Monday, May 05, 2008

Boys and Girls Renounce the World

Read first.

Ok. I haven't read the book that's being reviewed and I would bet you money that I could find a million more examples to bolster his conclusions about Christianity and Pop Culture/ Christianity as Pop Culture. I'm also the last person who is going to defend sub-par reading/music just because it's Christian. But this was funny to me. I got to the punch-line of the article mocking sub-par Christian entertainment and he uses a terrible example. "You'll have to excuse us/ we're in love with Jesus" is the song cited as the Christian sub-par punk music. And yes it is sub-par. What they were doing was cutting edge for the time even if it wasn't the best punk music. It humored me that I knew immediately that this is a song off of Undercover's first and worst album. I'm surprised at using it for an example because Undercover's next two punk albums were pretty cool. And then they did "Branded" which was my favorite album in junior high though no longer "punk" and no longer "fun". The author didn't even name the band that he was mocking, which is just lazy. Nor did he mention that this is off of an album that wasn't widely distributed and therefore hardly an example of the franchising of Christianity. There are some great examples of sub-par entertainment marketed as "Christian", but he really chose the wrong band. And I'm guessing we could find some "secular" punk music from the same era that's just as poor.

3 comments:

malh said...

Blind Willie Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Just a few of the innovative Gospel artists that inspired many of the pioneers of rock music, country music, blues music....

Drrty Joe said...

I suppose if I sat here long enough I could come up with something more witty. For now, I'll just say that the author should have dug into the genre a little bit and discovered true pioneers like Petra, Whiteheart, and Geoff Moore, before making such blind assumtions about the whole state of Christian culture.
For artfully done Christian punk music, I highly recommend the band One Bad Pig. Mmmm Tasty.

linda jean said...

Whiteheart...yeah. I did visit with Geoff Moore after a concert to find out the name Lone Justice and Maria McKee. He covered one of their songs.