the playlist of "drop" gospel hits
this new generation rightly called their songs praise choruses, because the percentage of praise as a topic was noticeably larger.
The approach to Scripture was also very different. For instance, Wesley’s “Arise my
soul” contains a Bible allusion or semi-quote in every line; Bliss’s “Almost persuaded”
contains a couple of Bible references in every song/verse; meanwhile Lafferty’s “Seek ye
First” was only the words of Scripture themselves. There was a revolutionary return to
Psalmody.... CWM aka contemporary worship music..
(RE)SOUNDING PASSION:
LISTENING TO AMERICAN EVANGELICAL WORSHIP MUSIC, 1997–2015
the mentions of throbbing bass, thumping percussion, physical vibrations,
and contemporary music might be designed to index the tropes of a nightclub or music venue
in order to create a less-imposing environment for those who might be uncomfortable or
unfamiliar with church....the above quote is the first complaint in a 2013 civil lawsuit filed
against NewHope Church. A group of nine homeowners from the nearby Hills at Southpoint subdivision complained that the loud music emanating from NewHope’s sanctuary on Sunday mornings was “akin to a rock concert.”
Even as recently as the early 1990s, the adoption of “praise and worship music” was a hotly contested topic in most churches, often creating a generational dividing-line within congregations.
These tensions were part of a protracted series of fierce internal struggles within
evangelicalism that came to be called the “worship wars.”
finding acceptance in more than three-fourths of American Protestant churches on a
weekly basis. The throbbing bass, thumping percussion, and physical vibrations lamented by neighbors are simply part of a normal Sunday morning for most evangelicals,
Within the evangelical community, its most vocal advocates herald praise and worship and its meteoric rise since the 1960s as nothing less than the rebirth of Western Christianity, citing its unique ability to attract and excite an entirely new generation of “lost sheep” into the Christian fold.
boasting a roster of recognizable performers and songwriters, claiming an ever larger segment of the music industry writ-large, and receiving enough widespread adoption to merit the creation of its own performing rights organization, Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), which monitors weekly church performances.....CCLI
now represents over 3,000 publishers and serves more than 200,000 churches as the primary copyright organization for worship music in the world
worship music has also become one of the most popular subsets of the Christian recording industry, selling more than 4 million records per year since 2003.
The Passion Conference hosts a yearly series of mega-events that draw tens of
thousands of young adults at every stop. These events provide a four-day experience of
sermons and lectures from prominent Christian leaders, breakout sessions on pressing issues, and arena-rock-styled worship events for its 18- to 25-year-old attendees...they have staged fifty-two large-scale events in thirty different cities in twenty-two countries [as of 2015]....so by early 2025, there will have been roughly 30 major Passion gatherings, including the upcoming Passion 2025 (Atlanta) and Passion 2026 (Arlington), marking nearly three decades of large-scale worship conferences for college-aged students....
sonic and spiritual intensities. Using an eerily similar turn of phrase to the
simultaneous disputes taking place in the Durham court system, Giglio explained that he
really wanted those gathered in the Georgia Dome to raise the volume high enough to “wake up the neighbors.” Because of the close connections between sound and theology which will be demonstrated throughout this dissertation, participating in instances of high-intensity musical sound provides worshippers with the opportunity to perform and experience their own individual levels of spiritual sincerity.
music-making in evangelical communities functions as a powerful and primary theological tool in the formation of believers.
Pastors and musicians consistently conflate high levels of sound
volume or density with high levels of spiritual sincerity, creating a powerful link between
experiences of sound and experiences of God in the world...
music functions as a “vanishing mediator” of divine
contact, valuable only insofar as it erases the material circumstances of its realization. The skill of the musicians, the bodies of the performers, and even the songs themselves “vanish”
as the act of worship creates a transparent and seemingly unmediated encounter between
parishioners and the divine. But because this mediating function is intended to be unmarked,
it is inevitably bound up in discourses of privilege. Spaces in which the individual bodies of
musicians and worshippers are effaced by divine presence also inevitably reinscribe the
white, male body as normative. Thus, the unmarked category of “worship”—as opposed to
the problematic category of “performance”—organizes aesthetic intensity into political
power which assimilates non-white and non-male bodies into an eschatological community
defined in the soundscapes of the evangelical West.
On New Year’s Day 2013, I filed into the lower deck of the Georgia Dome along with
more than 65,000 young evangelical Christians from all 50 states and 54 different countries.
