dc Talk's Jesus Freak

Will Stockton, D. Gilson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501331671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

Late in the Reagan years, three young men at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University formed the Christian rap group dc Talk. The trio put out a series of records that quickly secured their place at the forefront of contemporary Christian music. But, with their fourth studio album Jesus Freak (1995), dc Talk staked a powerful claim on the worldly market of alternative music, becoming an evangelical group with secular selling power. This book sets out to study this mid-90s crossover phenomenon-a moment of cultural convergence between Christian and secular music and an era of particular political importance for American evangelicalism. Written by two queer scholars with evangelical pasts, Jesus Freak explores the importance of a multifarious album with complex ideas about race, sexuality, gender, and politics-an album where dc Talk wonders, "What will people do when they hear that I'm a Jesus freak?" and evangelical fans stake a claim for Christ-like coolness in a secular musical world.

1

Jesus Freak

Will Stockton

I’m not like them,

But I can pretend.

The sun is gone,

But I have a light.

—Kurt Cobain, “Dumb”

“Jesus don’t want me for a sunbeam,” Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain sang on MTV Unplugged late in the fall of 1993. The song was the third of that night’s set, and it followed the band’s menacing twist on the common Christian invitational, “Come as You Are.” Originally recorded in 1987 by the Scottish band the Vaselines, “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam” reimagines the Sunday school standard “I’ll be a Sunbeam.” The child singer of the original aspires to become part of Christ’s radiant glory, shining “for Him each day” and “showing how pleasant and happy His little one can be.” But the adult singer of the grunge hymn scorns Christ’s sacrifice and wallows in self-isolation. “Sunbeams,” Cobain moans, “are never made like me.”

As it did for many grunge and alternative artists of the 1990s, Christianity typically figured in Cobain’s imaginary as a force of conformity and bigotry, welcoming with the one hand, but rejecting with the other. (See also, for instance, Soundgarden’s “Jesus Christ Pose” and “Holy Water.”) In “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” Cobain locates himself outside the sacred community of sunny believers. The song is bitter and melancholic, as Cobain, like the Vaselines’ Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee before him, makes an ironic boast of his unwantedness. Elsewhere Cobain channeled his anger into more punk-flavored critiques of mainstream American religion. In a 1993 interview, Cobain told the LGBT magazine The Advocate that he used to spray-paint “God is Gay” on pickup trucks in his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington (Allman 1993). He also shouts “God is Gay” at the end of Nevermind’s tenth track, “Stay Away.” For Sheep, the original title of Nevermind, Cobain imagined a promotional ad that read, in part, “Abort Christ” (Cross 2001: 154). The pro-choice–themed video for “Heart-Shaped Box” features the crucifixion of a man wearing a bishop’s miter. Although Cobain had experimented briefly with born-again Christianity in his teens, his adult perspective on the religion seemed consumed by disdain (Cross 2001: 62–63). If he had any religious goals, Cobain liked to tell people, it was “to get stoned and worship Satan” (Morgen 2015).

By the early 1990s, many of the Christians whom Cobain loathed as misogynistic, homophobic sheep had assembled into the powerful sector of the American electorate known broadly as the Religious Right.¹ Reforming and expanding the Moral Majority alliances of the 1980s, the Religious Right organized Protestants and Catholics alike around protecting an often implicitly white America from the left’s agenda of legalized sodomy and abortion. Members of the Religious Right—including D., me, and our families during this period—seem to rank chief among those people Cobain addresses in the liner notes to the 1993 compilation Incesticide: “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.” Leaders of the Religious Right like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson preached that Christians should love the sinner but hate their sins. In contrast, Cobain taught his audience to love both sinner and sin alike. If God didn’t want you for his sunbeam, fuck Him.

Ubiquitous though Nirvana was in the early 1990s, many evangelicals stayed away from Nirvana shows and refrained from buying Nirvana records. I turned fourteen in 1993, and the only grunge album I owned at the time was Pearl Jam’s Ten, which I found noisy, dark, and peppered with unnecessary uses of the f-word. (A friend’s mother confiscated the album after hearing that Jeremy, from the eponymous song, “bit the recess lady’s breast.”) My musical tastes ran more toward sacred music, specifically Contemporary Christian Music or CCM. Originating in the evangelical outposts of hippie counterculture, CCM had previously struggled to gain conservative Christian acceptance. It had long endured the attacks of numerous evangelical critics who cast it as a co-optation of irredeemably evil forms of music—be they rock-n-roll, whose sounds were ostensibly those of sexual license, drug use, Eastern mysticism, and the occult; or folk, which supposedly propelled the spread of communism in America.² Yet much of this intra-cultural conflict had settled down by the early 1990s. Christian artists like Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Twila Paris, and Steven Curtis Chapman had become staples on Christian radio, which competed with adult contemporary and pop stations dominated by Bryan Adams and Whitney Houston. Offering a Christian alternative to the likes of Metallica and N.W.A., groups including Stryper and P.I.D. (Preachas in Disguise) had helped carve out CCM subgenres of metal and hip-hop, respectively. Through the rise of Christian bookstores and Christian music festivals, CCM had become a multimillion dollar industry.³ Jesus may not have wanted Kurt Cobain for a sunbeam. But to many Christians, it sure seemed like Jesus wanted to shine his light on—and take his market share of—the contemporary music scene.

