An Origin Story
[Note: This is a longer version of the genesis of God Rock, Inc., as told in the book’s introduction.]
The Mall family at church
I was first introduced to Christian rock in the early 1990s. My parents are devout Christians, themselves the children of ministers, who met while students at a small Baptist college in West Texas. My father later attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth; after he was ordained, he worked for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Home Mission Board (now the North American Mission Board) directing an office that ministered to the diplomatic community in New York City. During my childhood we attended a white Southern Baptist church in suburban northern New Jersey, usually going three times a week. Our family’s social life revolved around the church and my dad’s missions work: weekly services, Bible studies, social events, monthly potlucks, hosting international diplomats for holidays, weekend retreats, regular Saturday drives into New York to feed the homeless in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park, Vacation Bible School (a week-long summer camp held at church), and even a few concerts.
I was in middle school in the early ’90s, discovering pop music through Top 40 radio (mostly New York’s Z100). As the oldest of four children I had no big brother or sister to introduce me to cooler music. Neither of my parents listened to music very much; aside from a copy of Abbey Road and a few LPs by The Imperials, a Southern gospel quartet, they had little in the way of a record collection for me to plunder. But they humored my interest in music: they bought my first saxophone in fourth grade and my first guitar in ninth grade, enrolled me in band camp for a few summers and drove me to competitions, and we tuned into the Top 40 countdown radio shows hosted by Shadoe Stevens and Rick Dees on our drives to and from church every Sunday. They were also concerned about some of the music to which I was listening; my dad once confiscated my dubbed cassette copies of Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion albums. The youth ministers at church taught us that it was sinful to idolize and listen to musicians who, judging by their lyrics and lifestyle choices (drug and alcohol abuse, extra-marital sex, rebelling against authority), so clearly held God and Christianity in contempt. For several years as a teenager, a highlight of the summer was our church youth group’s week-long trip to Centrifuge, a Southern Baptist summer camp. One year I returned from Centrifuge so convicted about the wrongness of listening to secular rock and roll that the following Sunday I made a tearful public commitment in front of the entire church congregation only to listen to Christian rock.
Where does a middle schooler find Christian rock in North Jersey? The Sam Goody in our local mall carried some gospel music but nothing that sounded like the rock music I enjoyed hearing on the radio. Instead, my parents took me to the local Christian bookstore a couple of towns over, a franchise of the Family Bookstores chain. Christian bookstores carry more than books and Bibles; they are essentially small department stores, also selling clothes, gifts, home décor, jewelry, music, and stationary. The music section always had a “recommended if you like” sign that suggested Christian artists who purportedly sounded similar to specific contemporary Top 40 artists. Among others, I bought cassettes by DeGarmo & Key, Recon, White Heart, and Petra, whose 1990 album Beyond Belief quickly became a favorite. I got my first CD player as a birthday present in July, 1992, and although my first two CDs were not Christian (Nelson’s After the Rain and R.E.M.’s Out of Time), I did buy several Christian CDs in the coming months: DC Talk’s Nu Thang and Free at Last, Amy Grant’s Heart in Motion, Michael W. Smith’s Change Your World, and Petra’s two-disc career retrospective War & Remembrance. Our church sometimes hosted concerts, such as Steven Curtis Chapman touring in support of his 1992 album The Great Adventure. And in 1993, my mom took me to my first major concert when we went with a group of other churchmembers to see Michael W. Smith’s Change Your World tour, with Christian hip hop group DC Talk as the opening act. Smith’s early song “Friends,” which has soundtracked countless high school graduation videos, was a crowd favorite that prompted a theater-wide sing-along. It was heavenly.
I have a confession to make: for many years, I never told people that my first concert was DC Talk and Michael W. Smith. Instead, throughout my adolescence and adulthood, I almost always singled out Lollapalooza 1994 as my first concert event. The summer after ninth grade my mom drove me and three church friends to the old Downing Stadium on Randalls Island in New York. The main stage lineup was awesome: Green Day, L7, Nick Cave, A Tribe Called Quest, The Breeders, George Clinton and P-Funk, the Beastie Boys, and The Smashing Pumpkins. It rained most of the day and we were miserable; the only shelter was the open-air concourse under the stadium seats, but the pot smoking really bothered my mom; we left early and I did not attend Lollapalooza again until it re-launched as a destination festival in Chicago in 2005. But I was hooked, and despite my earlier commitment to stop listening to secular music, in high school I listened to less and less Christian music. I became quite a passionate fan of masculine hard rock: Metallica, Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Weezer, and many others were favorites. I started digging into classic rock, buying LPs at garage sales that my youth ministers had explicitly warned me against: AC/DC, Ozzy-era Black Sabbath, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd. I went to arena concerts at the Meadowlands, Madison Square Garden, the Garden State Arts Center (now the PNC Bank Arts Center), and elsewhere. Perhaps most significantly, I discovered the DIY punk and hardcore scene and went to local shows almost weekly at American Legion and Knights of Columbus halls, a local teen club, and punk houses to see bands like Bigwig, The Bouncing Souls, Lifetime, and 25 Ta Life.
