= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Fri May 4, 2012, 03:59 AM - Edit history (1)
I'll just sit here and bask in the image of Christian love that he projects, idiotically.
I don't know why this image didn't sow in my original post, but here it is.
And few Christian musicians are break away artists. They lag behind and copy marginal artists, themselves mostly imitative.
They are not Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, or Aretha Franklin. 
--imm
Frightening!
That's only 200 miles from me.
Thanks for the warning!
this was 20+ years ago, mind you...he knew I was into metal and he had been in his previous unsaved state too. He was ALWAYS, like every day, bringing me tapes of TERRIBLE christian bands because they "sound just like Judas Priest" or Iron Maiden...he said he had a christian equivalent for any metal band I liked. I asked him why I would want a copy of a band when I could just listen to the actual band? Especially when the bands he brought me were laughably bad at best.
The reason I don't like "Christian Metal" is because I don't believe it is sincere. Every single note of it is manufactured (by persons of questionable talent and inspiration) to be marketed to sell Jesus to people who want to have their rock music and feel pure too.
Of course, there was my bible teacher in christian High School who said "Christian rock is just as satanic as secular rock. It's not Christian to wrap God's word up in satanic music and say it's OK. Besides, they suck. If you are gonna sin and listen to rock music, you might as well at least listen to the good stuff like Led Zeppelin and Toto."
That last sentence is one of the few things he ever said that I kind of agreed with....not sure about Toto (a couple good songs) but I love me some Zeppelin.
So yeah, I am naturally opposed to anything marketed as "christian music" in the way that means it is a christian alternative to popular rock sounds. I have tons of music, however, that I love by bands consisting of people who are christians.
Hell, half of Slayer are believing catholics.
I'm not a fan of hip-hop, either. Give me that old-time Christian music:
I'm old-fashioned that way.
I'm now of the mindset if people aren't doing that it's not church. 
religious syncretism. Every religious thing from them I have heard or seen seems like New Age religion to me. The symbols at their concerts, the liner notes of one of their albums, the ritual blessing of the lead singer's wine orchard in his wine documentary Blood Into Wine, and the crazy shit they post on their web site: http://www.toolband.com/index_frames.html
This is from today (May 3rd, 2012)
which the current occupier had found amongst some junk left by the previous tenants. It seemed that someone (or something) was looking out for us! (Note: This still exists on the reverse side of Danny's Enochian "Sigillum Die Ameth" board - a talismanic stage backdrop that should be familiar to most Tool enthusiasts.)
When not meddling with the Goetia or other 'black books', entheogens were employed as visionary tools (often combined with ceremonial mechanics) to facilitate daring sojourns to the outposts of 'reality' and, hopefully, vivid encounters with the denizens that populated this hyper-spatial topography. These entities might include the various tryptoids, tikes, and mantids described by the psychedelic theorist Terence McKenna and other intrepid (or foolish) neuronants. And, indeed, at times, there were fleeting glimpses of those that existbehind the scenery: haunting tryptamine jesters with outrageously complex appliances, electric flesh guides, silver fire babies and vortices of jeweled phantoms. Did I mention the cartoonish squatamauders? Eventually, attempts were made to shatter certain biological safeguards via simulated death techniques in order to access the endogenous tryptamine dimensions, with the operations carefully timed to coincide with the plummeting brightness of the eclipsing trinary star Algol (Beta Persei). (Disclaimer: Don't try this at home, kids. Professional psychonants. Mindscapes closed. Otherwise, you just might end up as a Christian fundamentalist or, even worse, composing esoteric verses that billions of apathetic souls will never recite.)
Palestrina, Victoria, Tallis, Dowland, Gibbons, Lully, Charpentier, Couperin, Josquin de Prez... There were more than three good composers then.
If you expand the list to the 19th and 20th centuries, the list grows to the hundreds.
Your ears need to get out more.
OK a very long essay from February 2004 in GQ, Upon This Rock, by John Jeremiah Sullivan. I included the part about the music in the extract. The rest of the essay - the part I've read - is about the festival. I don't have any opinion about Christian rock because I've never listened to it.
The excerpt
Ritter waved his arm like an impresario. He said, "This, my friend, is Creation."
†††††
For their encore, Jars of Clay did a cover of U2's "All I Want Is You." It was bluesy.
That's the last thing I'll be saying about the bands.
Or, no, wait, there's this: The fact that I didn't think I heard a single interesting bar of music from the forty or so acts I caught or overheard at Creation shouldn't be read as a knock on the acts themselves, much less as contempt for the underlying notion of Christians playing rock. These were not Christian bands, you see; these were Christian-rock bands. The key to digging this scene lies in that one-syllable distinction. Christian rock is a genre that exists to edify and make money off of evangelical Christians. It's message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what's more, it operates under a perceived responsibility—one the artists embrace—to "reach people." As such, it rewards both obviousness and maximum palatability (the artists would say clarity), which in turn means parasitism. Remember those perfume dispensers they used to have in pharmacies—"If you like Drakkar Noir, you'll love Sexy Musk"? Well, Christian rock works like that. Every successful crappy secular group has its Christian off-brand, and that's proper, because culturally speaking, it's supposed to serve as a stand-in for, not an alternative to or an improvement on, those very groups. In this it succeeds wonderfully. If you think it profoundly sucks, that's because your priorities are not its priorities; you want to hear something cool and new, it needs to play something proven to please…while praising Jesus Christ. That's Christian rock. A Christian band, on the other hand, is just a band that has more than one Christian in it. U2 is the exemplar, held aloft by believers and nonbelievers alike, but there have been others through the years, bands about which people would say, "Did you know those guys were Christians? I know—it's freaky. They're still fuckin' good, though." The Call was like that; Lone Justice was like that. These days you hear it about indie acts like Pedro the Lion and Damien Jurado (or P.O.D. and Evanescence—de gustibus). In most cases, bands like these make a very, very careful effort not to be seen as playing "Christian rock." It's largely a matter of phrasing: Don't tell the interviewer you're born-again; say faith is a very important part of your life. And here, if I can drop the open-minded pretense real quick, is where the stickier problem of actually being any good comes in, because a question that must be asked is whether a hard-core Christian who turns 19 and finds he or she can write first-rate songs (someone like Damien Jurado) would ever have anything whatsoever to do with Christian rock. Talent tends to come hand in hand with a certain base level of subtlety. And believe it or not, the Christian-rock establishment sometimes expresses a kind of resigned approval of the way groups like U2 or Switchfoot (who played Creation while I was there and had a monster secular--radio hit at the time with "Meant to Live" but whose management wouldn't allow them to be photographed onstage) take quiet pains to distance themselves from any unambiguous Jesus-loving, recognizing that this is the surest way to connect with the world (you know that's how they refer to us, right? We're "of the world"
. So it's possible—and indeed seems likely—that Christian rock is a musical genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellence-proofed itself.
...