This chapter focuses on the mid-1990s transform ation of one particularly popular CCM group, dc Talk, toward a mainstream alternative sound. Through this transformation, dc Talk provided both its largely adolescent Christian fan base and a new secular youth audience with an evangelical response to the “anti-Christian” politics of Nirvana and other grunge music. Jesus Freak presented Christ as the solution to despair, loneliness, isolation, and apathy—problems that ostensibly afflicted the new generation of youth consumers. Forged in the crucible of grunge anxiety over authenticity, where artists and consumers alike constantly worried about being and appearing real, Jesus Freak’s title track and lead single drew on both the biblical figure of John the Baptist and the origins of CCM in the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to depict the real Christian as a freak for the Lord. Both song and album invited listeners to join a sacred, but also countercultural, community of Jesus Freaks. dc Talk fashioned the alternative CCM subgenre alongside other groups, including Jars of Clay, the Newsboys, and Audio Adrenaline. But no CCM group found as much success in this effort as dc Talk.

I I Hate Myself and Want to Die

As a response and contribution to grunge music specifically, dc Talk’s December 1995 album was somewhat belated. Music critics routinely trace the beginning of grunge’s end to April 1994, when Cobain shot himself in the room above the garage of his Seattle home.⁴ Nirvana had ostensibly broken up shortly before Cobain’s suicide. The four albums that in hindsight defined the Seattle sound had all been released three years earlier, in 1991: Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, and Alice in Chains’ Facelift. The year 1994 saw the release of several more significant grunge albums, including Bush’s Sixteen Stone, Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple, Hole’s Live Through This, and Pearl Jam’s Vitology. But it is difficult to argue that grunge thrived following Nirvana’s supposed breakup and Cobain’s death. Merging into the mainstream, grunge music became “alternative music,” a genre so inclusive that it could often house the white-boy funk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the punk/pop of Green Day, the college indie-rock of R.E.M. and the Dave Matthews Band, and the pop/rock of the Goo Goo Dolls and Matchbox 20. In late 1995, dc Talk’s Billboard rock competition included the self-titled third LP by Seattle-grunge-stalwarts Alice in Chains, as well as Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by the Chicago-based Smashing Pumpkins.

Of course, “grunge” itself had always been an impossibly inclusive term. As Charles Cross writes in his biography of Cobain, Heavier than Heaven, the term “grunge” was originally “meant to describe loud, distorted punk,” but by the early 1990s it had come “to describe virtually every band from the Northwest” (Cross 2001: 132).⁵ Like metal, this new grunge music was technically skilled, but carefully unpolished and more melodic. It was punk, but with more pop. It was psychedelic and progressive, but with simpler song structures. If it existed as a discreet genre at all—as opposed to a variable blend of rock, punk, pop, and metal influences in several rather extraordinary Seattle-based bands—grunge music preferred minor keys to major ones and dissonant chords over consonant ones. It was gritty, distorted, and above all, ridden with youth angst.

Indeed, the label “grunge” arguably captured less a particular style of music than a particular performance of discontent by Generation X. Specifically, grunge described the sound of boredom pervading mostly white, mostly male post–Cold War American youth. Suffering from none of their parents’ paranoia about Soviet annihilation, American teens of the early 1990s turned their anxieties inward, toward themselves and their relatively privileged lives. These teens did not have to hide under their desks for bomb drills. The space race had been won. The Soviet experiment in communist living was over. American teens (again, mostly white, mostly male) now directed their rebellion toward the ostensibly oppressive uniformity of life in middle- and upper-middle-class suburbia.As children of the post–Civil Rights era, growing up almost entirely under the Republican administrations of Reagan and Bush, these teens turned away from advocating for largescale social action. Instead, they began cultivating a personal politics and aesthetic of cynicism toward the marketing machines of capitalist America that allegedly quashed expressions of originality and sincerity.⁶ These teens could not take the New Kids on the Block seriously when the boy band claimed street smarts or pledged eternal love to their girlfriends. These teens did not believe that MC Hammer was too legitimate to quit. Having seen through the sham, these teenagers knew that such mainstream artists were the money-making products of the big record labels. That’s what the mainstream was after all: a profit stream that drowned truth and honesty. Dressed in thrift-store finds (stereotypically old flannel shirts and torn jeans), fans of grunge took satisfaction in locating and manufacturing “the alternative,” finding in the unpopular a supposedly more authentic form of self-expression.

