“This is a chance to come together”: Subcultural Resistance and Community at Cornerstone Festival
Congregational Music-Making and Community in a Mediated Age
Co-edited by Anna E. Nekola and Thomas Wagner
Abstract
Cornerstone Festival was an annual Christian rock festival held every July near Chicago, Illinois from 1984 until 2012. Cornerstone was organized and operated by members of Jesus People, U.S.A., a Christian commune in Chicago with explicit ties to the Jesus People Movement and its ideologies. Festival organizers privileged peripheral genres and styles over mainstream Christian recording artists: this faith-based, youth-oriented music festival’s aesthetic, commercial, ideological, and stylistic elements had more in common with contemporaneous emo, hardcore, metal, and punk rock than with contemporary Christian music, gospel, or praise and worship music.
Cornerstone’s organizers prioritized an inclusive, evangelical theology coupled with a resistant ideology ambivalent to mainline Protestantism and mainstream evangelicalism. These themes were present in the musical and non-musical official programming, ad hoc performances at attendee-operated “generator stages”, formal and informal congregational worship, and branding strategies visible in marketing and social networking. Organizers and attendees alike framed the festival’s physical and social spaces as an imagined community made manifest for a short time every year. For many repeat attendees, the festival crowd was not an impersonal gathering but rather an intimate congregation that was simultaneously ephemeral and permanent.
Based on historical research and ethnographic fieldwork in 2009–2012, including two summers volunteering as festival staff, this chapter examines the ways in which Cornerstone’s imagined community was constructed, manifested, perpetuated, and mourned. This work participates in a growing literature on contemporary Christian congregational music practices and contributes to scholarship in ethnomusicology and popular music studies that address explicitly peripheral musical activities.
John J. Thompson’s reflection on Cornerstone after it ended is required reading and a perfect companion to this chapter.