Another 70,000 were following the events from home on the live web-stream.
Late Great Planet Earth, written by Southern California campus minister Hal Lindsay in
1970. In the book, Lindsay connected biblical prophecies about the end times and the
Dispensationalist theology of John Nelson Darby with current events like the Cold War, the
restoration of Israel, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Lindsay’s book went on to
become the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s and sold nearly 30 million copies in
less than two decades.
Graham’s efforts to reach out to the counterculture reached a fever pitch at Explo ’72,
a massive evangelical event held in Dallas, Texas June 12–17, 1972. Colloquially referred to as “Godstock,” Explo ’72 was organized by Campus Crusade for Christ and designed to
bring young evangelicals together for a week of training, study, and prayer. Each day of the
event ended with a mass rally at the Cotton Bowl stadium in Dallas which featured well-
known evangelical speakers, including Graham. It is estimated that the event attracted more
than 75,000 people...
The most successful of these new artists was Amy Grant, who’s 1982 album Age
to Age was the first Christian album to be certified platinum, selling a million copies in just
two years. In addition to notoriety, Age to Age earned Grant the Grammy Award for Best26
Female Gospel Performance in 1983. Her follow-up album, Straight Ahead, in 1984 spawned her first single to crossover to the Billboard 200 and won her another Grammy for Best Female Gospel Performance. Despite this previous success, nothing prepared her for the reception of her 1985 release, Unguarded, which spawned three crossover singles, won Grant her third Grammy award and went platinum in just over a year. One single of this album, the song “Find a Way,” reached No. 7 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart
“block worship,” something drawn from Pentecostal practice whereby the
worship band would play a large set or “block” of songs with little or no breaks in-between.
This was significantly different from the traditional evangelical template that involved
singing individual hymns which were bracketed and framed by scriptural exegesis ....Now, the musical “worship time” constituted its own section of the service in which
the pastor would cede control to the worship leader and his or her worship team.
a generation of post-denominational Christian believers. In
response to these believers’ aversions to institutional affiliation, many evangelical churches
have come to place particular importance on the idea of “branding,” using a variety of
market-driven strategies to publicly construct their sense of self. In this branding model,
patterns of consumption can come to express affiliations that have traditionally been a part of denominations. So rather than finding oneself part of a faith community through connections to an archdiocese or a general conference, believers in this post-denominational world often find themselves connected by participation within the material culture of evangelical Christianity, in particular, their patterns of consuming music
Artists like Amy Grant or dc Talk often achieved success on mainstream charts by
deploying religious language that was vague enough to attain broader appeal. Within
Christian circles, this is often referred to as the “God or a girl” phenomenon. If a song is
sufficiently ambiguous that it could be about either God or a female romantic interest, it
clearly contains the potential to crossover to the mainstream charts.
In general, these artists followed a standard 4- or 5-piece band format with the leader on
acoustic guitar, accompanied by an electric lead guitar, electric bass, piano or keyboard, and
drum set. Stylistically, they tended to mimic a softer rock/adult contemporary sound with a
basic, four-chord harmonic palate.
many members of their churches came to services expecting a “curated experience” similar
to the live worship recordings they were frequently consuming in their personal worship
lives. Mike Passaro, a worship leader at one of the satellite campuses of a local megachurch
called The Summit said, “The generation under us only knows Passion and arenas full of
people. For them, to worship means lights and sounds.” One worship leader even suggested that people sometimes tried to feign a certain type of overly-demonstrative spirituality
because they wanted to “look like people do in [worship music] videos.”
nineteen top ten hits on the Billboard Hot Christian Songs chart, Chris Tomlin is
unarguably the most successful “praise and worship” artist in the world.
spiritual meaning for Sigur Rós fans does not lie in its ability to construct logically-compelling units of semantic meaning, but rather in its ability to construct a sacred, hierophanous space in sound.
By contrast, Rouget characterizes Islam, Christianity, and Judaism as “non-identificatory
trance,” in which participants experience communion with or illumination by the divine but
do not channel or imitate the divine being.
Rouget’s work sparked widespread interest in issues of music and trance, but it also
created a series of enduring and problematic distinctions which he established as part of his
universalist, structuralist project. Particularly difficult to accommodate in a study of
evangelical Christians has been his distinction between “trance” and “ecstasy.” “Trance,” he
argued, is a social experience characterized by movement, noise, and sensory
overstimulation, whereas “ecstasy” occurs privately through largely silent meditation and
solitude.
