5:40PM
A Look Back: Christianity, Satire, and Irony in America in the 1980's
Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 5:40PM | by Otter 
Romeo Unchained: New Wave Moralism of the Best Sort
Having worked as a radio producer, I speak with knowledge and authority when I say I’m an inveterate hater of Contemporary Christian music.
I feel no need to apologize for that: in its infancy in the 1970’s and 1980’s there was a general feeling that, if you were singing about God, you were by definition being deep and wise. This was sadly not the case, as Mylon Lefevre demonstrated when he sang, “Here I stand before You on my knees” (“Morning Star”).
There were excellent moments, real artistic coups: just to pluck a few examples from many, Don Francisco’s rehabilitation of the narrative ballad (“He’s Alive,” “Too Small A Price”) were for a few years outstandingly transcendent of the preachy, predictable, dull, smug, and smarmy songs that made up the mainstream of Christian music.
Similarly Keith Green’s often-Pharisaical zeal was quite inimitable in its musicality and mprovisational energy: if you want to experience deep embarrassment, listen to anybody else perform a Keith Green song. (I think that Bill Maxwell, his producer and drummer for many albums, deserves some sort of medal for harnessing the man to a band without losing that energy.) I don’t revisit Keith Green much, but his artistic integrity should rightly be a thing of legend.
More to my liking, Mark Heard and Rich Mullins both actually read books beside the Bible, and had things to say that were worth saying.
Possibly the hardest thing to do though in that musical hothouse climate of American Christian subculture was to write good satire. The reason was (and remains) that satire requires that you really understand what it is you’re digging into. It takes a bit of love and comprehension for the thing you aim to reform.
Larry Norman: The strange, distant genius step-father of Contemporary Christian Music
Consider Larry Norman’s “Reader’s Digest” (1973, from the legendary Only Visiting This Planet), which uses the basic patter-patterns of Dylan’s “Sidewalk Soliloquy” for a musical bed against which Norman does a sort of rap about musical and political culture in 1973. Clearly conditioned by Dylan’s mistrust of government and the drift of American life as well as his music, “Reader’s Digest” shows a command of the things it remarks upon. It’s a judgmental song: most satire is, implicitly or otherwise. But it differs from the satire of 1980’s Christian pop entertainer Carmen in that Larry Norman never seems to misunderstand his subject:
Harsh, but true, and clearly understood from within the world of 1970’s hippy music. Similarly, one can argue that Larry Norman is judgmental, but not that he’s wrong when he narrates:
I feel no need to apologize for that: in its infancy in the 1970’s and 1980’s there was a general feeling that, if you were singing about God, you were by definition being deep and wise. This was sadly not the case, as Mylon Lefevre demonstrated when he sang, “Here I stand before You on my knees” (“Morning Star”).
There were excellent moments, real artistic coups: just to pluck a few examples from many, Don Francisco’s rehabilitation of the narrative ballad (“He’s Alive,” “Too Small A Price”) were for a few years outstandingly transcendent of the preachy, predictable, dull, smug, and smarmy songs that made up the mainstream of Christian music.
Similarly Keith Green’s often-Pharisaical zeal was quite inimitable in its musicality and mprovisational energy: if you want to experience deep embarrassment, listen to anybody else perform a Keith Green song. (I think that Bill Maxwell, his producer and drummer for many albums, deserves some sort of medal for harnessing the man to a band without losing that energy.) I don’t revisit Keith Green much, but his artistic integrity should rightly be a thing of legend.
More to my liking, Mark Heard and Rich Mullins both actually read books beside the Bible, and had things to say that were worth saying.
Possibly the hardest thing to do though in that musical hothouse climate of American Christian subculture was to write good satire. The reason was (and remains) that satire requires that you really understand what it is you’re digging into. It takes a bit of love and comprehension for the thing you aim to reform.
Larry Norman: The strange, distant genius step-father of Contemporary Christian MusicConsider Larry Norman’s “Reader’s Digest” (1973, from the legendary Only Visiting This Planet), which uses the basic patter-patterns of Dylan’s “Sidewalk Soliloquy” for a musical bed against which Norman does a sort of rap about musical and political culture in 1973. Clearly conditioned by Dylan’s mistrust of government and the drift of American life as well as his music, “Reader’s Digest” shows a command of the things it remarks upon. It’s a judgmental song: most satire is, implicitly or otherwise. But it differs from the satire of 1980’s Christian pop entertainer Carmen in that Larry Norman never seems to misunderstand his subject:
The Rolling Stones are millionaires, the flower children are pallbearers,
The Beatles said all you need is love, and then they broke up.
Harsh, but true, and clearly understood from within the world of 1970’s hippy music. Similarly, one can argue that Larry Norman is judgmental, but not that he’s wrong when he narrates:
Jimmie took an overdose, Janice followed so close,
The whole music scene and all the bands are pretty comatose,
Really good satire is usually judgmental and moralistic, and that’s a strength, not a weakness: it critiques institutions in a way that preaching cannot do effectively. And in an age when the really powerful institution was free thinking and personal liberty, Norman offered the stinging critique of an insider in many of his songs.
