You will both have to wait for part 2 of the series on Musical Snobbery. Instead of an ongoing defense of snobbery (which is what, in some form or another, it will be), I'm going to just drop a load of unreconstructed snobbery on you, and you can sort it out.
I attended a Wednesday night church service at Liberty University with my dad and little sister, at her invitation (does she get 'christian service' points for that? I dunno. Dad and I are already in the fold, so to speak. Plus we brought Bibles). The purpose of our going was to hear Dr. Ergun Caner speak, who is (I think) now the head of Liberty Baptist Seminary, or is in some sort of upper administrative role in the seminary. Anyway, he's a very personable, charismatic, and engaging speaker whose preaching is worth hearing, so we went.
Wednesday night services are less formal than Sunday morning, no matter what style of Sunday morning worship a church uses. I think thats a pretty widely applicable generalization, and its certainly the case here. One of the most prominent trends in "christendom" (a word that no longer really makes any sense), at least in the West, is the trend towards 'contemporary' worship. What this means is that everyone wears jeans, and the music is bastardized rock beats under incredibly amplified strummy acoustic-guitar worship choruses. It is with the music that I will be taking (mild) exception.
I'm going to assume that you (Rebecca...and others, if you're out there) have heard some sort of praise and worship music. Turn on a Christian radio station. That is exactly what is in the worship service, except everyone is supposed to sing along (which we'll get to later). So lets take a look at some of the things this worship experience is like, and some of the presuppositions on which this style of music rests.
We will begin with the music itself, i.e. not the lyrics. In the evangelical Christian world, at least as it appears to me, the formula for success seems to be: whatever the 'World' (yes, with a capital W) is doing, wait ten-fifteen years and then it'll be ok to bring under the mantle of acceptable Christian interests. The entire rock experience is a good example of this. The corollary to this formula is that once the idea is accepted , whatever 'it' is (in this case, rock music) will be syncretized, bastardized, and bowdlerized into some sort of acceptable Christian form (movies, music, the concept of sarcasm, 'edgy' fashions, etc.). In some cases, it will simply be taken as is and white-washed as now ok. The general idea seems to be that since things (e.g. violence and sex in movies) have gotten so much worse, the stuff (violence and sex in movies) from ten years ago suddenly isn't so bad in comparison.
This, I think, is especially the case with music, which seems to stay a comfortable two to five years behind whatever is going on in secular pop music, observes the trends, and then follows suit accordingly. In other words, Christian entertainment :: Secular entertainment : Wal-Mart :: JCrew (Unexpected analogy colons! let the standardized test flashbacks commence). The difference between the trendy fashions in JCrew and the trendy fashions as they appear in Wal-Mart is obvious: in Wal-Mart, everything you see is a derivative of something thats already been popular, and which Wal-Mart can (almost) make and (definitely) sell for less. Anyone with an eye can spot someone in designer fashion as opposed to someone in the cheap version, and anyone with an ear can hear the difference between Christian versions of genres and their original counterparts. (Is that too radical a generalization? I don't think so, but its a point that could be argued). Hence we get Christian rap, Christian emo, Christian fiction novels (a WHOLE 'nother post), etc.
There can be arguments about whether those musical trends simply foster a large group of like-minded musicians, some of whom happen to be Christian and prefer that sound for their music, or whether there is a calculated quality to the appearance of these sub-genres, as I believe. Go to a Christian music store and you might see signs saying: "Do you like _Insert Secular Musician_? Then you'll love _Christian Version of Same_!" My point is that it feels dishonest, musically speaking, to pattern yourself as 'Just like Coldplay, but approved by the Southern Baptist Convention!' This is different in an important way from listening suggestions you might get within a genre. "Do you like this rock band? Then you might also like THIS rock band, which sounds somewhat similar and might even have some of the same influences" is different from "Do you like this rock band? Then you might like this CHRISTIAN rock band, which sounds almost as good, but at least you don't have to worry about there being sex or swearing." There are derivative bands in pop-music, but their derivation seems more intellectually honest. They're still just trying to make a buck, but at least you can see right through it, and listen or not. Christians bands are trying to make a buck and save your soul, which is a much more dangerous thing to do, especially if you're aping secular mannerisms in order to do it.
