Well, IMO Chagall Guevara’s lyrics were not explicitly Christian, but if you’re looking for it at all, the Christian worldview is pretty clearly there. With the exception of maybe one or two tracks each, Taylor’s last three or four solo albums weren’t explicitly Christian, either.
I guess the record label is a good dividing line, though, so by that measure I guess you could say that they were “secular.”
Not since Ben left. Now it’s standard pseudo-goth Top 40 songs about breakups and tortured love, all the way.
Signed,
kfl, whose brand new gf is a devoted Ev-head.
I think it’s interesting that no one has yet mentioned Creed. I think that says a lot about Creed.
There was an article in GQ magazine a couple years back where a guy attended and reviewed a Christian Rock festival. He came up with an interesting distinction, that a “Christian Rock band” is a rock band that plays music targeted at Christians, while a “Christian band” is a rock band that just happens to be composed of Christians. The writer had considerably more respect for the latter than the former.
I used to listen to a lot of Christian music too. My parents like it a lot. I kind of grew out of it, but some of it is still good.
I kind of like Audio Adrenaline too, especially their album Underdog. The lyrics are good for a mainstream Christian band and the music isn’t bad either, though not as good as when I was 13.
I used to love Jars of Clay. I still like them but I don’t listen to them much. Some of you might have heard their song “Flood”, which was a hit in the mid-90’s. I think they were mildly controversial among some Christians for being more than “Praise Jesus!” in every song. They are an example of a mainstream christian band with lyrics that could be broad topically. The song Art in Me had very poetic lyrics.
They started out as sort of a basic mid-90s mainstream alternative band and then progressed from there. Their first three albums are good, but their fourth was mediocre. After that they reinvented themselves as a sort of Gospel band, which they do well.
It doesn’t have to be like that, but that generally is the case.
Rich Mullins has been mentioned. Is he the guy that wrote “Awesome God”? It is a pretty good song, but the verse lyrics are terrible. The first two lines are:
“When he rolls up his sleeve he ain’t puttin’ on the ritz
Our god is an awesome god”
[for some reason my brain just mashed that song together with REM’s “Man on the Moon”- "Moses went walking with a staff of wood/ Our god is an awesome god. . . "
Nick Cave’s music is, of course, chockablock with Christian themes, and can even to some extent be divided into his “Old Testament” and “New Testament” phases. You might find it interesting to check out the album The Secret Life of the Love Song & The Flesh Made Word: Two Lectures by Nick Cave.
Wow . . . seen some bands I recognize mentioned, but mostly this thread just reminds me just how OLD my experience with Christian rock really is. I grew up in a very conservative area of Ohio, and my family and friends bought the first albums ever put out by Petra, Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, Rez Band, and Steve Taylor. This was back when Christian Rock was considered something of an oxymoron. Stryper’s secular success was cause for a lot of controversy, and looking back at it now, it’s hard to argue that they weren’t using Christianity as a bit of a gimmick.
I still own a lot of those albums. They were made by artists who were idealists, because there really was no money in Christian rock back then. (My experience is from the early 80s to the late-90s). What is called “Christian Rock” now has been homogenized into a saleable genre, and the artistic drive just isn’t there. As others have noted, Steve Taylor was a brilliant songwriter, as was M.W. Smith and Bob Hartman of Petra in their prime. IMHO, they were the equals of mainstream secular artists working back then, although the Christian performers were a little more restrained in some ways because they considered themselves “message” artists.
Along with Rez Band (a bunch of inner-city Chicagoans who were as tough as any secular band) they wrote songs about suicide (“The Last Letter,” Smith), racism (“We Don’t Need No Color Code,” Taylor) Third World poverty (“Hollow Eyes” by Petra) child abuse and homelessness (“Playground” by Rez Band, which also recorded several songs about apartheid.)
The key difference that I can see from these artists and secular music then and now is the message of hope the Christian stuff contained. “Playground,” and Rez Band in particular were and still are inspirational to me. Rez didn’t apologize for their faith; they were streetwise in the literal sense, as people who were Christians but had (sometimes first-hand) experience with drug abuse, poverty, and crime. They sang about these things as people whose faith wasn’t a fad, a trend, or a social club, but as a force that literally changed their lives and saved them from the gutter. A quote from “Playground” will illustrate what I mean:
*I see them every day
with holes all in their clothes
dirty faces, matted hair
snot running from their nose
I wonder what they had to eat
I wonder where they sleep
glue bags, porn and suicide the Devil sells you cheap
They say God lives in the sky
Does he really care?
Maybe he’s got lots to do
Don’t want us in his hair
But I can tell you first hand
He took me in his arms
God don’t beat his children, or leave them all alone.*
Powerful stuff, and they had a lot of songs like that. If the OP wants Christian music that really takes Christianity seriously, he should forget just about everything made in the last 10 years, and start with these albums. They will be hard to find; some aren’t even on CD, and all were released before 1987:
Petra - Beat The System
Michael W. Smith - The Big Picture
Rez Band - Live! Bootleg (One of my favorite live albums by any band, ever)
Stever Taylor - Meltdown (His “I Predict 1990” album is good too)
Sorry I got long-winded. Christian music, and what has happened to it, are very personal issue for me.
climbs on soapbox
Yet another reason Christian radio sucks - this is the only song people know by Rich Mullins. Yeah, he wrote it. No, it’s not good. But the majority are much better. Please don’t judge the man by ‘Awesome God’.
climbs off soapbox
I did not know. I know of them as Gothic.
I was looking in Borders Books & Music for Sixpence None The Richer. I went through the popular music section to no avail. Then I did a computer search – Christian contemporary. I didn’t know.
For some reason I feel that it is better to say: “Evanescence and Sixpence None the Richer are my favorite bands…oh yeah, years later I discovered that they are Christian rock” versus “Evanescence and Sixpence None the Richer are Christian rock and I love their songs”
As a Christian and a rock fan, I have to admit, I almost always find explicitly religious lyrics to be trite and cheesy. George Harrison and Bob Marley are about the only people I trust to sing unabashedly about God and still sound cool. I guess they call it the devil’s music for a reason.
This is a result of lack of sophistication in the Christian artists, not because of the material or genre. Early Christian rock was thematically and theologically complex, far more so than what is being made today. (The song I quoted in my post above was published circa 1982.)
A lot of so-called “Christian” groups today are provincial bands playing to a provincial audience. It was not always so.
Hehe…you’re so Mormon. 
Speaking of which, did you ever see or hear of the Mormon-produced film The RM? It was by the same company that did The Singles Ward.