God Rock, Inc.

The Business of Niche Music

Andrew Mall

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520974784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Popular music in the twenty-first century is increasingly divided into niche markets. How do fans, musicians, and music industry executives define their markets' boundaries? What happens when musicians cross those boundaries? What can Christian music teach us about commercial popular music? In God Rock, Inc., Andrew Mall considers the aesthetic, commercial, ethical, and social boundaries of Christian popular music, from the late 1960s, when it emerged, through the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic research, historical archives, interviews with music industry executives, and critical analyses of recordings, concerts, and music festival performances, Mall explores the tensions that have shaped this evolving market and frames broader questions about commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover in music that defines itself as outside the mainstream.

PART ONE

Christian Music

An Industry and Its History

1

“Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?”

The Christian Market’s Origins

The roots of the market for Christian popular music lie in the Jesus People movement, an evangelical youth revival that emerged in California during the late 1960s, in parallel with the countercultural movement. Street evangelists ministered to youth, students, and hippies, engaging them directly on college campuses, in coffeehouses and nightclubs, or even literally on the street instead of through church-based programs or parachurch ministries. In a traditional model of evangelism, these countercultural converts would in turn minister to their peers in coffee shops, on college campuses, at rock concerts, and other unconventional settings. Certainly this was the hope of Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, whom historian Larry Eskridge describes as wanting “to train an army of half a million local lay evangelists who would spread the gospel throughout America by the nation’s bicentennial in 1976.”¹ But young Christians first had to be secure and confident in their new faith in order to convert others, so street evangelists focused on making Christianity immediately meaningful and relevant to their daily lives. For these ministers and their many young converts, Jesus Christ was not some unapproachable, abstract deity but rather an accessible hippie whose teachings resonated with their daily concerns. Evangelism itself—converting someone to Christianity—became recast as a form of activism that addressed the kinds of issues that animated the counterculture.² It was effective for a variety of reasons: the Jesus People movement’s form of Christianity broke both from previous generations’ religious traditions and from the increasingly permissive morality of the 1960s, especially in terms of sex and drugs; it also benefitted from a growing popular interest in spirituality unattached to organized religion. Rejecting sectarian views, traditional worship practices, authoritarian leadership, and conventional sociocultural expectations, the Jesus People reframed Christianity as a set of beliefs opposed to middle-class norms, simultaneously speaking to youths’ disenchantment with materialism and their distrust of mainline denominations. Finally, it incorporated popular culture into the Christian lifestyle: within the Jesus People movement, coffeehouses, alternative newspapers (Duane Pederson’s Hollywood Free Paper was a popular resource), and rock and roll were not taboo; rather, they became important tools for evangelism and biblical teaching.

It might help to think of the Jesus People movement as “rebranding” Christianity for 1960s’ countercultural youth whose concerns were distinct from, if not unrelated to, those of their parents.³ Like most modern branding campaigns, a huge variety of goods and media promoted this newly culturally relevant version of Christianity: bumper stickers, buttons, jewelry, literature, movies, music, musicals, T-shirts, and so on. The Jesus People movement was not centralized—there was no official Jesus People marketing team strategy—so we have to find other explanations for the deluge of faith-based consumer goods that appeared during this time. One explanation is that the Jesus People, many of whom were converted hippies, simply translated the counterculture into Christianity. Thus, Christian coffeehouses, communes, newspapers, and rock music attest to the Jesus People movement’s acceptance of contemporaneous popular culture. Entrepreneurs, including those invested in ministry and those invested in profit, designed and sold ready-made fashion, knick-knacks, and other items, commodifying the Jesus People movement as readily as they did the counterculture. The popularity of the Jesus People—both as a movement that attracted new converts and as a newsworthy cultural phenomenon that sold newspapers and magazines—exposed a market for contemporary religious goods and media.

Another explanation, however, situates the consumer goods during this period within a longer history of material Christianity, or the physical stuff that constitutes religious practice and identity for many Christians in the United States. Colleen McDannell writes of the ebb and flow of these goods’ popularity: in addition to the altars, Bibles, hymnbooks, icons, and other sacred objects long found in Christian homes and places of worship, Christian decorative and household products were a fashionable component of the Victorian aesthetic in the nineteenth century. These goods were commonly produced and sold by secular companies who found the religious market to be profitable. Middle-class consumer tastes changed in the early twentieth century, however, driven by mass culture, industrialization, and urbanization. By the end of World War I, religious themes were no longer in style, and secular producers and retailers that targeted middle-class consumers deemphasized unprofitable religious commodities. As these companies pulled out of the market for religious goods, Christian companies emerged to fill this niche, finding demand for Christian-themed household objects reduced from the broader U.S. middle class to primarily working-class Christian households.⁴ From this perspective, the market for Christian goods follows fashion trends just as other consumer markets do: companies invest in the market when it is strong and divest when it is weak, leaving it to smaller producers as a comparatively small niche. By the 1970s, however, the market had rebounded dramatically: Christianity was fashionable again following the visibility of the Jesus People movement, and the demographics for Christian goods had expanded.

