Isn’t Skillet kinda fine?..
the key ingredient is they don’t only sing about Jesus. See also: Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. Mainstream audiences don’t generally mind christian themes so long as that band is being true to themselves rather than making common denominator slop.
i mean… look at all the music that came from Motown records before 1985. not all of those musicians and acts were devoutly christian, but a lot of them were
I think you nailed it. I don’t mind the Christian songs of Black Sabbath. They are just true to themselves and sing what they want to sing.
Skillet is trash, and the front man is a tool.
You misspelled fire.
Hate AI ‘art’. Love me some Icon For Hire. But they mostly sing about mental illness with pop-metal hooks, and rarely anything spiritual.
I would not call icon for hire christian rock. You can glean they are christian, and you can draw parallels in their messaging, but at the same time it would be easy for a non christian to say and espouse the ideas in their lyrics all the same.
…then…why are they relevant here?
The objective was to try to get religion to appeal to youth. I knew some young 20’s guys in a band who were into it circa 1998.
You mean the goal wasn’t to get rock to appeal to Christians? 😲
I believe you mean “the Devil’s Music”. Getting the kiddos all swinging and gyraten their hips like demons.
some of that evil pelvic sorcery, i hear
When I was a preacher I did a sermon based on that episode. It’s such an accurate picture of a teenager finding a social group that happened to be at church. And Hank accurately calls out how shallow that kind of social faith is.
At the end of the episode, Hank pulls out a box of crap from fads Bobby had been into and talked about how he didn’t want Bobby’s spirituality to end up in that box.
For millions of people, church is basically a club where they meet with their friends, and since the church is still the most racially segregated place in America, that’s a problem.
The “Christian Club” mentality is what allowed the rise of the religious right, when churches should be vocal about justice for the the sick, the poor, and the foreigners.
since the church is still the most racially segregated place in America
Unrelated to the rest of your comment, I find this observation perplexing. In Germany, the church I went to had close ties to several African communities. I loved their joyful, passionate style of worship-parties, more than what I learned of other churches in Germany. The Africans I knew at that church (refugees) were some of the kindest, loveliest people I’ve known. I’d credit that as being one of the good things I took from my faith: Growing up in frequent contact with different cultures and in a spirit of appreciation, I wasn’t even conscious of the concept of racism.
My mom once told me that, when she’d been babysitting a friendly couple’s son and pushing him in the stroller on a walk, she got evil looks from some people. For the longest time, I assumed that was just because it was apparent that we had come from different fathers and people thought we were both hers.
In middle or high school, when I learned about it from history class, the concept seemed so alien to me, like a relic of the past… until I realised that my primary school had one black kid, who was bullied (and a bit violent at times, which I’d now attribute to trauma from fleeing an active warzone coupled with facing racism in a fairly conservative town) while my secondary school had none, mostly upperclass “white” with a few other “white”-adjacent (Italian, Russian) ethnicities.
The idea that this childhood friend might have drawn evil looks because he was black hit me years later like a freight train of shattered childhood innocence.
(As an aside, that friend once declared that he’s dark chocolate and I’m white chocolate and if that isn’t the sweetest thing, I don’t know what is.)
Poster is probably American… Churches are generally pretty segregated… not that there aren’t less (denomination) segregated ones… But there’s often a stark difference between a Baptist and evangelical church beyond the singing.
That is weirdly true.
Both are corpo-sanitized.
It’s like averaging out anything- the temperature of your porridge is the average of all porridges, the new movie you’ve been waiting for just uses the most common tropes in its writing, the quality of sex you’ll have next is the average of all sex you’ve already had
Ok, I’ll take the average sex. But the other stuff needs to go.
Yup, phoney
The only good Christian rock band is Five Iron Frenzy and that proves the redemptive power of ska
What about that one Skillet song that’s good? And I want to say switchfoot?
I hadn’t heard the name switchfoot in decades. I remember they had one good song but it still got creepy in the middle. New way to be human?
My sister used to be a born again Christian and I always liked Jars of Clay better than the other options.
used to be
So do you call her unborn again?
Nah, she’s got the triple crown
She converted to Islam?
agreed. i just posted above it took me a few albums to figure it out (i wasn’t paying attention to their lyrics, i was makin out with the pastor’s daughter)
ugh I hate that I really like some Jars of Clay songs musically even though I abhor what they’re singing abiuy
Collective Soul had some good stuff.
cries in Fireflight
Sobs in RED
I think back to those early hillsong albums. All the moshpits and everything.
Did hillsong expect all those people in the mosh pit to be sober?
Christian mosher: *hits incense burner / spills ritual wine*
Almost real.
Gospel is crying in the corner
Are you saying AI art…It can take me higher? To a place where blind men see?
silent planet is the best christian band I’ve ever discovered. they just have incredibly correct takes so idc if they’re religious.
The word “intelligence” means nothing when referencing most “AI”, just like the word Christian means nothing when referencing most “church-goers”.
Jesus why don’t you, turn off the light?
Stryper sounded good and was very popular outside Christian circles. I don’t think most people knew unless they saw them in concert and had a bible tossed at them.