He also paved the way for three of the six best satirists in American music in the 1980’s, who just happened to be Christians: Terry Scott Taylor, Steve Taylor (no relation), and Tonio K. (The other great satirists were Randy Newman, an increasingly bitter and newly baptized Bob Dylan, and, the perennial Tom Waits. T-Bone Burnett scored assists whenever he released an album.) Terry Scott Taylor, the weirdo of American music, needs his own essay.
As I said, I hated Christian music. But I knew that music. And one thing that had to be said about both Taylors and Tonio K. was that, by thoroughly understanding their subjects, by immersing themselves in the culture that they meant to judge, they avoided the damning superficiality of more direct evangelical judgments against American culture.
For instance, while Scott Wesley Brown scolded that unidentified sinners were “fools who march to win the right to justify their sin” (“This Little Child”) Steve Taylor envisioned and presented his audience with a portrait of human behavior that was the result of close observation and compassion. He imagines a straying husband in counseling and asking, “If the healing comes as the time goes by / tell me why I still can’t look her in the eye” (“Sin For A Season”). Both songs render judgments. Only one suggests that the singer understands the sinner: Steve Taylor might be the man on the therapist’s couch, but nobody would have imagined Scott Wesley Brown marching to justify his sin.
And this habit of understanding enabled Taylor, and to an even greater degree Tonio K., to gain some ironic distance on their own judgments: both men were capable of skewering their fellow Christians as easily as the pagan world they understood so well, with the same mixture of love and judgment. Both were wicked comedians, and like Tom Waits, both were capable of slipping into the role of the characters in their songs and singing with apparent sincerity a point of view that they meant to dismantle.
Two of the best albums of the 1980’s were Taylor’s Meltdown At Madame Tussaud’s (1984) and Tonio K.’s Romeo Unchained (1986). The title song for Meltdown, instead of lecturing about coming judgment, presents an allegorical satire in which all the famous people of history, gathered at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, melt in a thermostat-related catastrophe. “The queen is losing face… a general’s been disarmed.”
Hic transit gloria mundi. The reflection is medieval, but the presentation is ironic, with airtight guitar hooks and witty reversals in the lyrics.
I might as well say that I don’t like or necessarily believe in the theology of judgment, but then the wonderful thing about Steve Taylor is that even if you have no notion of Christian Judgment Day, the song is still true: death is the great leveler. No matter your status in this world, death undoes you as surely as if you were melting wax. “Think,” says his thin ironic voice, “about it.”
Similarly on the same album, Steve Taylor took a typical darling of right-wing Evangelical subculture, American capitalism, and painted it with the same dark brush that it reserved for secular humanism. In “Whatcha Gonna Do When Your Number’s Up?” a sly bait-and-switch begins by inviting (in a voice that’s a dead ringer for David Bowie) judgments on a girl who “spends her years in college just to find out nothing is true.” What will she do, the chorus asks, when her number’s up? But the second verse targets a capitalist who similarly gathers. (The song imitates the “gathering” motif of Ecclesiastes, a book Taylor seems to have dealt with thoughtfully in the writing of the album.)
How’d Meltdown do on the Christian charts?
Don’t bother asking.
Notes From The Lost Civilization: From the primordial ooze to the first Bush presidency: Tonio K. as cultural anthropologist. It was hard to beat Romeo Unchained, but he managed it.
Tonio K. is probably the most subtle and ironic moralist of the 1980’s. In Romeo Unchained and the followup album Notes From the Lost Civilization (1988), two commercial failures, he surveys modern love and culture respectively. The production of the two albums was high above average for anything out there with pretensions to being Christian, and neither album mentions Jesus conspicuously. In the 1980’s that was a one-way ticket to the margins of Christian sub-culture.
But both albums had sharp satirical teeth. Christian bookstores carried a version of Notes that lacked one song, “I Know What These Women Want” because the first line crowed, “I know what these women want: they want sex.” (The song goes on to investigate the material, emotional and spiritual desires of women. But in 1980’s official Evangelical culture, women did not want sex.)
Then too, Romeo’s best song announced that the citizens of America were “out looking for love, love, love / on a Saturday night in a Coupe Deville.” The next best reported that “Shakespeare and Cheetah / Are crying in their margaritas. / Bad news: Romeo loves Jane.” Not a lot of Christian airplay for that one, even though the Bible announces the same truth (that the human heart tends to be rudderless and unfaithful).
What was depressing, almost maddening, in the 1980’s was that this was in some ways the best satire out there. It was unabashedly moral and unhypocritical. It mocked modern conceptions of love as well as contemporary religion without pretending that (on the one hand) modern love was somehow shockingly unnatural or (on the other) that religious instincts were themselves foolish. It was rational, imaginative, intelligent stuff.
But it could speak clearly because it looked directly at its target instead of tut-tutting behind its chastity belt. It lived in the world it discussed.
Have things gotten better on the Christian scene?
There have been good changes. If you ask Christian musicians who their favorite songwriters are, you’ll hear good answers: Mark Heard, Rich Mullins, Bruce Cockburn, Tonio K., T-Bone Burnett.
