Abandoning Shelters: Christian Popular Music and Crossover Strategies

International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch

IASPM-US, Cleveland, Ohio, February 24, 2017.

Material from this paper was published in God Rock, Inc.

Abstract

Niche markets shelter marginal musics, providing safe spaces that cultivate emerging genres, support local scenes, and enable underground or regional styles to thrive. While niche music markets are usually distinguished by their aesthetic values, they are also often marked by ideologies that limit their broader accessibility. The Christian popular music industry, for example, has long circumscribed its market a priori by its target consumers’ faith identity despite selling music that sounds largely indistinguishable from contemporaneous mainstream pop. Even marginal Christian musics—such as Christian metal or Christian punk—presume a common religious background that, for many critics, aligns these styles more closely with Christian pop than with their non-religious/secular equivalents.

Participants and observers have described this particular sheltered niche as the “Christian ghetto,” whose separatedness from the mainstream has largely prevented Christian artists from reaching superstardom while enabling them to achieve some commercial success and financial stability in a less competitive environment. Some artists have abandoned this shelter in search of crossover success in non-Christian markets. In this paper, I critically analyze the strategies of two crossover cases: Amy Grant, who became the first Christian pop singer with a number-one Billboard Hot 100 single following the 1991 release of “Baby, Baby,” and Tooth and Nail Records, a Christian metal and punk label whose artists straddle multiple margins, crossing over from one to another. In doing so, I build upon the works of Hebdige, Toynbee, Weisbard, and others to theorize crossover as a process through which niche markets change over time.