What Am I Supposed to Do About it Now? 6 comments

By Joel Hartse

Jennifer Knapp played a show in my hometown last week. I have been sitting in front of the computer for about two hours because I’m not sure what I should write about that. I keep assuming that I ought to say something about Knapp, since the story unfolding around her during the past few weeks (her disappearance from Christian music, her sudden return, her coming out as a lesbian, her upcoming release of a “mainstream”/ “non-Christian” album, and the subsequent controversy) pushes almost all of my buttons as a fan of music, a writer, and a post- / maybe present-evangelical Christian in North America.

Unfortunately for me (and everyone), every angle of this story has already been covered, quickly, shoddily, and with very little thought to the actual music Jennifer Knapp has made and is making.

Christopher Weingarten, in his second delightfully vulgar excoriation of online music journalism in as many years, recently decried internet music writers’ addiction to being “first” with exclusives about bands. It’s the same with thinkpieces now, and everybody has already pounced: we’ve seen rants on such time-honored topics as Love the Sinner Hate the Sin, Christians Are Stupid and Wrong about Everything, Homosexuality Is Unnatural, Hooray for Gay Christians, You Can’t Be Gay and Christian, Hey Guys Let’s Not Be Judgmental (and its corollary, It’s My God-Given Right to Speak the Truth in Love), You Can Be Gay or Christian But Not Both, I Will No Longer Listen to Jennifer Knapp, and I Will Go Out and Buy a Jennifer Knapp Record ASAP.

I (sort of) joke; I also think that that string of words signifying vague pronouncements and long-entrenched moral and political battles will cause many a Googler to end up reading what I am typing right now.

The sad truth is that Jennifer Knapp’s music—which has, as far as I can tell, always been beautiful, honest, and heartfelt—suddenly matters less than it used to for a lot of people, because the orbit of ideological, political, theological, and moral issues spinning around her is starting to matter to them/us more.

Things will quiet down in time. Christian music has weathered Amy Grant’s divorce, Michael English’s affair, and Scott Stapp’s existence. All that has been proven, thankfully, is the vapidity of contemporary Christian music culture and its desperate keeping up of appearances, as each scandal exposes the vast gulf between CCM’s entertainment-money-ideology complex and the Christian faith itself.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Just because I don’t like CCM doesn’t mean it has no right to exist. After all, it produced Jennifer Knapp, her soul-shaking voice and desperately devoted lyrics. I saw her play once, and although I wasn’t paying much attention, I could tell she was the rare musician who cannot help but do what she does—do you know what I mean? Have you seen those guitarists or pianists or singers whose bodies uncontrollably move as the music comes out of them, how they twitch and turn, appearing to be in pain or ecstasy?

After the scandal broke, I looked up some of Knapp’s recent performances on YouTube. I was struck by this performance of “Fall Down” and haunted by its refrain, which Knapp sings with her whole body: “What am I supposed to do about it now?”

“Fall Down” was written years ago, and it would be easy enough to give it a new reading in light of recent events—“this week, this is my favorite song,” is Knapp’s introduction to the performance, given in the thick of a media frenzy. But the answer to the question in her song is the song itself, whenever it was written, wherever it is sung.

There are people who are made to make music, whose longing, pain, sin, and regret, whose joy, love, hope, and faith, become songs that allow some of the rest of us to make it through.

Jennifer Knapp is one of those people. That is one thing I’m sure about.