Oh that you were like a brother to me
Who nursed at my mother’s breasts.
If I found you outdoors, I would kiss you;
No one would despise me, either.
I think it is fair to say that very few things have such an eternal & unbreakable connection with all things spiritual than music. At its most rooted, basic moments, music was the fruit of the religious womb, so to say. It began in the steeples, with songs of devotion & praise & mourning. The dawn of man is itself very deeply entrenched in religion, & truly it does not surprise me in the least that music would follow in that route quite closely. Thus, for me to say that I am going to devote one blog post to the historical connection of the spiritual & the musical…that is just too ludicrous for me to think about. Instead, this post – part 2 in the 3-part series of religion’s influences & structures in three separate media – is going to focus on the current spaces that religion occupies in the musical world. Touching for just a little while on an old devotional/spiritual number (& that is only because I love it & you deserve to hear it), this is mostly going to be about modern Christian-influenced artists & song structures.
The idea behind this, I also want to point out quickly, is not to play around with WOW Worship artists. That is boring even to ponder, & not even I would want to read about it (much less write about it). Everyone knows that “Awesome God” & “Lord I Lift Your Name On High” are covered by 30 different pop-Christian artists each year, there is no point in touching upon that here. This post, then, is dedicated to people who are taking the CCM musical aesthetic & completely re-thinking everything it used to stand for. This post is to prove that there is good Christian-influenced music out there. & if you think I am wrong, if you think I cannot possibly be telling the truth, just stick with me, please.
Also, one more thing before I just shut up with the foreplay & begin. I realize this is not entirely consistent with my own original idea for this trio of posts. I realize this does not deal with spirituality as a whole, & is just focusing on Christian influences. I realize all this. I do not mind, really, that it is turning out this way. You shouldn’t either.
I want to kick things off with the spiritual number I mentioned earlier in passing. The song “There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down” was one that I first heard on the Goodbye, Babylon boxset – a cedar box with pieces of cotton stuffed inside & a booklet as thick as a Stephen King novel, five discs of incredibly uplifting & thought provoking gospel music & one disc of blood-thumping sermons. Buy this boxset, buy it now. Regardless: the song in question was written & originally performed by Brother Claude Ely from Lee County, Virginia (down home boy!). He was a Pentecostal preacher with a very strong sense of revival & a grip on what it takes to rattle the congregation’s emotions. “There Ain’t No Grave” was recorded in an Appalachian Kentucky church, & it is one of the most tense songs you are likely to hear concerning the Christian belief system. It is loud, chaotic, completely erratic, & simply amazing. The final verse especially, stick it out to the final verse…the shouting, the clapping, the “yessuh!”s.
Shoot ahead fifty years, & the revivalist idea is still ever-present in modern music today. The idea behind this style of music in the spiritual sense is the same idea Jonathan Edwards was using when he delivered “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to the puritan mass. To insert a sermon with strong emotional conviction into a song is to incite the listener to experience such an onslaught of direction & commandment that he is hastened to rethink the way he lives without realizing. It is almost as if the musician is performing the opposite of the subliminal message, “Revolution 9” played backwards & all that: the idea is to be so forward, so direct, that the listener is trapped into action. On that note, the Danielson Famile is a band formed by Daniel Smith’s senior thesis project at Rutgers. It involves Daniel playing with his brothers & sisters, & eventually, as the band progressed, his wife & daughter & his brothers’ & sisters’ husbands & wives. The music is like a carnival show of Biblical intrusions & reprimands, Daniel himself squealing directives to the audience in an attempt to both convert everyone involved & provide severe entertainment with his chorus of handclaps & girlish echoes. Here: “Btwn. the Lines of the Scout Sign.” You will understand –
(I apologize, it gets cut off right at the end for some reason. Whatever, you get the point.)
Danielson Famile, for me, is the perfect portrait of what the Christian music scene should sound like. It is honest, completely estranged from the rest of the musical world, & works toward a sound so unique that it draws in a huge fanbase of underground indie kids without alienating too many just because of the lyrics. The concept works because it is so grassroots: it is one college kid who roped his family into playing his songs with him. None of them really knew what they were doing, or really how to play their instruments, but they did it because they were family & they had nothing much better to do. & when you make music with as little pretensions as this (by now the band has kind of moved way past the original concept & is making overblown music with very little of the original DIY feel or purely, oddly divine lyrical know-how), it is bound to be full of the artist’s soul. I can write a whole blog post about this band. Maybe I will. If you want to really learn about the family, I suggest Danielson: A Family Movie. Okay, moving on now.
On the opposite end of the CCM spectrum sits music that is made with the intent of pleasing the artist, with very little pretensions to conversion of the audience. The best example I can think to give of this is Anathallo‘s earlier work. The music is relatively epic & progressive, oftentimes building in layers to represent in some way, some form of the Christian experience. The message is spiritual in the sense that it is devoted to an artistic analysis of Biblical scripture. The similarities between Danielson Famile & Anathallo lie in the coalescing of a large group of people into a studio to form a concrete sound. Anathallo as a band has grown & grown over the years, adding a French horn player here, a glockenspielest there, & the songs tend to rise & fall & rise & fall again, much like sea sickness. From their album Sparrows, here is “A Song for Christine.” (More handclaps! What is it with alternative Christian artists & handclaps? Must be something divinely possessed.)
For those obsessed with the music’s message: the lyrics.
Finally, because I fear for this post going on forever, I present Half-handed Cloud, a solo multi-instrumentalist who makes some of the most literate Biblical music out there. The album Thy is a Word & Feet Need Lamps especially is a collection of songs stripping stories from the Old Testament as if there were no tomorrow. Each tale requires you to open your Bible & investigate the characters & the plotlines, like a running mystery novel. Most of the songs run no longer than a minute, & are meant to educate or elucidate rather than simply show praise or strength of conversion. & to uncover a mystery of my own, I will tell you that the inspiration for this entire blog comes from “Jael Peg Caper,” a 60 second song based on the story of Jael from the Book of Judges. You may recognize a steadfast saying of my own in the lyrics there…
There is so much more I could give you here, so much more light to be shed on the Christian music scene (& so little that I have uncovered, or even want to uncover). But for now, this is what you receive. Music & religion, they have a history unlike any other, & the strength of the current scene both popular & independent of the 200,000 crowd WOW Worship concerts is evident of its refusal to go away. For better or for worse.