene was heavy on hippie jam bands).

What’s the plan? As I’ve mentioned before, I am always interested in unusual collisions of rock and religion, but I have been living outside the U.S. for two years (I’m writing this on a flight from Shanghai to San Francisco) and I’m not entirely sure what has been going on here vis-à-vis the kind of music that moves me the most.

My idea, then, is to investigate what is happening outside the Christian Music Machine, away from the world of major labels and megachurches.

I recently read an article which explored whether the contemporary Christian music industry would be able to “survive” the current economic crisis. My first reaction—I admit I’m a cynic—was “man, I sure hope not.” If it’s going to take a few record label executives losing their jobs in order to break up the Jesus + Coldplay + Money formula that reigns in that sphere, well, that’s maybe for a greater good. In any case, cracks in the CCM edifice have been emerging for a while now, and it seems as good a time as any to explore the flip side.

I’ve got a few ideas: I’m looking at a social network of outsider worship musicians, Love is Concrete; a new gospel record label started by the squeaky boy genius Daniel Smith (of the Danielson Famile); archival recordings by a Jesus Freak commune in Northern California; the renewed interest in the long-dead singer/songwriter Judee Sill, a drug addict who wrote achingly beautiful and sensual songs about God; and a new album by the most innovative (if occasionally unlistenable) band I have ever heard, Soul-Junk.

These are just a few things I know a little about now. I want to unearth these strange jewels and share them with a lot of people who I think would be—to use the evangelical vernacular—blessed by it. I also hope that learning about alternative models of Christian music, based more concretely in faith, hope, and love than in the music business, will inspire and encourage people (us, you, me) to do our own things in new ways, to sing our own new songs.

Let me end, then, with a plea: tell me what your ears are hearing. Where are the bands, the communities, the churches, the individuals doing weird and wonderful things with modern music and faith?

Let’s move past the now-clichés that we tell ourselves are innovative--U2 songs in sanctuaries, or “cool” Christian bands “crossing over” from major Christian record labels owned by EMI to major not-Christian record labels owned by EMI. This is my job for the next two months: to dig out the raw and weird, the new songs and the poplife abundant, dark, strange, and lovely, that doesn’t get enough ink.

Help me out.