The arguable exception to that trend is actually praise and worship music as such, which as far as I know, has no musically similar counterpart in secular pop music (full disclosure: I am very far from an expert on what exists in pop music. It might be out there). But praise and worship music, as sneeringly described above, does borrow essential elements from rock music. It seems like a weird amalgamation (at least as it was instantiated at this worship service) of breathy acousti-singer-songwritery stuff with various strains of rock.
So we grant that the music, while not particularly ground-breaking, is at least unique in the sense that it is identifiable as what it is without reference to the lyrics. A praise-and-worship tune is what it is, whereas, minus lyrics, Christian screamo might be screamo or Christian screamo, which is both the point and the problem. Some might object by saying that I just got done saying that Christian versions of genres tend to be readily identifiable as Wal-Mart brand knock-offs, but the point is that there is good and bad screamo music out there, secular and Christian. As a rule (and here we are making breathtaking leaps into total assumptions, since I've never even heard Christian screamo, I just know that it exists), Christian stuff tends to be less groundbreaking simply because it has to wait for the ground to get broken to know in which direction it will be heading. Without lyrics, Christian screamo might be just a generic screamo band (it might even be a good screamo band--that isn't the particular objection being discussed in this paragraph).
Alright, lets move forward. The music is identifiable as what it is in a way that lets you know that it is going to be praise-and-worship music regardless of lyrics. Lets get to the lyrics, and some of the knottier issues involved in this style of corporate worship.
So my whole thesis for the rest of this increasingly essay-length post is going to be that the incorporation of praise-and-worship style music into a worship service is evidence of a radical break in the way we understand ourselves as Christians--both individually and as a church.
One of the principle facets of post-modernity seems to be a radical privatization of experience. The reductio ad absurdum result of this is the mode of argument that inevitably seems to end in: "thats your opinion" or "its true for me," or "its the same thing, but in a different way." Meaning has come undone at a surprisingly practical level. The notion is that there are no objective signposts identifying things as true or real and that therefore my definition of my own experience is 1) uniquely and ineluctably my own 2) valid without reference to anyone else's experience. This notion doesn't play out at some levels (a red light is a red light is a red light, and everyone feels pretty good about agreeing on that, for the sake of not constantly being in fear of death when negotiating intersections), but when it comes to anything that we don't think we can immediately verify, when it comes to: religion, politics, ethics, morality, we are left with our own opinions that can either be verified by other people agreeing, or contested by others' disagreement, but never in any case resolved by recourse to rational argument. This is weak thinking, but its characteristically post-modern weak thinking, and it is part and parcel of the entire post-modern personal experience which is, roughly: fragmented (and fractious), very very rapid, intensely personal.
In church, this has led in some cases to a devaluing of doctrine, specifically as it relates to a denominational identity. The whole concept 'denomination' seems like an archaic nomenclature for something that doesn't really exist anymore anyway. With so many umpteen iterations of baptists, whats the point of identifying as any kind of baptist? What is a baptist? These distinctions have gradually eroded from within, and serve as the basis for a telling critique of the whole system: "your disagreements are so trifling and yet so divisive. this is what we mean by organized religion--overly legalistic and distasteful and who needs it when we can simply experience Christ without all of your hair-splitting and dunking vs. sprinkling and five point vs. four point Calvinism and pre-millenial dispensationalism etc. We'll just borrow stuff that appeals to us, and has emotive value because its "old-fashioned" or "simple and sacred" or "communal," etc. etc. etc." Except that that attitude is itself a kind of doctrinal identity. The problem is that it seems like an unexamined identity to me.