But really, so long as there is a “Christian” subculture, Christian moralizing will always be incredibly thin. To fence oneself off from a culture is to give up the right to speak to it. You have to see clearly what you’re talking about, not as an outsider, but as a citizen, committed to its well-being.
Meantime, I’m sure you can turn on Christian radio and find something unoriginal that vaguely resembles the Jonas Brothers or Nickleback. It might give you the comfortable illusion that conversion is a comfortable transition from death to life. Which is a lie.
But it feels wonderful, and it sells well at Christmas.
I might as well say that I don’t like or necessarily believe in the theology of judgment, but then the wonderful thing about Steve Taylor is that even if you have no notion of Christian Judgment Day, the song is still true: death is the great leveler. No matter your status in this world, death undoes you as surely as if you were melting wax. “Think,” says his thin ironic voice, “about it.”
Similarly on the same album, Steve Taylor took a typical darling of right-wing Evangelical subculture, American capitalism, and painted it with the same dark brush that it reserved for secular humanism. In “Whatcha Gonna Do When Your Number’s Up?” a sly bait-and-switch begins by inviting (in a voice that’s a dead ringer for David Bowie) judgments on a girl who “spends her years in college just to find out nothing is true.” What will she do, the chorus asks, when her number’s up? But the second verse targets a capitalist who similarly gathers. (The song imitates the “gathering” motif of Ecclesiastes, a book Taylor seems to have dealt with thoughtfully in the writing of the album.)
How’d Meltdown do on the Christian charts?
Don’t bother asking.
Notes From The Lost Civilization: From the primordial ooze to the first Bush presidency: Tonio K. as cultural anthropologist. It was hard to beat Romeo Unchained, but he managed it.Tonio K. is probably the most subtle and ironic moralist of the 1980’s. In Romeo Unchained and the followup album Notes From the Lost Civilization (1988), two commercial failures, he surveys modern love and culture respectively. The production of the two albums was high above average for anything out there with pretensions to being Christian, and neither album mentions Jesus conspicuously. In the 1980’s that was a one-way ticket to the margins of Christian sub-culture.
But both albums had sharp satirical teeth. Christian bookstores carried a version of Notes that lacked one song, “I Know What These Women Want” because the first line crowed, “I know what these women want: they want sex.” (The song goes on to investigate the material, emotional and spiritual desires of women. But in 1980’s official Evangelical culture, women did not want sex.)
Then too, Romeo’s best song announced that the citizens of America were “out looking for love, love, love / on a Saturday night in a Coupe Deville.” The next best reported that “Shakespeare and Cheetah / Are crying in their margaritas. / Bad news: Romeo loves Jane.” Not a lot of Christian airplay for that one, even though the Bible announces the same truth (that the human heart tends to be rudderless and unfaithful).
What was depressing, almost maddening, in the 1980’s was that this was in some ways the best satire out there. It was unabashedly moral and unhypocritical. It mocked modern conceptions of love as well as contemporary religion without pretending that (on the one hand) modern love was somehow shockingly unnatural or (on the other) that religious instincts were themselves foolish. It was rational, imaginative, intelligent stuff.
But it could speak clearly because it looked directly at its target instead of tut-tutting behind its chastity belt. It lived in the world it discussed.
Have things gotten better on the Christian scene?
There have been good changes. If you ask Christian musicians who their favorite songwriters are, you’ll hear good answers: Mark Heard, Rich Mullins, Bruce Cockburn, Tonio K., T-Bone Burnett.
But really, so long as there is a “Christian” subculture, Christian moralizing will always be incredibly thin. To fence oneself off from a culture is to give up the right to speak to it. You have to see clearly what you’re talking about, not as an outsider, but as a citizen, committed to its well-being.
Meantime, I’m sure you can turn on Christian radio and find something unoriginal that vaguely resembles the Jonas Brothers or Nickleback. It might give you the comfortable illusion that conversion is a comfortable transition from death to life. Which is a lie.
But it feels wonderful, and it sells well at Christmas.
Reader Comments (4)
Tell me, oh, tell me it was just a tragic oversight that Bill Mallonee of Vigilantes of Love didn't make the list.
It was an accident. Though I think Bill's influence was more "local" than the others named. Alas: he deserves a very wide audience. One of the best live-shows I've ever seen.
I was never all that aware of Tonio K, but otherwise I am completely tracking with you. I guess I gave up on contemporary Christian music some time around '85 or '86. The thing that really ruined it for me once and for all was the realization that CCM had more in common with commercial jingles than with authentic artistic expression. For me it was a striking connection between the vapid, derivative nature of jingles in service of moving some product and the formulaic propagandizing in service of pietistic moralizing.
Your ending jab reminded me of Larry Norman's rant about the commercialization of Christmas, where in typical fashion he went out of his way to provoke. "Santa Claus is coming and the kids are getting greedy. They know it's in the stores because they seen it on the TV. It's Christmas time!"
I've heard of unfaithful lovers, but this is outrageous! Now I'll have to dig out my Tonio K. cassette! (It was the 80's after all! And by the way, where's my rocket pack?) I think Steve Taylor's best is "Squint", with "I Predict" 1990 very close.