Posts tagged "Christian Rock"
The Only Excellence-Proofed Musical Genre (You Guessed It)
Music / Religion

The Only Excellence-Proofed Musical Genre (You Guessed It)

by David Zahl on Feb 1, 2012 • 2 Comments

Another brilliant passage from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay about his experience at the Creation (Christian Rock) festival, “Upon This Rock,” which can be found in his highly recommended recent collection Pulphead. Don’t think I’ve ever heard the CCM conundrum expressed so precisely or matter of factly, i.e. most such takedowns tend to be gleeful exercises in reaction that fail to understand the fundamental premises at work:

The fact that I didn’t think I heard a single interesting bar of music from the forty or so acts I caught or overheard at Creation shouldn’t be read as a knock on the acts…

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High-School Jesus Phases and Doubts About One’s Doubts
Literature / Religion

High-School Jesus Phases and Doubts About One’s Doubts

by David Zahl on Jan 17, 2012 • 3 Comments

How to create a Pavlovian response in yours truly: 1. Produce extended, compassionate essays on Michael Jackson and Axl Rose. 2. Let it slip that you were raised Episcopalian. 3. Prompt a number of your colleagues to compare you with David Foster Wallace, going so far as to proclaim you his literary heir. 4. Write an extremely funny and not entirely unsympathetic article about a Christian Rock festival. This is what John Jeremiah Sullivan has done in the past few years.

I remember reading his piece on the initial GNR comeback shows in 2006 and thinking it was the best writing…

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Humor / Religion

Jesus Is Like A Mountie

by David Zahl on Sep 4, 2008 • 10 Comments

Further proof that when it comes to kitsch, no one does it better than Christians! And I mean that in an affectionate way – if we can’t laugh at ourselves…:

Not to be outdone:

Mbird-Approved Christian Rock
Music / Playlist / Religion

Mbird-Approved Christian Rock

by David Zahl on May 20, 2008 • 7 Comments

As promised, here’s my stab at a playlist of legitimately great Christian rock songs, in response to the one Daniel Radosh posted on the NY Times blog. The criteria I used were:

1. The song had to be something that could honestly be called Christian Rock. Clearly, tons of “secular” music references Jesus, and huge amounts of it deal with Christian themes, sometimes very explicitly. But we wouldn’t call those songs Christian Rock (that’s a playlist for another day). At the same time, by Christian Rock I don’t necessarily mean CCM (Christian Contemporary Music), which is what you hear on the…

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Music / Religion

Rapture Ready-Approved Christian Rock

by David Zahl on May 15, 2008 • 1 Comment

As a follow-up to Aaron’s excellent post the other day, William Writes alerted me that Daniel Radosh, author of Rapture Ready, recently posted an annotated playlist of his favorite Christian rock songs on the NY Times blog. His introduction was particularly good:

“This is a list of 10 great Christian rock songs. Really. I know what you’re thinking. I’m a secular Jew who always took it for granted that Christian rock stinks. Indeed, until a couple of years ago I knew virtually nothing about Christian rock except that it stinks. But after spending time inside the “evangelical bubble” I had to…

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