Lost in the Sound of Separation: Mainstreams and Alternatives at a Christian Rock Festival
Society for Ethnomusicology
SEM, Mexico City, D.F., Mexico, November 22, 2009.
This paper’s title is taken from an album by Underoath.
Winner of the Popular Music Section’s Lise Waxer Student Paper Prize.
Material from this paper was published in God Rock, Inc.
Abstract
Rock festivals have long been representative sites of tension between mainstream musical cultures and alternative (sub)cultures. From 1969’s iconic Woodstock to the present-day Bonnaroo, Coachella, and Lollapalooza festivals, these ambitious events attempt to balance alternative aesthetics and ideologies against mainstream scope and practicalities. Cornerstone Festival is similar to these events in many ways: it is annual, takes place over several days, has available campgrounds, presents dozens of musicians and bands on multiple stages, requires a full year of planning and an army of staff and volunteers to execute, and attracts a primarily young generation of participants.
But Cornerstone is crucially different from these other festivals: it markets itself as a festival of alternative Christian rock music, presenting self-identifying Christian musicians to Christian fans. For participants, the music performed at Cornerstone provides an alternative to the mainstreams of both (secular) popular music and faith-based music: Cornerstone aesthetics have more in common with contemporary punk, hardcore, and indie rock than they do with the Nashville-based Contemporary Christian Music industry or the guitar-based praise music found in many contemporary worship services.
How do the performers, mediators, and listeners of alternative Christian rock negotiate these multiple tensions? How can their negotiations contribute to existing conceptions of mainstreams and alternatives? Describing the lived experiences of Cornerstone participants requires a perspective more subjectively nuanced than the strict dichotomies of previous models. In working through these ideas, this ethnography studies the ways in which Cornerstone contributes to participants’ self-conception of their Christian lifestyle: mainstream, alternative, and in-between.
Part of the organized panel Conflating the Sacred and Profane: Theorizing Present-Day Christian Popular Musical Practices. Panelists:
Monique Ingalls
Andrew Mall
Anna Nekola
Philip Bohlman (discussant)
Richard Keeling (chair)
Panel abstract
This panel investigates the musical, cultural, and ideological tensions that arise when present-day Christian practices intersect those of popular secular culture. While American evangelicals have long adopted new technologies to better fulfill their mandate to spread their faith, the adoption of secular popular musical aesthetics into Christian practice beginning in the second half of the twentieth century has continued to draw controversy and question from both inside and outside the faith. Not only does the production, mediation, and active reception of Christian popular music closely parallel that of secular popular music, the ritual life of local faith-based communities has absorbed these practices, supplementing and often replacing the denominational hymnal as the source of congregational song. As such, present-day Christian musical practices in the United States are positioned between the traditional and the modern, raising questions about the practice of faith and Christianity’s relationship to popular culture and new media. For instance, how do participants understand the overlap and create distinctions between these spaces? What, if any, are the boundaries between the sacred act of “worship” and the profane act of performance? How do evangelicals negotiate these boundaries? What role have new media technologies played in the creation of these new musical syntheses and discourses about music? The papers on this panel synthesize a variety of methodologies and theoretical perspectives in examining the discourses, practices, and complex identifications that result from Christians’ negotiating intersections of the sacred and profane in their personal, social, professional, and religious lives.