By Joel Hartse
I have to admit it: I’m stumped. Having spent the better part of a year in a holding pattern at the crossroads between vocation and avocation (to borrow from Robert Frost), I am confronting a number of choices that would seem to need answers if I am to get on with the work I am here to do.
To write for an academic or a popular audience? To keep writing music reviews and features or to focus wholly on sociolinguistic research? and commentary? To write for a particular religious audience or a general one?
Sooner or later, the answers will come, and I know that I will not be able to escape the charge I get from academic writing nor the one that comes from having described a particular type of amp feedback as a “wailing wall of guitars.”
But here’s what I’m genuinely confused about, one particular conundrum of the particular writing life I have been pursuing these ten-odd years: what is Christian music criticism for? And what I think I mean by Christian music criticism (though these terms are never so easily untangled) is the writing about popular music—critically, as in reviewing—that is done by people who are Christians for publications which are called Christian by those who publish them. (Image is a fine example.)
The music written about may or may not be called Christian, though it seems many would argue that anybody who is a Christian reviewing records for a Christian periodical ought to be reviewing a Christian album.
It’s the many comments on reviews for a popular Christian magazine I write for that have kept pushing me toward trying to answer this question. In recent months, they (or we , really, though I’m just a freelancer) have been reviewing a lot of records outside the evangelical Christian music subculture, and most albums reviewed which is not released by a “Contemporary Christian Music” (CCM) label are met with complaints or questions—why are they giving space to this non-Christian band? Shouldn’t a Christian magazine be featuring Christian artists? Shouldn’t Christians listen to Christian music? And variations on this theme.
A number of questions arise just as quickly from another camp: shouldn’t we just be writing about good music? Does it matter whether the songwriter ever said the sinner’s prayer? Aren’t people who make dogmatic demands of their favorite rock bands small-minded? The discourses sometimes seem to be talking past each other.
If you have read many of my previous Good Letters posts, you have travelled some of this ground with me, but instead of just complaining about the complaints, I am now looking for answers. If those of us who argue for a more robust relationship between Christian faith and the arts are looking for a way to articulate why and how Christians have a stake in popular music (or any genre, made by musicians of any or no faith) then we need something—if not a manifesto, at least an explanation—to explain why we are not compelled to write only about CCM.
We should also explain what it is we hope to accomplish by “reviewing” (a term that doesn’t sit well with me, nor, I imagine, with many well-meaning Christians who would like to avoid even the appearance of judgmentalism) pop records, why Christian publications ought to bother publishing such reviews, and what we expect readers to take away from them.
Why? Because, as naive as this may sound, we’re all in this together, and the amount of squabbling and bickering in this little corner of the Body where we care a lot about rock and roll is disheartening. I’m not expecting the faithful of the ArtsandFaith.com Music board to start writing more about Stephen Curtis Chapman, or websites like Jesus Freak Hideout to cover the new Grinderman album.
I just want to figure out what Christians who care about music are meaning to do each time we pump out 100 to 500 words about a new record, and what Christians who care about music are looking for each time we read those reviews.
I don’t have a lot of answers, though I do keep thinking of what Paul wrote to the Philippians: “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
That is pretty good advice, but I want to know how you, the writers and the readers of the blogs, websites, and magazines which still, thankfully, devote space to the intersection of faith and pop music, think it ought to be playing out.
Your second paragraph is pretty much exactly the reason I write about what I write about.