I knew about Christian punk bands like Audio Adrenaline, MxPx, and One Bad Pig from our youth ministers’ and the Christian bookstore’s recommendations, but it was too little, too late. One year in high school, on New Years’ Eve, I took my girlfriend (who was not a churchgoer), her brother, and her best friend to see Jars of Clay play at a local church. They’re an acoustic rock group whose crossover single “Flood” climbed the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1996, peaking at #37. But the four of us were not impressed — Jars of Clay could never really measure up to the first concert we attended together, Nine Inch Nails opening for David Bowie’s Outside tour in 1995, nor the local punk and hardcore shows we went to regularly — and I did not listen to Christian rock again. I kept attending Sunday morning worship services with my family throughout high school, but my extra-curricular activities and after-school job usually prevented me from going to church on Sunday evenings or during the week. After I moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for my freshman year of college at Lehigh University in 1997, I tried the worship services at the campus chapel, but soon enough I stopped attending church entirely. I majored in music and computer science, regularly drove to shows with friends, and worked at a local CD and record store. I told anyone who asked that I was agnostic, but in truth I was ambivalent: church and the Christian faith no longer held important places in my life.
I have another confession to make: I did not set out on this project because of some half-remembered Michael W. Smith concert from my adolescence. The truth is that when I started graduate school I really wanted to write about underground rock, like the DIY shows I had been going to since high school, and I intended to include Christian punk only after my youngest sister Esther introduced me to some of the bands she had started listening to in the early aughts. We are eight years apart, and she was just a kid who turned eleven years old two weeks before I left home for my freshman year at Lehigh. My parents and siblings moved to suburban northern Illinois that December, and visiting them in their new house never felt like returning home. My trips became fewer and shorter — one week around Christmas, another near my birthday in July — and I spent most of my school breaks during those years with my girlfriend’s family in North Jersey or, after we broke up, with my housemates in Bethlehem. But when I did visit my family, I brought a huge pile of CDs with me, mostly the emo, indie, and punk rock I cherished at the time. Esther remembers digging through my music collection as a child, and as she later developed her own tastes we found common musical ground (Jets to Brazil’s Orange Rhyming Dictionary was a shared favorite). She started going to local shows in high school, just as I had many years earlier, and she was excited to tell me about those experiences. Back in Bethlehem, I was going to shows and concerts with my friends three or four times each week, driving down to Philadelphia or up to Scranton and Wilkes-Barre; out to New York, Hoboken, or the Jersey suburbs; and around the local Lehigh Valley scene in Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton.
Esther’s favorite heavy Christian songs include:
UnderOath, “Reinventing Your Exit” (from 2004’s They’re Only Chasing Safety): From their second album when they experienced some changes, this album is an upgrade from the first. Aaron’s vocals in this particular song are a crowd pleaser, not to mention he’s the drummer! It’s quite the experience to see him live.
Project 86, “Me Against Me” (from 2000’s Drawing Black Lines): I remember owning this album, I don’t know what drew me to them. Listening to it now, they sound rather “preachy” or authoritative. Maybe I needed that at the time.
Still Remains, “White Walls” (from 2005’s Of Love and Lunacy): These guys toured with Haste the Day early on, even before their first album. They followed the trend of having a vocalist help draw the crowd into harmony.
As I Lay Dying, “Forever” (from 2003’s Frail Words Collapse): Kind of like Project 86, I can’t articulate exactly why, but these guys are fun and fast. Listening to them and Haste the Day back to back you can hear their influence on other bands.
Haste the Day, “Closest Thing to Closure” (from 2004’s Burning Bridges): The break in screams and harmony cracks me up because Jimmy Ryan sounds so awkward. Asking me to pick a favorite Haste the Day song is hard. Their debut EP isn’t streamable, so I picked something from their first album from 2004. If you get your hands on the actual sleeve you’ll find my name in the Thank Yous. These guys hold a special place in my past. It’s layered. (“Blue 42” was always a crowd pleaser.)
The Juliana Theory, Emery, Anberlin — Let’s not forget them! Not metal but such an influence during the same time.
During a road trip to Michigan with my family during the summer of 2003, Esther told me about a youth club she had been going to for several years called Souled Out. At Souled Out, she found a supportive community separate from our family in much the same way that I had at college. Central to that community were frequent emo, hardcore, metalcore, punk, and ska shows held at Souled Out. As Esther talked while we drove to Michigan, I gradually realized that she and I shared much of what we valued about being a part of a music community: the fact that artists (especially indie artists) were normal, approachable people with aspirations and fears, successes and failures, just like their fans, and that scenes both lived and died on their members’ collective energy and engaged participation. I had missed much of Esther’s teenage years while attending college and then two masters programs, but even though we did not know each other very well, she and I bonded over music in a way that transcended the difference in our ages and our relative absence from each other’s lives. I had played her Death Cab for Cutie, Jimmy Eat World, Modest Mouse, The Promise Ring, and Rainer Maria; now she introduced me to As I Lay Dying, Haste the Day, Project 86, Still Remains, and UnderOath, and told me about Cornerstone Festival, the Christian rock festival in rural Western Illinois that was a mecca of sorts for subcultural Christians.