The removal of context is another aspect of a world in which you can get any movie or tv show on demand, cued right up. In which TV shows now have graphics-within-graphics on screen, to tell us: this is on NOW, here's whats up NEXT and also be aware of LATER, in which tiny digital devices stream just about any kind of audio/visual/print entertainment we need, in which we can completely individualize our entertainment: when where and what we want it to be, in which we can carry on 'meaningful' texted conversations in emoticons and LOLspeak etc. This isn't a luddite rant against technology, its simply pointing out that the relentless competition for our attention in the World is mirrored just as relentlessly in the church (HMMM...). One of the byproducts of this tailoring of experience to match our desires is that we come to see as normal our indiscriminate sampling. And the thing about being indiscriminate is that you're almost always also being superficial. That is, you don't have time to soak anything up deeply, because then you might miss whats next. Or worse, you don't want to take the time to soak up anything because that would take too much time and be boring. Better to flit from experience to experience as rapidly as possible, like a junkie after a high. The ramifications in praise-and-worship music become apparent, though in ways that are subtle but that aren't necessarily bad, just incomplete (we are still talking about music, I promise!).
So, the three symptoms of postmodernity in praise-and-worship music, and how they can be potentially detrimental (though, importantly, not automatically detrimental).
All three symptoms are symptoms of the same basic illness, and that illness is the near total absence of a strongly identifiable sense of group within the group. What I mean is that praise and worship does a good job of identifying us in one important way: followers of Christ as opposed to those who are not. What it doesn't do is say much about our experience as a group of Christ-followers qua group of Christ-followers. The short way of saying this is: count the number of third person pronouns in a praise-and-worship tune, as opposed to the number of first-person pronouns. Lots of I's, me's, mine's, far fewer we's, us's, ours's etc. It might be unfair to so broadly generalize from a single service, but in the service that I went to there were only three instances of a we/us/our etc. One was quoted directly from scripture, and so can be put aside for purposes of intentional inclusion in the tune (in other words, it was included because it was scripture, not because it was scripture relating to the church qua church). The second was an 'us' that I'm pretty sure was used simply to rhyme 'victorious,' since the rest of the tune was pretty definitively first person. The final one was the one genuine instance I can allow. It was the familiar device of repeating a phrase exactly except moving from the first person to the third person: "I will worship you/I will worship you...WE will worship you/WE will worship you." This is, I believe, intended to be the exact inverse of the practice of replacing pronouns in scripture with personal pronouns, to move from general to very specific: "For God so loved John Q. Public (insert any proper name here), that He gave His...etc." So we're moving from specific to general, but thats kind of a problem in this case, because 'we' is not a general concept in Christianity. It refers to the Church, i.e. the world-wide body of believers, about whom the Bible has a lot of specific things to say, and about which Christ Himself also had specific things to say.
So my argument is that these instances of the idea of 'we' are either 1) coincidental (in the Aristotelian sense: 'a pale thing is approaching' is coincidentally true if a man is approaching who happens to be pale) in that they are in scripture: we are quoting scripture here, we are coincidentally quoting a text that uses the third person here; 2) convenient: 'us' rhymes with victorious, which is the important idea of the lyric; or, 3) indefinite: 'we' refers to 'the group of us standing here singing this song and only vaguely to "The Church" as such' as opposed to 'the worldwide body of Christ, instantiated here in this specific worship service but fully participating in the sum congregation of believers past present and future.'
Compare the first line of "A mighty fortress is Our God," which goes (get ready for it): "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing." That, to me, (and here as above I can see that there might be objections to my characterizations of those pronouns) is a great example of the specificity lacking in P-&-W. 'Our' God is a mighty fortress. A fortress does two things: identifies and organizes people. The second distinction is the important one. What I mean is this: we are identified as being those defended, those inside the fortress or behind the bulwark, as opposed to all those who are outside/attacking. P 'n W does that too, as we mentioned. It identifies us as Christ-followers. But a fortress also identifies us as all being in one place: we are all inside one specific, identifiable fortress. The difference is like a shepherd identifying his sheep in the midst of a much bigger flock, or spread out over a hillside, and then collecting them together into a flock, and, conversely, that shepherd merely identifying them where they are, without calling them together. Out in the world (i.e. during the rest of the week), we are identifiable as an individual sheep--hopefully identifiable as a certain kind of sheep, different from the others-- but when we come together, we are a single flock, and are identifiable as such.
