The best Christian metal/rock album of the decade?

Greatape

Philly_Q said:

english_bob said:

Philly_Q said:

  I'd hope that musicians I like - Trouble, King's X, Kerry Livgren, even Dave Ellefson and the aforementioned Rex Carroll - aren't the kind of Christians who are homophobic or anti-abortion.  But I don't know.

I know that King's X deliberately distanced themselves from the "Christian rock" tag, and as far as I know Dug Pinnick doesn't consider himself a Christian any more. He came out in 1998 so I doubt he's homophobic.

Yeah, I know, but I didn't want to make my post any more convoluted than it already was!    I think Ty Tabor may still identify as Christian and I'd like to think if he is, he's one of the "good" ones.

I have a horrible suspicion that 'Legal Kill' is about abortion. 

Greatape

fretmeister said:

Televangelist Kenneth Copeland....

He's quite angry. 

xscaramanga

fretmeister said:

Televangelist Kenneth Copeland....

Was coming here to post this! If that guy made a whole

 record of this, it would indeed be the best Christian rock album of the decade. 

@english_bob ;said:

(Fretboard won't let me type below the quote so I'll reply here)

Good points here (and apologies to OP for causing this total thread derail). I think it's even more complex again, actually. No small section of the audience for Christian rock are teenagers like I was, who weren't allowed to listen to the mainstream rock we really wanted to listen to. We were grateful for whatever we could get, and also pretty ignorant. I'd never heard Guns n' Roses, but I was sure I would like them because I liked Bride, who were marketed as the Christian Guns n' Roses. 

Now I was a total zealot and would absolutely have boycotted a band for swearing or endorsing a doctrine I didn't like. Tourniquet criticised Kenneth Copeland in a song and I stopped listening to them (it's all very Judean People's Front). But lots of the audience for Christian rock was essentially captive. Maybe they cared about the bands' lyrics and lifestyles, maybe they didn't. It's leaders within the churches who hold a great deal of sway, because they were the ones that would be leading the burnings if you were deemed heretical.

Then again, when I spent a summer with a church youth group in smalltown Missouri in 2000, one of the kids had just destroyed his Creed collection after concluding they weren't true Christians, and the rest of them were debating if it was still OK to own MxPx albums because of a rumour that one of them had said 'piss' in a radio interview in Florida. Don't underestimate the young radicals.

But you're right about the artists feeling restricted. I remember an Amy Grant quote about how when people were passing joints at parties, no one ever offered her one.

It's fundamentally the least rock n' roll thing ever. 

As for @Grumpyrocker 's point about people being glad to make a living, I do wonder how much money they can possibly have made. Some of the albums I grew up on are really well produced, mastered by people like George Marino and Bob Ludwig, photos by Neil Zlozower, all the trappings of a big major label release, but apart from Petra and Stryper none of them ever sold in numbers. Knowing how record deals are structured, the labels would have been making money, but the artists must have been scraping by. 

But Grumpyrocker reminds me of a part in Butch Walker's autobiography where he had the chance to join a Christian rock band on tour and almost did because he was so desperate to leave his smalltown home and play. If he'd done it, the rest of his career since would probably have been impossible.

I think it's probably slightly more complex than that. I think the reason there was ever a "Christian music" market at all (for pop and rock music I mean, not for music to sing communally in church services) was the Evangelical church in the US, and the stuff it preached about being separate from secular culture. You get a whole parallel system of music production and distribution, selling products from Christian record labels through Christian bookshops to a Christian audience made up mostly of people who believe in a very conservative, very proscriptive version of Christianity with its own set of in-group signifiers that need to be there in the music to prove the artist is "one of us". Less conservative strands of Christianity don't have the same strong feeling about shunning everything secular, so they're less likely to be very interested in Christian music, so they don't need to be catered for.