The growth of consumer culture following World War II had several effects. Lizabeth Cohen, for example, writes of mass consumption contributing to a shared sense of U.S. nationalism while simultaneously furthering social stratification along class, gender, and racial divides.⁵ President Jimmy Carter diagnosed the United States’ economic woes in 1979 as symptomatic of, in part, “self-indulgence and consumption” in his “crisis of confidence” speech on July 15, 1979.⁶ Daniel Horowitz documents the critical trajectories that ultimately validated consumption as integral to meaning-making itself and not merely a poor substitute for elite culture.⁷ Within white U.S. evangelicalism, consuming Christian goods became a way for Jesus People converts to celebrate their newly held religious beliefs. But, more significantly, it further cemented the idea among evangelicals that everyday acts, including acts of consumption, could and should be imbued with religious intent. As McDannell writes (echoing Cohen), in the United States, “being Christian means to have a Christian life style that includes purchasing goods from a fellow Christian. . . . Making, selling, marketing, and purchasing link Christians together.”⁸

What both of these explanations have in common is the significant role that the commodification of religion plays. The buying and selling of salvation and praise have been central to Christianity for centuries; purchasing (and profiting from) religious goods was not a new feature of the Jesus People movement. Relationships between religious practice (or the promise of salvation) and the market for material goods and services have long been uncomfortable: the Roman Catholic Church’s selling of indulgences was a target of Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century, and many Christians still disagree about the appropriate role of capital, capitalist markets, and wealth in religious contexts.⁹ And yet, a major legacy of the Jesus People movement—including the record labels, artists, and executives who exploited its music—is that it normalized consumption practices within white U.S. evangelical culture. As McDannell shows, by the 1970s Christian products were no longer only associated with working-class identity but also with the increasing numbers of young, middle-class evangelicals. Media scholar Heather Hendershot argues that in embracing capitalism’s conflation of consumption with social identity, evangelicals situated consumption as a central component of the Christian lifestyle: “To purchase Christian products is to declare one’s respectability in a country in which people are most often addressed by mass culture not as citizens but as consumers. In America, to buy is to be.”¹⁰ As members of an identifiable and desirable market, evangelicals staked a claim for participation in public discourse.

The Jesus People privileged freedom of expression and embraced popular music styles relevant to their daily lives. Because Jesus People musicians such as Agape, Phil Keaggy and Glass Harp, Love Song, Larry Norman, and others wanted to sing about their faith, they faced resistance from the dominant (secular) record labels. In short, they were too Christian for rock and roll, but they were also too rock and roll for Christian record labels. Word Records, the largest Christian label at the time, primarily released recordings of hymns and white Southern gospel musicians. Although Word’s owner, Jarrell McCracken, feared that Jesus music would dilute the label’s core brand identity, in 1972 Word launched a new subsidiary: Myrrh Records would produce and release recordings of Christian popular music. Other Christian labels emerged in the 1970s, many with no previous experience in the record industry or Christian market: Lamb & Lion, Maranatha! Music, Sparrow, and Star Song, among others. These labels were part of a new infrastructure for Christian music’s nascent niche market: Christian artists recorded for Christian record labels and wrote songs for Christian publishers; Christian consumers listened to Christian radio; and Christian records were reviewed in Christian magazines and sold by Christian retailers, who readily provided “safe” alternatives to secular artists.

One effect of this separation and insularity was that the diversity of aesthetic, ideological, and theological orientations within Christian music was rarely apparent to outsiders, who typically had a monolithic and undifferentiated assessment of Christian music (if they were aware of it at all). Much like Christianity itself in the United States, Christian music was (and still is) incredibly varied. Recording artists perform many musical styles and represent numerous ideological and theological orientations, ultimately pushing the boundaries of what constitutes Christian music—a question that Christian consumers and the companies marketing and selling Christian commodities both face. Despite the changing demographics and tastes of evangelical Christianity following the Jesus People movement, debates over the appropriateness of popular music within Christianity dominated discourse in the 1970s and into the ’80s. Essentially, participants asked whether popular music could—or should—be employed in service to God. This argument, which I discuss further in chapter 3, harbored transparently racist perspectives (many of which were recycled from the moral panic over rock and roll in the 1950s), substituted individual tastes for theology, and ignored past debates about musical appropriateness throughout the history of Christianity.

Other debates, however, are rooted in differing opinions over the ideal objectives for Christian music. These differing opinions emerged regularly throughout my research, in primary and secondary sources, during formal interviews and informal conversations with interlocutors, and throughout the course of my ethnographic research. The following six sets of questions articulate their core concerns:

1. Is Christian music’s primary purpose to serve as worship, as entertainment, as an evangelizing tool, or as something else? What should its lyrical and aesthetic priorities be to help fulfill this purpose?

2. What are the aesthetic boundaries of Christian music? Are any musical styles incompatible with Christianity, or are all styles appropriate for Christian expression?

3. Who is Christian music’s target audience: Christians or non-Christians?

4. Should Christian recording artists pursue crossover success in the general market?

5. How should record labels and other companies in the Christian market balance commercial with theological concerns when articulating their goals and measuring success? What should be the market’s orientation to the broader missions and ministries of evangelical Christianity?

6. If Christian music is primarily identified by its lyrical content, what makes lyrics particularly Christian? Must Christian artists explicitly address their faith for their music to be Christian? How should we categorize music by general market artists who are Christians? Can instrumental music be Christian?

These questions’ moralizing and prescriptive tone reflect absolutist positions that have been common in the Christian market for decades. Each participant’s perspective is informed by personal faith; Christianity itself is positivist, grounded in the belief of an absolute truth. There is often little ambiguity or nuance in individuals’ positions on these issues and little compromise within the debates themselves. Embedded within all these debates are theological arguments over Christianity’s role in the world, its ideal degree of engagement with or resistance to secular culture, the objectives for Christian music and musicians, and ultimately the boundaries of Christian music. When conflated, these debates might be reframed as asking what constitutes “authentic” Christian music. Authenticity, in this context, is socially constructed and best understood as a process of authentication and not an inherent quality of the music itself.¹¹ Ultimately, this is a foundational question about Christian rock’s ontology—what it is.

In the rest of this chapter, Jesus music case studies illustrate the complexities of this ontological question and the four th...