The Week
published at :
Real Clear Politics
Real Clear Religion
June 8, 2017
Who killed the contemporary Christian music industry?
Tyler Huckabee
Derek Webb's old band, Caedmon's Call, was once the darling of the
contemporary Christian music (CCM) industry. Their eponymous debut, released in
1996, sold over 250,000 copies, and their follow-up, 40 Acres, sold about
100,000 more. Caedmon's Call's live shows frequently sold out, and really
broadened CCM's demographic. You were as likely to see college students as
their
parents at Caedmon's Call's shows.
"We had some very unexpected success, very early," Webb explains. "We
backed into a moment of success we could have never anticipated. But a wise man
once said to me, 'The two things that will ruin an artist are success and
failure. And especially in that sequence.'"
Today, Caedmon's Call is a dusty afterthought of a bygone industry.
Chances are you've never heard of Caedmon's Call. But the band's story is an
interesting microcosm, if not a metaphor, of CCM as a whole. In CCM's heyday,
approximately 50 million CCM albums were sold annually. In 2014, that number
had plummeted to 17 million. CCM Magazine has long since ceased printing
issues, and modern Christian songwriters struggle to penetrate the masses,
outside of writing worship songs for church gatherings.
The descent of CCM is a reflection of America's waning interest in
Christianity as a whole. The precipitous dropoff in CCM sales has left
Christian
labels and artists staring into the void alongside their pastors, scratching
their heads, wondering where they went wrong.
The birth of CCM can be traced back to the Jesus Movement of the late
1960s, and was shepherded through its infancy by God-fearing hippies like Larry
Norman. But it didn't really take off until more than a decade later, as a
result of early pioneers like Andrae Crouch and Amy Grant. Grant was
especially revelatory, a comely teen whose lyrical vaguaries left it a very
open
question as to whether she was singing about God or boys. It was a potent
strategy, and it led to several Billboard-topping singles and the first
Christian album to ever go platinum. Her fame would boost the fortunes of her
keyboardist, Michael W. Smith, whose CCM career would go on to become nearly
as influential as Grant's.
As these spiritual singers became superstars, they proved that CCM could
be more than just something record stores stocked to appease area youth
pastors; it was big business. This laid the foundation for the next wave of
faithful crooners, including Phil Keaggy, the Newsboys, Steven Curtis Chapman,
and Jaci Valesquez. Jars of Clay's inescapable 1995 hit "Flood" made huge
waves on college radio. Petra packed out global arenas and sold nearly 10
million albums. Together, these artists helped CCM become one of the fastest
growing music genres in America, with many bands finding crossover appeal
among both spiritual and secular listeners.
"Back in the '90s, you could believe that Jesus Christ was God and create
art that was still interesting, and the general market would respond," says
Kevin Max.
He should know. After all, he spent the '90s as a member of dcTalk,
unquestionably the decade's greatest CCM success story. Formed in 1989 as a
hip-hop trio, the group morphed into a grunge act following the success of
Nirvana's Nevermind, and promptly started recording double platinum albums. In
1997, it wasn't unusual to find dcTalk songs on MTV or Billboard charts,
making them one of CCM's most prized commodities: a Christian band that also
appealed to the culture at large.
In retrospect, it's not hard to see why. The group had an ear for alt-rock
aggression that never quite lost its pop sensibilities, and channeled it
all into a genuinely thrilling live show. If you ignore the ecclesiastically
minded lyrics (a sampling of song titles: "Jesus Freak," "Into Jesus," "So
Help Me God"), you might guess you were listening to some pretty good Stone
Temple Pilots B-sides.
When Max was asked to join dcTalk, he did so without knowing much about
CCM ("To say 'skeptical' would be putting it lightly," he admits) — which may
have been just what the act needed. Not knowing the rules helped dcTalk
break them all. The lyrics to one cut off the group's 1995Jesus Freak called
"What If I Stumble?" asked, "What if I lose my step and I make fools of us
all? Will the love continue when the walk becomes a crawl?" Such bracing
questions in a religion known for giving answers gave their music a daring
edge.
"We were reaching out," Max says. "We were trying to communicate to the
non-believer as much as we were communicating to the believer. Today, when I
listen to Christian radio and see the festivals and see what's happening in
the church, I don't see a whole lot of that interactivity. Where I'm at
right now, it's almost like the doors have shut on the experimenting with
lyrics and images and ideas to get people interactive."
That's an assessment echoed by Matt Bronleewe, a veteran CCM producer who
helped start Jars of Clay, another '90s CCM titan. Bronleewe has since
collaborated with everyone from Michael W. Smith to Nashville's Hayden
Panettiere.
"There was a time where you might hear a song about God, but there was an
understanding that it might also bring something else to the table," he
says.
As the music industry began to weather the disruptions of the digital
market, labels grew much warier of those kinds of risks, says Bronleewe.
"There's not much room to fail anymore," he explains. "And failure's such a
creative gift. When the ability to fail is taken away, it fuels a lot of fear.
It narrows the pool of producers and writers to such a degree that there's a
sameness that starts to occur."
The CCM industry began relying on sure bets, and the surest bet of all was
what's broadly known as "worship music" — songs people sing at church.
Initially fueled by musicians like Chris Tomlin and Sonic Flood, worship has
since become CCM's primary export — a fact worship-focused bands like
Hillsong United have leveraged into playing stadiums around the world.
But whatever CCM might have gained in throwing its fortunes in with
worship music, it largely lost in its ability to sneak into the Top 40 or the
occasional Now That's What I Call Music! compilation. (One big exception is
chart-topping emcee Lecrae, and CCM is clinging to him like a life raft.) For
the most part, CCM artists have been content to either play it safe and hold
onto their dwindling cut of America's attention span, or strike out on
their own and look for other outcasts.
John Mark McMillan has chosen the latter option, crafting some truly
memorable rock and roll sets with frequently compelling ruminations on faith.
This path hasn't made him wildly successful, but in his words, "I got into
this because I love what I do and I want to make the kind of music that I
make. Making too many compromises wouldn't be worth it."
"In CCM, if you want to sing about certain, more uncomfortable things, you
won't have an opportunity," he says. "But on the same end, if I want to
sing about Jesus on Top 40, that's not going to happen either. The gatekeepers
in that world are just as weird. The problem is, if I'm a believer and I
want to sing my honest thoughts about Jesus, it's like, 'Where do I do
that?'"
That's a question many of today's Christian artists may well be asking —
musicians with compelling messages and world-class talent, but no labels
willing to take a chance on them.
The industry has eased into making church music for churches, unable to
recapture the ideas that made it such a prominent force in decades past. At
least, that's how Caedmon's Call's Derek Webb feels.
"The way I could describe it for our band is this: You're doing something,”
he says. "It's meaningful and it's real and it's observable and it's
organic. That becomes your bio. But then two years in, that bio is the most
real, organic, meaningful thing about you. And all you're trying to do is
maintain the elements of that bio, in hope that you might one day achieve it
again. You find yourself making a lot of compromises, but you're still not
receiving the nominations or the sales awards. You don't even need anyone to
tell you things are dropping off. You put the idea in your own head. You
just keep asking yourself the same question: ‘How do we get back to that?'"
That's a question the entire CCM industry is asking itself.
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