More than Mimics: The Music of the Counter-Culture

What has become a fairly major pet-peeve of mine is the tendency of the Christian music industry to try and match the sounds of "Christian artists" with those of the secular industry. These days you can go into your local Christian bookstore and see a list of artists who are compared and categorized by the nearness of their sound to a well-known secular artist.

While I can understand that Mom and Dad might find this useful in finding a less destructive, but similar sounding, version of Nine Inch Nails for their adolescent to listen to, I think what it does is play into the tendency of the Christian industry to do no better than mimic the secular industry. Its like we're surrendering ourselves to the fact that ground-breaking art will be made by secular artists. And that it's only our job to come along and "repackage it with a track"- and call it "ours". That's just sad in my mind.

We are the imagebearers of the creator of the Universe- the Ultimate Artist. We should be the ones defining the cutting edge of music and art. Not so much because we're trying to be "cutting edge" as that we're pursuing God with our whole hearts and writing music that is attempting to describe the undescribable. If we did that more often, we would, as a bi-product, be making the kind of music that would turn heads everywhere- both in "the World" and in the Kingdom.