Is You Is Or Is You Ain't? (An Article From Emusic.com)

Is You Is Or Is You Ain't?: Christian Indie-Rock
by Michael James McGonigal

Eight years ago, a reedy-voiced genius from Athens, GA, sang the words "I love you Jesus Christ/ Jesus Christ I love you, yes I do" in a crazy, fuzzed-out pop song. Over a chaotic and beautiful backing music that sounded like a marching band from inside your very best dreams, Mangum stretched those 15 syllables out into many dozens. It was just two lines in one song, "King of Carrot Flowers Part Two," off an album called In the Aeroplane Over the Sea that is filled with alternately disturbing and blissed-out, Blake-ian imagery. Mangum had written much of the album in just a few days after he read Diary of Anne Frank for the first time and "kind of lost it," which is of course the only rational response to the Holocaust.

But seeing as Aeroplane was among the best albums of that year, those lines had a pretty large impact in the indie rock community. Expressing a sincere love, even just a potentially sincere love, for Christ was perhaps the last taboo in indie and alt-rock. The Danielson clan had been doing it since 1995, but they were misunderstood as some sort of outsider/joke band (perhaps aided by the quirky nature of their songs and the fact that they all performed in nurses' uniforms).

I interviewed Mangum for a cover story for alt-rock quarterly Puncture, whereupon he allowed that "a song about God was inevitable, because of my upbringing and the intense experiences I had... at church camps." He continued, citing the age-old divide of God versus church. "My love for Christ has more to do with what Christ said and believed in. The church put this bullshit around it and made it this at-times really evil thing. If you attach man to anything, he's gonna fuck it up somehow," he continued, adding, "You think that's too cynical?" Such words do have a ring of truth for those of us who went to church and never once heard a sermon on why it would be harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a camel to enter a needle's eye or whether it really made sense to spend so much of the church's money on these big fancy buildings rather than on outreach, not to mention those of us who still have trouble reconciling such actions as the Holy Crusades (the old ones and the more modern versions) with the words "thou shalt not kill."

But this isn't a freshman religion class, and of course there are a multitude of churches and denominations from which to choose, so, um, back to the music.

Whatever the impact of that one song by Neutral Milk Hotel, it was just one song. Today, though, some of the most interesting and celebrated musicians in the "secular indie" scene are devout Christians. But is the music they make Christian music or not? How to address this stuff from the vantage point of Christian music? Should it even be addressed at all? I'm feeling particularly fed up with genre definitions as I search for ways to address the strange but devotional music of the promising new band Page France and the celebrated musician Sufjan Stevens.

I'd already decided to write about this subject of Christian music being made in the indie-rock commuity, when Chris Dahlen wrote about this very thing in a column for the influential website Pitchfork this past January. "I don't know why hipsters hate Jesus," he began. Of course, that's not true, that hipsters hate Christ, though the problem with discussing hipsters is that you'd be very hard-pressed to find a hipster who'll acknowledge he or she actually is one.

Dahlen ends his piece by suggesting folks be more open-minded, to not "shoot the messenger," which sounds good to me. It does concern me that some of the most talented musicians of our day — who are Christians but not operating within the CCM community — do not feel comfortable discussing their faith for fear of being thought of as "stupid, or worse," as a musician friend of mine (who is amazingly talented and worshipped on websites and touted by NPR as a great talent and who unfortunately wishes to remain anonymous) put it while visiting last week.

What I am asking for is an expansion of the definition of Christian music, to also include amazing devotional songs that might not even be written by people within the CCM community. I want more weirdness! I want more questioning! I want better music! I want rock bands that are as great at being rock bands as the Swan Silvertones were at being a vocal quartet! Knowing that God is everywhere, and yeah it's a crazy cliché but that God works in mysterious ways, I'm more interested in hearing amazing songs of devotion than the purported great faith of this or that person. I'm not here to take inventories. I'm less concerned with whether or not Amy Grant had an affair or not, but when it comes to her music, is it any good, as gospel? Does it inspire joy, or make me think about faith in a new way? As such, I would rather listen to the Velvet Underground's gorgeous ballad "Jesus" (a song written by a junkie New York Jew!), or Sufjan's pretty and plaintive "Oh God, Where Are You Now?" than anything in, say, dcTalk's catalog. (Let's face it, they were an important band in the evolution of CCM, but their music was as ridiculously hokey as the best of Vanilla Ice crossed with the worst of U2.)

One of the latest songs to cause ripples within the indie-rock community is "Jesus" by the band Page France. Page France has the makings of greatness, as a single listen to the song "Spine," will attest, seeing as it brings to mind Elf Power playing with Tom Verlaine during his instrumental period. And while some of the band's work is too precious, too twee, as if the group were really holding something back, with time they could be the equal of their influences. They always have interesting lyrics that are clearly Biblically inspired, with blood from stones and burning bushes and angels and lines like "You were made out of my ribs/ We share a heart."

Anyway, this song "Jesus" might upset your mother, but it's clearly a spirited, spiritual song. The three and a half minute number begins with some pleasant acoustic guitar and organ before heading into these sweetly-sung words that have confused many listeners: "And Jesus will come through the ground so dirty/ With worms in his hair and a hand so sturdy/ To call us his magic, we call him worthy." Some might bristle at the tune and call it sacrilege, but I find it one of the more interesting, if not a tad literal, interpretations of the Resurrection.

Perhaps we need a new category for this kind of stuff? We could call it Alt-Alt-Christian rock? No, that's awful. Think of a name and send it in, I beseech thee