As the story goes, the mainstream market quickly, almost simultaneously, grew to encompass and create the alternative. It became hard to tell the mainstream and the alternative apart, crucial though the difference was supposed to be. Grunge purported to describe a form of anti-commercial authenticity—a model of musicianship as noble savagery, untainted by the marketing machines of the big mus ic labels and their enslavement to the popular tastes of mass consumer society. But in reality, grunge was no less a marketing phenomenon, a massively successful effort by the same big music labels to capitalize on consumer desires to escape mainstream consumerism. The result was a new form of popular music whose makers trumpeted their ostensible unpopularity; who worried ad nauseum, on MTV and in Rolling Stone no less, about the dangers of “selling out” and the corrosive effects of fame; who sometimes forewent opportunities to “cash in”; and who occasionally spent lots of money trying to sound like little money had been spent. Regretting the studio polish of the massive-selling Nevermind, Nirvana hired Steve Albini to roughen up the sound of their sophomore album, 1993’s In Utero. Eddie Vedder complained bitterly about luxury living in the posh studio that Pearl Jam rented to record their second album Vs., and even went so far as to sleep in his truck to help ensure his voice would sound sufficiently rough (Crowe 1993). After the release of Vitology, Pearl Jam went to war with Ticketmaster, forgoing millions in tour revenue rather than selling out to what they argued was the company’s monopolistic control of the concert market.

In keeping with this ethic of authenticity, grunge artists also loudly eschewed rock braggadocio. Here was no irresistible sexual prowess—no championing of fat bottomed girls, no genital innuendos involving custard or sweet cherry pies, and no locker room talk that one was hot for teacher. (Such violent machismo, grunge implied, belonged only to rapists: see Nirvana’s “Polly” or Stone Temple Pilots’ “Sex Type Thing.”) Here, too, was no hip-hop boasting about fame, money, or artistic greatness. Mostly, grunge songs were songs about masochism—songs about self-loathing (Nirvana’s “I Hate Myself and Want to Die,” the intended title for In Utero), depression (Soundgarden’s “Fell on Black Days”), crumbling relationships (Pearl Jam’s “Black”), drug addiction (Alice in Chains’ “Junkhead”), and the agonies of conformity (Hole’s “Miss World”). Here was abject desire, like Cobain’s wish that he could “eat your cancer when you turn black” (“Heart-Shaped Box”). Within the wider terrain of alternative music, here were hundreds of thousands of teens asking, along with Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, whether anyone had time to listen to them whine (“Basket Case”). Hundreds of thousands identifying with Beck as losers or raging against the machine. And hundreds of thousands more wearing their Zero shirts to Smashing Pumpkins concerts. Here was the adolescent poetry of rejection sold to millions of Gen X Americans united in nothing if not their sense of alienation.

But here, too, amid all these ostensibly real, if also self-absorbed, sentiments, was a new social justice outlook in popular rock music. As Catherine Strong has argued, grunge music was not as politically explicit as punk (2011: 19) or hip-hop for that matter. Nonetheless, grunge music shone light on the plights of rape victims (Nirvana’s “Polly”), the homeless (Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow”), bullied children (Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy”), and veterans (Alice in Chains’ “Rooster”). Eddie Vedder received no small amount of press, not to mention new fans, when he wrote “pro choice” on his arm during Pearl Jam’s 1992 taping of MTV Unplugged. Political concern for the welfare of others—especially women and gay people—helped energize the grunge aura of authenticity. The men of Nirvana and Pearl Jam were unabashed feminists. Cobain was a vocal LGBT-rights activist who admitted to The Advocate that he had once wondered if he was gay (Allman 1993). For naysayers, grunge music ceased to be authentic the moment it became categorized—and sold—as grunge.⁷ Grunge artists themselves tended to disparage the term for exactly that reason. Yet there is no doubt that many artists and consumers alike understood grunge music to actually be a more authentic form of personal, political, and artistic expression. Certainly more authentic than what the mainstream had to offer. More socially aware and responsible than anything Poison, Vanilla Ice, C&C Music Factory, or even Guns N’ Roses put out for sale.

As grunge music in its original incarnation waned, alternative music took up the dual cross of authenticity and anti-Christianity. The daughter of a preacher, Tori Amos held down the “softer” side of the alt-scene with her piano-driven, confessional albums Little Earthquakes (1992), Under the Pink (1994), and Boys for Pele (1996). Calling herself a “recovering Christian” (“In the Springtime of His Voodoo”), Amos wrote about masturbating while her family sang hymns (“Icicle”), boys who fancy themselves Jesus because they can make her cum (“Precious Things”), and a God who just isn’t there when you need him (“God”). On “Zero,” from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Smashing Pumpkins’ frontman Billy Corgan de...