Does that even make sense? Here's what I mean: praise and worship music is an example of contemporary worship, which is (according to argument) eclectic and above all personal and private. P 'n W music seems to be all about our individual walk with the Lord. At first sight, what's wrong with that? I would argue that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, and that indeed one of the biggest positives to come out of the whole contemporary church experience is a renewed emphasis on personal growth and accountability in a way that many 'old-school' church experiences can miss or unintentionally downplay. The problem is that its incomplete, and in a way, inappropriate. There is a time and place for private worship, and listening to praise and worship music could potentially be a great means by which to worship privately or in a smaller group (if you enjoy the music, which I don't particularly). But corporate worship is unique, and uniquely important. I believe that music as a tool of worship ought to be used to unify our attention and our identity, to audibly affirm our oneness as a body, and then to praise God in our capacity as a single body of believers, a great big uniquely differentiated WE. We sometimes experience the shepherd in his relationship to us individually, but there are also times when we experience the shepherd as a flock of sheep.
This brings us to the next point: praise and worship music has a distinctly packaged, distinctly commercial vibe. What I mean is this: these are tunes that have been crafted to be performed by bands, and when they are performed as congregational worship tunes they are actually performances by a band instead of worship by a congregation. In order to sing along you have to: 1) know the melody, 2) know the lyrics, and 3) know the form.
So the melody: these are tunes which do in fact have a basic melodic shape. Often times they are quite simple melodies. Here's the problem: since these are vehicles for performance and not for worship, as I've argued, they become harder to follow. The vocalists in this particular P 'n W band (and in others I've heard) performed: vocal melismas, ascending into harmony, stretching syllables, back-phrasing etc. Obviously, those are not decisions that can be instantly conveyed to a thousand people simultaneously so that we are all breathlessly sighing or angstfully soaring at the same time in the same places.
Lyrics: Because another corollary of the contemporary worship service is the total inclusion of as much technology as possible, the lyrics part of the equation is relatively easy: follow the bouncing ball (read the lyrics on the giant screens). The one caveat I would add is that the lyrics in these tunes, being essentially singer/songwriter type tunes, are often conversational, meandering, and totally non-metrical, meaning that without prior familiarity, you might be hole-stepping. The actual content of the lyrics is, regrettably, usually pretty vapid. But if we were to get into THAT as well, you'd never finish this. You've still got a long way to go.
And finally, know the form. This also speaks to the character of these tunes as essentially performance vehicles since most of them are shaped like pop tunes: intros, verses, choruses, bridges, interludes, postludes, vamps, etc. Again, unless you know these tunes from listening to them recreationally, you will constantly be a step behind. If you sing a hymn you don't know, you follow the words through the first verse and chorus and can then jump right in for the remaining verses, confident that what you will be singing will follow a basic pattern that is easily and quickly communicable to large numbers of people (i.e. it is a vehicle for group singing, not a performance vehicle for a band in front of an audience).