I had never encountered indie or DIY Christian bands before, and the fact that these artists were Christian seemed simultaneously unextraordinary and incredibly significant. Esther’s interest piqued my interest, and I initially set out to interrogate what, to me, seemed to be an obvious cognitive dissonance: how do artists and fans involved in Christian rock reconcile the conformity that evangelical Christianity — both as a faith and as a culture — demands with the resistance that hardcore, metal, and punk articulate? Their faith was a given, taken for granted, an implicit (if expected) component of their identity inseparable from the music they made, which — more often than not — did not praise or preach or proselytize like the music of the Christian artists I had listened to as a younger teenager. They were often signed to independent labels (like Facedown, Pluto, Takehold, and Tooth & Nail affiliate Solid State) that were relatively unaffiliated with the major Christian record companies; they toured a network of underground and DIY coffeeshops, clubs (like Souled Out), and house venues. Before we carried our social networks in pocket-sized supercomputers, fans learned about these bands through word-of-mouth, online bulletin boards, and print fanzines like Heaven’s Metal (later HM Magazine), Radically Saved, and White Throne.
The parallels between the Christian and non-Christian hardcore, indie, metal, and punk DIY scenes are unmistakable, and the shared affinities for DIY and anti-mainstream ethics often trump differences in faith identities to enable intersections and overlaps between the Christian and non-Christian underground rock markets. That said, even if a common Christian faith was a given at Souled Out and in the larger networks of Christian rock, it was (and is) central to understanding these scenes and communities, in part because it is indeed common. For many evangelical teenagers, their Christian identity is itself oppositional and marginal to the dominant culture. Esther and her friends might not have driven to Chicago for DIY punk shows at the storied Fireside Bowl (which I did almost immediately upon moving to the area in 2002 after graduating college), but their community at Souled Out and later house venues was no less subcultural. Venues such as Souled Out, much like the Fireside and the Knights of Columbus halls of my youth, provide physical places for these music communities to flourish far from the expectations and values of the mainstream. Furthermore, a bands’ public claim to Christian identity functions as kind of a seal of quality — not necessarily that their music is any good, or even that they sing about loving Jesus, but rather that it adheres to Christian morals and that they do not sing about loving hedonism or nihilism. You did not risk the eternal damnation of your soul, in other words, attending shows at Souled Out; but who knew what messiness awaited you at the Fireside. When I was a teenager, going to punk and hardcore shows sometimes made my mom uneasy after she had witnessed the pot smoking and drinking at Lollapalooza, heard about violence or clashes with police at shows, knew that I was staying out very late with my (non-Christian) girlfriend, or even just heard hardcore blastbeats and screamed vocals on my stereo through the closed bedroom door. If I had been able to say, “Don’t worry Mom, these bands are Christian,” our conversations would have ended differently.
God Rock, Inc. began as my dissertation project at the University of Chicago, where I had started studying ethnomusicology in 2005. I began researching Christian music in earnest in 2009, gathering data using a mixed-methods approach: multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at Cornerstone Festival and in Chicago and Nashville, which serves as the de facto center of the Christian music industries; archival research at the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University (in Murfreesboro); many formal interviews with several current and former record label executives and recording artists in Chicago, Nashville, and Seattle (where Tooth & Nail Records is located); quantitative data, including publicly-available industry metrics provided by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Gospel Music Association; and a material collection of ephemera (church bulletins, concert tickets, magazines and fanzines, programs) and recordings in various formats (audio cassettes, CDs, DVDs, and vinyl LP records).
Although I no longer self-identify as a Christian, throughout my fieldwork I was able to draw upon my childhood experiences as a regular churchgoer to authenticate myself to Christians as a researcher already familiar with their beliefs and practices: when asked if I was a Christian, I always replied that I had grown up attending church, that my father was a pastor, but that I no longer considered myself a Christian. In many instances, this led to a more in-depth conversation about spirituality, Christian beliefs, and personal faith (or my lack thereof). To some of the evangelicals I encountered in my fieldwork I was a “backslidden Christian,” ripe for ministry and recovery. Others have seen me as an agnostic, a liberal/elite academic, or a “searcher,” and have used Christian apologetics as a way to witness to me. Still others did not press me on matters of faith; they answered my questions and tolerated my observing worship (an observation which could never be fully participatory) without questioning my own beliefs. My religious background provided me with a degree of cultural insiderness, as did my experiences as an active participant in underground music scenes. This background facilitated my interactions with record label executives and other cultural intermediaries, authenticating me as someone professionally invested in the field beyond the personal investment of a typical fan. I draw from these experiences and data throughout God Rock, Inc. to examine the boundaries of Christian music through the lenses several themes: commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover.