As Plugged In’s main music reviewer, I spend a lot of time thinking about popular music—specifically, observing what artists are saying as well as focusing upon the values and worldviews that their lyrics reflect and reinforce. Along with my fellow Plugged In reviewers, I strive to carefully interpret what I’m hearing from a Christian perspective. So I’m always encouraged when I find something that helps me pursue that task with greater precision and clarity.
I came across exactly such a resource last week in the form of a blog by Christian youth culture expert Walt Mueller. His organization, the Center for Parent Youth Understanding (cpyu.org) does a terrific job of thinking about how our culture influences young people, as well as pondering what it takes to pass the baton of Christian faith on to those growing up today.
Mueller’s blog, titled “How Music Has Changed … And What It Says About Us” contrasts two very different artists from different times and reflects upon what their lyrics say about our culture and its values. Mueller said he was prompted to write the blog after watching two live musical performances in quick succession: first the band Heart during the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, then Selena Gomez’s performance a day later at this year’s Billboard Music Awards.
Mueller offered a keen analysis of these two very different performers’ lyrics, which I’ll get to in a minute. Perhaps what I appreciated most, however, was his description of how to think about popular culture from a Christian perspective. Mueller writes:
When I teach skills in media evaluation and cultural exegesis, I always tell students to listen and look for spiritual hunger cries. There is always some cry for redemption. There is always some indicator of humanity’s universal hunger for heaven that is rooted in our brokenness and lostness. There are also clear indicators of where people are traveling in their quest to find redemption. Like Paul in Athens (Acts 17), we need to find the “unknown God.”
Mueller’s starting point for cultural interpretation, then, is identifying what someone’s artistic expression says about their hurts and what they think will provide some relief from those hurts.
In this particular case study, Mueller compared Heart’s performance of its 1976 hit “Crazy on You” to Selena Gomez’s current hit “Come and Get It.” He observes:
I’ve been pondering this as I think about what I saw and heard from Heart and Selena Gomez last weekend. When Nancy Wilson hits those guitar chords and sister Ann’s voice soars in “Crazy On You,” there’s a unmistakable sense that they clearly know that they and the world are broken and that we all need some kind of relief. The song is rooted in the tumultuous and tenuous years of the 1970s. They sing, “If we still have time, we might still get by/Every time I think about it, I wanna cry/With bombs and the devil, and the kids keep comin’/No way to breathe easy, no time to be young… Wild man’s world is cryin’ in pain/What you gonna do when everybody’s insane.” While Heart’s redemption is sought in the wrong place (a night of escape into passion), there’s at least the conscious sense that things are horribly broken and in need of repair. But if Selena’s song is an indication of how we’ve changed as a culture, we don’t ponder the brokenness anymore. We simply skip right to seduction, as if that is the chief end of humanity.
Then he adds, “So, while brokenness was in the music back in the 70s and it’s still here now, we’ve spiraled down more than we know. We don’t think. We don’t ponder. …We simply flood the market with musical and lyrical fluff that is fed to thoughtless minds who as a result of their thoughtlessness, are even more easily influenced that ever before.”
I think Walt Mueller’s right on the money here in his comparative assessment of what these musicians from different eras say about our culture through their songs. Even more than that, however, I appreciate how he’s given us a helpful grid for thinking deeply and critically about pop culture from a Christian point of view—not only about what a given entertainer is saying, but why she might be saying it and how her images, ideas and ideals might be shaping the fans who are influenced by them.
Recent Comments