When it comes to the songs we love, I wonder if we have things a bit backwards.
A year or so ago I was asked to include a particular song in a hymnal I was working on for another church. It was a fairly recent and popular song by a well-known Christian artist (who shall remain nameless).
I was vaguely familiar with the artist but had never heard the song, so my first exposure to it was reading through the words. Now, I try to be fairly magnanimous in my criticism of other musicians. I know how hard it is to create things. But upon reading the words of this song, I was immediately struck by how uninteresting they were. There weren’t any problems with the theology; indeed, the words were so generally bland and non-committal that it would have been hard to pick many theological nits. The phrases rhymed, I guess, and the message of the song was somewhat straightforward. For bonus points, the writers had dutifully followed the approved template of verses, choruses, and a repeated bridge. But there was no nuance, no poignancy, no real poetry.
Ok, I thought, this song is wildly popular right now, but it’s not because of the text. Maybe the melody is really brilliant. So I pulled up the lead sheet.
Nope, that wasn’t it. The melody was easy to sing, but again, it was incredibly unoriginal. It went up in some places and down in others, some quarter notes and some eighth notes, and that was it. No creativity, no freshness, no beautiful melodic line… nothing to distinguish it from ten thousand other tunes that have been penned and forgotten.
So I was left scratching my head, but I finished typesetting the song as requested. And then I thought I might as well watch the YouTube video.
And just twenty seconds in, I said to myself, Oh… now I get it.
The video opened to an ethereal synth pad, followed by a warm piano playing those achingly beautiful “worship chords” (you know the ones). Then the drums laid down a pulsing groove, 4-on-the-floor. Clean rhythm guitar. Heavy chorus effect on the lead vocal, and a phenomenal mix all around. On top of all that, the video production was really well done, a masterclass in motion and angles and lighting. The song was well-structured, too. I knew the bridge was coming, and then the repeat bridge; but when the band dropped out just before the final chorus, the effect was still as powerful as if it had been totally unexpected.
It was a pretty visceral experience, and I confess I was totally hooked. Why is this song so popular, I realized? Not for its content, but for its packaging.
And here’s the thing: I should know better. I know how powerful music can be, and how important it is to think carefully about choosing the best and most enduring stuff. I’m supposed to be objective. But when the video was done, I wanted to play it again. To this day, that song is stuck in my head. And it was this experience, and many more like it, that make me wonder whether we have a problem with how we decide what music we love. At best, we’re one-sided, and at worst, completely turned on our heads.
Now, here are your qualifiers, lest I be misunderstood. Yes, music can evoke powerful emotion, and emotions are a gift from God. Yes, for the majority of human history, our music has been passed down and experienced independent of the printed page. Yes, recordings are a wonderful means of enjoying music.
But can we agree that we tend to love what we know? If our portal for musical evaluation is always the experience above the substance, then we’ll always decide what is good based on nothing but our subjective experience: a thing is good because I like it. When that happens, we don’t choose what to listen to and what to love; it chooses us. If we’re carried along by the visceral, we’ll abandon the intellectual.
But even the visceral can’t sustain itself. It’s flash paper, not embers. C.S. Lewis once said, “Aim at heaven, and you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth, and you get neither.” I think this is borne out in the contemporary music debacle of the evangelical church. It’s the reason why every hit song is soon replaced and forgotten, and thus a generation is deprived of a musical tradition: we’ve elevated the experience and neglected the substance. When the visceral fades for one song, we look for the next. Rather than allowing emotion to flow out of rich content and construction and even just faithful delivery in community, we’ve sought to bypass substance for an emotional hit. Get impatient and kill the golden goose, and you get one egg instantly, but that’s all you get.
There’s much more that can be said on this, and plenty of room for misunderstanding, but I think the culture of YouTube has done far more harm than good for the church. And if you’re a music leader, for the love of your people and their long-term good, choose carefully. Don’t get swept up in what’s new and flashy and popular. Give them the good stuff, and help them love it.