Should Christians listen to Secular Music?
Almost two years ago, I began to get a feeling of unease over the music I was listening to. For almost all of my life, I had grown up listening to hard rock/heavy metal and also rap music beginning in middle school. I was a big-time headbanger, especially in my college days. I went to see bands like Guns-n-Roses, Metallica, Motley Crue, Ozzy Ozbourne, Iron Maiden, Poison, Kiss, The Scorpions, Rush, and many more in concert. I even managed to get into the music video for “Same Old Situation” at a Motley Crue concert at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin.
I remember one spring day I was speeding down the road jamming out to “TNT” by AC/DC, fist pumping, adrenaline flowing, petal to the metal. The lyrics “So lock up your daughter, lock up your wife, lock up your back door and run for your life” were playing and I was singing along since I was alone in my car. It sort of hit me right there. I thought to myself “If I truly want to be close to God, is this the sort of message I should be listening to all the time?” The answer was clear to me at that point. I made a decision then and there to stop buying secular music and start buying and listening to Christian music.
At that point in time, I was buying all of my music on iTunes. There was plenty of Christian music available, but there were a couple of problems I ran into. One was that all the Christian music was lumped together. Gospel music was mixed in with Rock, Pop was mixed in with the Country, etc. I wasn’t really very interested in music from all genres, I wanted to see if I could find some Christian music that was upbeat and had a lot of guitars. The other problem I had was I decided that I’d only buy music in the iTunes Plus format. I didn’t want to buy songs in the 128kpbs format from iTunes, only to have Apple extract an extra $.30 per song from me when they eventually upgraded the album to iTunes Plus. The other appeal of iTunes plus is that it’s DRM free, so it would cause me the same headaches that the DRM music I’ve bought before gave me. I have music on several computers, and hated having to always authorized them whenever I copied music from one to the other.
The iTunes Plus issue turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Because there were so few Christian albums in the iTunes plus format (around 100 or so), I was able to preview a lot of them, and I was pretty excited by what I found. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if all the songs were already in iTunes Plus format, I probably wouldn’t have discovered some of the bands I bought albums from and have really enjoyed. There have only been a couple of disappointments, largely due to the fact that I’ve been able to preview the albums on iTunes before I bought them.
One day while I visiting Sounds of Light (our local Christian book store) they had a CD on the counter for $5. I don’t even remember what it was right now (Barlow Girl or Stellar Cart, maybe?), but I bought it without having listened to it, and it was pretty good. Up until then, I had refrained from buying music from there largely due to their prices. They were really high—similar to an FYE or Sam Goody store. I had previously supported them by buying greeting cards, gifts, etc. from them, so I didn’t feel like I was not supporting them by getting my music elsewhere. I didn’t want to spend $17 on a CD that I could buy from iTunes for $10. Since that time, there have been a lot of Christian music releases that are in the $5 range. They’re mostly EP’s, having 5 or 6 songs per album, but I haven’t found too many of them to have a lot of filler songs. The ones you get are pretty good. I still buy some of my music from iTunes, but I’m finding now that I can sometimes get better deals from Sounds of Light with coupons & sales they have one weekend in the middle of each month.
Here are a few observations I’ve gleaned from my nearly two-year experiment. First: Christian music is just as varied as most popular music, representing a wide variety of genres, from Country/Folk to Rock, Pop to Metal, Emo to “Screamo”. You get the picture. Second: There’s a lack of guitar solos in Christian music, even in the hard rock/metal music. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise since guitar solos are often an exercise in self-aggrandizement. Third: A lot of Christian music sounds just like other popular music. This can be good or bad. Some bands that are considered Christian don’t really seem to have much to do with Christianity at all. Some bands’ songs sound secular but have Christian themes, though aren’t explicitly Christian. Others can rock out and still deliver a strong Christian message. It’s the latter ones I tend to like the most. Fourth: a lot Christian music is very milktoast. I don’t mean this in an insulting way, it’s just that for every hard-rocking Christian band out there, there’s 100 light-sounding “contemporary” bands.
My goal here isn’t to impress anyone or brag about how holier-than-thou I am since I no longer intentionally listen to secular music. That is not the case at all. There are times I can’t avoid secular music— like in public places—and sometimes I even like it. Still, when I have a choice, I am going to spend my time & money on Christian music. We have a lot of choices in our life, and this is one I’ve made for myself. I came to the determination that I’m better off on my journey through life with songs by Kutless or Pillar running through my head instead of Eminem or Rage Against the Machine. I don’t think my musical choices make me better than anyone else, but I think they help me to be a better person than I was, by keeping my focus on the things of God instead of the things of man.
I haven’t cut myself completely off from the world either. I’ll still watch secular movies and play popular video games, and the reason is two-fold. First, it’s because there aren’t a whole lot of Christian based alternatives in those mediums. You can find some sort of opportunity for discussing moral dilemmas presented in those movies if you wanted to (there are a number of Bible studies on all sorts of movies), and many games also give you moral choices to make. Second, music is different. I listen to music a lot. I listen to it all the time when I’m in my car, or when I’m going to the store, mowing the lawn, raking leaves or shoveling the drive, when I’m at work, and when I work out. It probably ranges up to 40 hours a week that I listen.
Music is a passion of mine, and I’d like to start sharing some of my discoveries with the world. There are plenty of web sites devoted to Christian music, but I don’t feel there’s any harm with there being one more out there. Of course, my blog won’t be dedicated to it, but I’d like to make a habit of spreading the word with whoever will listen. I plan to buy a new album every pay day, listen to it over the weekend, and then write a review of it on Mondays using the rating I give them in iTunes. Mondays are “Music Monday” on Twitter, a day when people on Twitter share music they like to listen to. Hopefully I’ll be able to have a positive influence even if it’s some small and insignificant way. On non-payday weekends, I’ll write about an older record in my collection. They are all still pretty new to me, regardless of when they were released.
For convenience sake, I’ll be linking to the albums I review on iTunes. I encourage people to support their local Christian music store as much as possible, but I also realize that’s not always feasible, especially if you don’t have one nearby.
Note: For the sake of full disclosure, I get a 5% commission on on everything somebody buys through iTunes if they click on one of the links on my site. That works out to $.05 per song, or $.50 for a normal $10 album. My web site costs me about $13 per month to maintain. I don’t expect that sales from music or other stuff will exceed that, but merely supplement it and help me to keep my site up and running.
In my opinion, Christians should buy Christian music and not buy stuff from secular bands. If more people reject secular artists that make music that is often times openly hostile to Christianity, and start spending more on Christian artists, the popular culture will follow. Just imagine if two or even just one of the top ten albums on the Billboard charts or iTunes charts were Christian musicians. That would send a strong message to record execs that Christians are rejecting a lot of the trash they’re putting out these days.
If I’ve piqued your interest, check out “Now Here This! Winter 2010 Sampler” (Note: link launches iTunes) a collection of 14 singles from new Christian bands for only $2.49—that’s only $.18 per song! What have you got to lose? By the way, I got the “Now Here This” sampler from my local Christian book store free with my purchase this weekend, and it came with 3 more songs, so you might want to look into that instead.
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