The final and perhaps most telling critique of P 'n W music in worship services is the volume. This is obviously based on a single experience and so isn't necessarily true of any other services, but I'm guessing its common. The idea of a contemporary worship service is to be exciting and flashy, and above all, contemporary. Its hard to ratchet up the volume on a hymn sing, unless you can get everyone to belt out the words a little louder. P 'n W bypasses audience participation as a volume factor altogether by completely drowning them out under the amplification of the band on stage. Volume has two dangerous effects, one of which we've basically been hammering on for awhile: a loud volume excludes meaningful audience participation. It was literally impossible to hear more than a smattering of other people singing, though many in the crowd knew the words and were singing along. So any sense of 'us, together worshipping' was drowned by 'them, on stage performing.' Occasionally, the lead singer would step back from the microphone and encourage the audience to sing. At those points, the bottom dropped out of the vocals. People were singing, but the effect was totally undermined because the bedrock volume level was almost certainly at 11. In essence, the audience singing was like the audience at a rock concert singing. Each individual enjoys participating with the band on stage, but everyone is clear about where the actual performance is taking place: who is accompanying whom. In a traditional service, the musicians accompany the congregation. It was exactly opposite in this case.
There is one more point about volume that, more than the others, may be idiosyncratic to me. Because the volume was so loud, the manipulations of the worship leader became so overt as to be distracting and insincere. This is an objection to the volume specifically, not necessarily to P 'n W worship services, though there is an element of an objection to that as well. What I mean is this: in a typical contemporary worship service the worship leader will attempt to lead the congregation through a series of experiences in order to prepare them for the rest of the service. This is often done by starting with a raucous 'start-the-party' praise-jam. Then they'll 'slow things down' a bit and become more contemplative, with perhaps a scripture reading and a prayer, then followed by another barn-burner or the sermon or what have you. So the worship leader is now wearing two hats: he is the front man in a band on stage, and he's a worship leader. This results in a lot of heavy breathing as he/she attempts to combine the deeply contemplative, emotionally drenched stance of a singer/songwriter with that particularly aggravating and affected habit of moaning at the beginning of every single phrase of a song: "huhwhoooaahGoduhhhh hooWe just ehWorship ehYou...uhWHOAHohwhuuuOH, with that of a worship leader reading that week's scripture passage. So when they're reading scripture, they're using the microphone as if they were singing. Now, as a singer, you learn how to use a microphone as an instrument to capture every artfully contrived break of your voice or rasp in your throat. You, after all, are overcome with emotion and are having (remember!) an intensely private spiritual experience, which is coincidentally being overheard by a thousand people. The result is that, with the volume at eleven, we can unfortunately not only hear every gargle of sincerity you've applied to poor old Isaiah, we can also practically hear you thinking about where to apply it, as you lean in and out of the microphone, wheezing and sighing through every aspirant and trailing off after every hissing sibilant with a pregnant pause where the drum fill ought to go. This drives me nuts and is probably just a personal beef because I am always somewhat suspicious of overt attempts to influence my emotional state, especially when I can see the signposts for where you're taking me before we get there. I can recognize and don't mind being manipulated rhetorically or musically, but don't whisper at me on 11.
In conclusion: have an original thought, maybe think about 'us' as a group once in awhile, lead us in worship rather than worshipping 'at' us, turn it down a smidge. I think there is a lot of good to be found in contemporary worship. But there are dangers as well, and the nature of the service I attended on Wednesday made it clear that there is a distinction to be made between private and corporate worship, and that there is a creeping radical individualism in contemporary worship that should be recognized and relegated to its rightful place in our Christian walk, so that we don't forsake the gathering of ourselves together, which has as much to do with our participatory fellowship and worship as it does with our being in the same place at the same time. If you read this whole thing, you're definitely a trooper.
One final caveat: this was all pretty much off the top of my head. I don't cite facts or examples very frequently and am totally willing to be proved wrong, and not only wrong about the facts but also totally ignorant of them. I don't hate praise and worship music or contemporary services. I just think we should be aware of what exactly they are, and what exactly they aren't, so that we might be able to improve on them from there. Also, I don't mean to suggest that hymns are all nuggets of musical perfection. "A mighty fortress" was itself syncretized, bastardized, and bowdlerized in the sense that it was originally an old (german, I think) drinking tune that was "re-purposed" by Martin Luther so that the devil didn't have all the best tunes. Just goes to show that as much as these problems are new, they're also already very very old.
Matt