You end up with the situation that existed in the 90s, where bands whose members are Christians, and whose lyrical themes are Christian want to be professional musicians. Mainstream labels won't touch them because they're a bit *too* Christian, but the Christian labels need them to tick all the right boxes in order to appeal to their conservative Evangelical market. This might mean going full-out with songs about how Catholics aren't Christians or everyone's going to hell if they don't stop having any fun, or it might just mean *not* saying certain things, not writing songs that don't directly address some aspect of faith, or not taking a position on an issue that goes counter to the accepted line. And they don't fuck about either-  I've known of Christian artists who were cancelled before it was even a thing, simply for having a swear word on an album, or an extramarital affair, or coming out. All the albums come off the shelves of the Christian stores, the gigs get cancelled and it's game over. There might be a way back from marital infidelity for an artist, but once you're out as gay you're dead to them.

So it's not necessarily the artists who are pushing the agenda (although I'm sure plenty of them do), it's the audience.

Grumpyrocker

jonnyscaramanga said:

SNIP: lots of great stuff.

That's a great post. I moved in quite a fundy crown at Uni - but compared to the sort of American Evangelical stuff you describe it was hardly anything really. I never came across Christian in the UK - even the young fundies - that separated themselves form the rest of the world in terms of movies, music etc. There were some that mostly listened to Christian music, but they were few and far between. And I remember us jamming on stuff like Mustang Sally and the like in rehearsals. 

I had fun playing with the band despite me not being into most of the songs. My sub-par shredding was what they were after,(the worship leader knew his limits as an acoustic strummer) and once I was slotted in they quickly added a drummer and a brilliant sax player. And so sometimes we'd end up doing blues call and response stuff between sax and guitar and having a good old jam during our performances (ahem worship meetings). 

I did know some American Christians at uni who had awful views on stuff such as Catholicism. But again, not many, I suppose the real hard core were less likely to come to the UK. I knew one British girl who married an American, and they ended up doing Missionary work in Europe because over here were were supposedly so swimming in the sins of things like tolerance of other faiths and sexualities. There's some really bonkers stuff across the pond. 

Philly_Q

Grumpyrocker said:

And I remember us jamming on stuff like Mustang Sally and the like in rehearsals. 

Blimey, sorry to hear that.  Glad you managed to get out.

Grumpyrocker

Philly_Q said:

Grumpyrocker said:

And I remember us jamming on stuff like Mustang Sally and the like in rehearsals. 

Blimey, sorry to hear that.  Glad you managed to get out.

Oh come on, it's good fun when you've got a great vocalist. And we had some cracking singers. 

Greatape

I was working in an Our Price (remember them?) when a Delirious cd came out. There was a steady stream of creepy young people buying multiple copies, all with a facial expression somewhere between a beautific smile and a maniacal grin. 

Oh, and the record was fucking awful. 

xscaramanga

Greatape said:

I was working in an Our Price (remember them?) when a Delirious cd came out. There was a steady stream of creepy young people buying multiple copies, all with a facial expression somewhere between a beautific smile and a maniacal grin. 

Oh, and the record was fucking awful. 

I remember that! When Deeper was charting in the Top 40. They were big with the Evangelical Anglican crowd, a bit more mainstream than the utter extremists I was with (all in the UK by the way, we do have them here). I was visiting an Anglican youth group and the youth leader stood at the front and told everyone to go and buy several copies so the single would go up in the charts.

As I understand it, charts weren't calculated on every sale in those days because they couldn't be tabulated fast enough. It was a random sample of particular stores that were asked to report. So chances are they were all wasting their money. In more ways than one. 

english_bob

To give them their due, Delirious? were several steps ahead of most of the other Christian bands who came before. 

Yeah, it was that bad.

jonnyscaramanga said:
a bit more mainstream than the utter extremists I was with (all in the UK by the way, we do have them here).

Oh yes. My wife works at an independent Christian school that appointed a new head over the summer with US-style extreme conservative views to go with the head of governors, who is cut from the same cloth. The stories she comes home with- a perfect blend of abuse of the Bible, authoritarianism and professional incompetence are fucking batshit crazy. Sad, because the previous head was a personal friend, far more moderate in his views and, crucially, actually capable of doing his job, and she has a ringside seat to the destruction of everything he built.

Surfmonkey77

Does Times of Grace - The Hymn of a Broken Man count? I loved that album, a follow up is on the horizon I hear.....