The First Five Non-Christian Records I Ever Owned 11 comments

For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading through the final pages (finally!) of my upcoming book Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll, which is a collection of essays about faith and popular music, mostly in the 1990s, and the musical twists and turns life (mine and others’) has taken since then.

For the most part, I listened to Christian rock music in the early part of the 90’s, but eventually, I started exploring “secular” music with embarrassingly milquetoasty gateway albums. This was a struggle for me at first—I truly believed that, as a young evangelical Christian, there was something dangerous and worldly about pop music—but the five records listed below were albums that put me on the path to pop obsession I’ve been on ever since.

1. Genesis—We Can’t Dance. I’d like this one not to count, because my pop culture brain wasn’t fully formed yet. Nevertheless, Genesis’ We Can’t Dance was technically the first pop album I ever bought, which is a weird choice for an eleven year old kid to make when there were artists like Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer in the world. I would maybe allow the purchase of a Genesis album to be cool if the year had been 1980 and not 1991, but in the end, I’m the one who bought it. At Target. The album sat uncomfortably on my bedroom shelf next to my Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith cassettes, and ominously contained a satire of televangelists called “Jesus He Knows Me.” Slight guilt while listening, though deep down I knew it wasn’t making fun of Jesus himself.

2. Sarah McLachlan—Surfacing. I almost did not buy this record, mostly due to the presence of the All Time Worst Word in the World Beginning with F in the World on the first track, “Building a Mystery.” (While I am admitting prudish realities of my teenage years, I will also go ahead and point out that I never saw an R-rated film until I was seventeen. Happy now?) Despite its Lilith-Fair namby-pamby-ness, Surfacing remains a solid record with some great pop songwriting on it—the melody on “Adia” alone is worth the price.

3. Me First and the Gimmee Gimmees—Have a Ball. Christian rock in the 90s was somewhat fanatically obsessed with genre. My favorite Christian punk band, MxPx, sang about Jesus, but also about how great it was to go to a “Punk Rawk Show,” and voila, punk rock was reverse-baptized! It became OK to listen to bands that influenced or toured with Christian punk bands: the Descendents, Sex Pistols, NOFX. I decided it would be OK to get a Me First record, since it was all covers of oldies, which were so safe as to be practically Christian anyway. Nevermind the fact that this band’s material was obviously recorded while drunk, and that they often added an impromptu cadenza of shouted profanities at the end of each song. Considering the person I am today, I am surprised and amused that I used to like this, and that this band still exists.

4. Five For Fighting—Message for Albert. I need to make this perfectly clear: I do not like that “it’s not easy to be me” song about Superman. I have no idea what happened between this album and adult contemporary act the band became, but Message for Albert was a great album that nobody ever heard. The single “Bella’s Birthday Cake” was like Ben Folds Five with Flaming Lips guitars, and there were tasteful piano ballads and perfect melodies and harmonies. And there was nothing about Superman on it.

5. Superdrag—Regretfully Yours. Superdrag’s first single, “Sucked Out,” is hands down the best disposable powerpop single of the 1990s, and the whole album, from the LP-era aesthetics to the honest, scratchy vocals, was just plain classy. The moral dilemma here was with “What if You Don’t Fly,” the only remotely theological song in the bunch: the song timidly—quite timidly—suggests that maybe there isn’t a Heaven, or at least maybe that the addressee isn’t going to go there (“cause when you die / whoa, what if you don’t fly?”). Ten years later, John Davis, who wrote that song, had a Damascus moment, converted to pretty hardcore evangelical Christianity, put out a few religious solo albums, and eventually, as a Christian, reformed Superdrag. So, note to sixteen-year-old self: don’t worry about it.