Music Mondays: When CCM gets serious

CCM often feels perfectly packaged. Artists need to fit a certain image and sing about certain topics in order to maximize their popularity. This is probably true of the entire music industry, but when your audience is Christian you are dealing with a whole different set of expectations and standards. 

Maybe sprinkle in a little bit of honesty and transparency about the difficulties of life but not too much. CCM often drift towards that safe space and really always has. 

Every once in a while though, someone breaks the mold. The first major exception like this that I can remember was this song:

"What If I Stumble?" was the track after dc Talk's megahit "Jesus Freak" on the album of the same name and the contrast of tones what startling and made me and many like me sit up and take notice. dc Talk was hugely popular in Christian circles before this album but their fame hit another stratosphere after it. And in the middle of all of this, they had the temerity/vision/arrogance/humility to include a song about doubt, vulnerability, and frailty.  

Self-awareness, transparency, and weakness are not common subjects in CCM. "What If I Stumble?" broke the mold. And that's what the songs in this series are all about.

Music Mondays: When CCM gets serious

I fully realize it is Wednesday and also it's been almost an exact month since I last posted for Music Monday or anything. But here we are.

I was listening to a podcast earlier this summer that takes a look back at various pieces of Christian culture. This particular episode was analyzing the Newsboys album "Step up to the Microphone". For me, it was a trip back through memory lane to my later high school years of the late 90's. 

There were a number of radio hits from that CD, but the song that I most appreciated remembering was one not featured as a single - the last track, "Always".

That song had always resonated with me, probably because of it's chorus highlighting God being our "Father in my fatherless days". This song reflects a story of fatherly abandonment and finding God's healing help in the aftermath of that. My story is about a father who died - so it is different, but the truth still resounds in a powerful way.

So for the next few weeks, I'll be highlighting songs that tackled serious subjects. CCM often retreats into clichés and bland theology, that while usually true, doesn't connect to real life. But every so often, an artist or artists will break the mold and venture into the challenges of reality. And as we'll see, the result is often some of the best work they do, even if it's not the most popular.