The other day I was riding in the car and found myself listening to what sounded like Top 40 songs and was temporarily suspended in a place where I simultaneously liked the music I was hearing, but also knew there was something strange about it. It was catchy, and had all of the general lyrical qualities associated with dime-a-dozen romantic radio garbage (“you are everything” “I need you” etc.) but it had a distinct overall crappiness and badness to its fit and finish that made it clear that it was not conventional music.

As I listened further, I noticed that my gut feeling was correct and that this music was Christian music, or more accurately, Overtly Christian Music.  I call it this because there are plenty of songs which have spiritual undertones, or even overtones, but which never include the word “thee”. 

A few years ago a friend of mine who works in music publishing told me that the Christian music market, while moderate in size, was very profitable.  I can believe this because I was raised in what I would call a "pretty religious family" which meant that in our comings and goings we often crossed paths with "zealot isolationist families" who sent their children to Seventh Day Adventist school even though they didn't know what Seventh Day Adventism was.

By the time I was in middle school, we started going to a Presbyterian church, which is the O'Doul’s of Protestant denominations. The starkest difference between our old church, where they sung hymns that likened being a Christian to being in the military off of overhead projectors, and the Presbyterian church is that at our old church, people who got divorced were asked to leave, and at the Presbyterian church, the only woman who stood up to say she was sad that “the gays” had gotten the right to be ministers in the church never returned when she realized nobody agreed with her.

One of the main advantages of being part of a religious family that was not uber-religious, was that I knew kids who were subjected to considerably more restriction than I was in terms of their general day to day living and I was frequently in a position to feel cooler than them because I was allowed to listen to music that didn't suck.

Occasionally, the kids who were only allowed to listen to bad Christian bands that nobody had ever heard of would try to turn the tables by wearing a tee shirt to school bearing the image of some alternative looking guy with a headband and try to pass it off as conventional. This trick would never work in the days of the internet but back then, I will admit that there were one or two days that I coveted Matt Nelson's tee shirt bearing the names of some White Rappers for Christ.

This decade's version of Overtly Christian music stays true to some of the many themes that marked the genre in its early years. These themes are: letting oneself be at the mercy of God, asking God to take oneself, apologizing to God for one's shortcomings, reminding God that you are nothing without God, and  imploring God to grab hold of some part of your being and make it clean. 

I'm not sure where this obsession with mortal imperfection came about but it's a troubling trend and might have something to do with our inability to balance a budget.  If you attend a church, take a gander at some of the lyrics of the “old standards” as my mother would call them, which are the songs that were playing when the world was made.  There is scarcely a mention of human frailty and much more of a focus upon God's ability to save the wretched, and heal the wounded and socialize with different breeds of Angels.  This may be due in part to the fact that these songs were written by God himself, but I think it's more about the fact that today's lyrics would sound cheap even if accompanied by a harpsichord.