In August 1994, I left Texas for college in Nashville, TN, where many of my friends expected me to become the next Michael W. Smith. And, truthfully, that was my hope. The analogy made both superficial and musical sense at the time, as Smith, one of the leading contemporary Christian artists of my generation, was, like me, a pianist, vocalist, and composer. He provided a model of what I wanted to do.
That didn’t happen. I’ve written previously about why I lost my inner connection to music, but that experience was just one arc of the story. The other arc involved what I would call “the Christian cultural-industrial complex,” which, to paraphrase Voltaire, was neither Christian, cultural, nor industrial. Though it did give many people various kinds of complexes.
I wasn’t completely naïve about how the Christian music industry worked when I moved to Nashville. I had a youth minister who’d previously worked for a record label. He shared stories about how money drove most decisions, how artists might make a show of faith in exchange for fame and sensual pleasures, and how many people who couldn’t make it in “the real music industry” settled for top billing in the second-tier Christian sub-culture.
Where I was naïve, and guilty of some magical, youthful thinking and hubris, was that I was good enough to overcome all that….just by being really good – both musically and spiritually.
I saw very quickly that contemporary Christian music was indeed an industry, governed by a logic and power structure, gatekeepers and influence-peddlers, that was mostly a replica of everything in the normal music industry. Yet it somehow called itself Christian, though I caught on that “Christian” designated the consumer of the music, not the content or meaning of the genre.
I wasn’t the only one who saw this. In 1996, about a year before he died in a tragic car accident, I sat on the front row of the Ryman Auditorium listening to Rich Mullins ask a packed house, “Why don’t we have a sell-all-your-possessions-and-give-to-the-poor movement instead of a Jesus-as-personal-savior movement?” Not long after that I got acquainted with songwriters Derek Webb (of Caedmon’s Call) and Andrew Peterson, both influenced by Mullins and critical of the industry in their own songwriting and later publishing endeavors.
There were other musicians, of course, who struggled against industry-as-system and Christian-as-aspiration-only. Some worked within it, others left disillusioned. Best I can figure, no one really liked it.
I certainly didn’t. I grew up singing in church, and I later found refuge and community in making music with others at school and elsewhere. There is nothing that teaches you listening skills like making music with other people, and there is something different you learn about teamwork than what you learn playing sports or doing a project together: music is an intrinsic good, done for its own sake, and the beauty you experience with it is qualitatively different than, say, getting a product to market.
Music was a deep part of me, which I didn’t feel could be surrendered to a simple market calculation.
Making music, as any musician except Kenny G will tell you, is a practice that enlivens the soul. Following a path like Christianity, that can be a soul-making path. Put those two together, and there can be an enriching spiritual experience—or, if industrialized, a soul-draining one.
But I was young, vulnerable, impatient and ill-equipped to deal with systems.
I wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t become the next Michael W. Smith.
In the long process of becoming myself, however, I was right on track.