Time and time again, critics of this repertory portray it as musically43
vapid––that is, not capable of breaking “new ground in hymnology”––as well as “lyrically
and theologically starved.” While many of Passion’s CD releases would certainly be subject
to a reviewer like Farias’s barbs, Hymns Ancient and Modern is saved from a similar fate by merit of its engagement with a more theologically-sophisticated tradition of Protestant
hymnody. The album is a compilation of live performances and features Passion’s impressive stable of artists “updating” well-known Protestant hymns by rendering them in the contemporary praise and worship idiom.
For philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “intensity” describes the dynamic movement of power
around a rhizomatic assemblage. Because the rhizome inherently resists the top-down
structures of the arboreal system, power is distributed through the flow of intensity rather
than through a fixed hierarchical arrangement. Here, the sonic intensity of the crowd ...sound becoming theology becoming body politics becoming sound in very real and tangible ways
Detroit Electronic Music Festival.
[DJ Stacey] Pullen cuts the bass drum out. The audience turns to him
expectantly, awaiting its return. For one measure, and then another, he builds
their anticipation, using the mixing board to distort the sounds that remain. As
the energy level increases, he gauges their response. A third measure passes
by, and a fourth, and then—with an instantaneous flick of the wrist—he brings
the beat back in all its forceful glory. As one the crowd raises their fists in the
air and screams with joy.66
In EDM, as well as other beat-based musical styles, this moment of the bass’s return is
frequently called “the drop.”
[Likewise, many CWM songs are written with an instrumental break at some point in the song.]
The drop serves a variety of important functions. First, it’s a
formal cue that marks a new section of the song, usually resulting from a process of building tension over some sort of musical and/or textual vamp....the climax music is designed to elicit a more intense embodied response from the audience/
congregation. People may have been dancing or had their hands raised before, but at this
particular moment that embodied action goes into overdrive.
From a phenomenological perspective, the idea of expectation that is connected to the
drop is particularly crucial.
Praise” music is generally uptempo and celebratory in lyrical tone.
“Worship” music on the other hand is typically slower in tempo and more reverent and
explicitly emotional in tone....Percy also argues that because of their submissive position with in evangelical theology, women are more capable of embodying acts of “worship” that involve recognizing and submitting to intimacy with the divine. “Conflicting signals are effectively held together in the romantic genre, which women can often master far better than men.”
Percy also observes a consequent, and counterintuitive, type of empowerment that women
can experience “through owning their own distinctive somatic religious experience.”75
At Passion, as well as in the church worship services I observed, women tended to be
more likely to lead the slower, more reverent “worship” songs than the uptempo, celebratory “praise” songs.
Excited female bodies are perceived to be too sexually distracting or corrupting for the men in the congregation and would therefore be counterproductively non-transparent if used in worship. Additionally, women are more capable of portraying the kind of surrender and receptivity necessary for being the sites of divine action that are so often described in the lyrics and framing devices that surround the reflexive worship songs in question.
“How Great Is Our God,” but this time, every worship leader
sang the words in unison in English. As I noted in the previous chapter, group singing at the
Passion Conferences is almost always framed as a “foretaste of heaven.” But if this is the85
case, the implications to the ending of “How Great Is Our God: World Edition” are stark.
The Christian community may be diffuse and diverse now, but at the moment of
eschatological consummation, these differences will be assimilated into Westernized
sameness.
Many scholars and critics will make references to the fact that Martin Luther or John and Charles Wesley adopted and adapted the popular drinking songs of their days into well-known hymns of the faith. [Martin Luther (1483–1546), widely considered to have been the first significant evangelical hymn writer, was both poet (writer/adapter of hymn texts) and musician (composer/adapter of hymn tunes)...John Calvin began work with poet Clement Marot in 1532 to versify all 150 psalms and in 1541 he recruited the help of composer Louis Bourgeois to write tunes for these psalms. Many of the tunes included by Bourgeois were based at least in part upon earlier plainsongs or secular chansons, and all were carefully designed for ease of singing by the congregation.].....While this may seem like a nice and reasonably coherent narrative—essentially justifying new or daring innovations by reminding us that everything was once an innovation—it seems to miss the fact that many of the most important early practitioners of early rock and roll were religious musicians from the black church. Thus, the move of rock and roll into evangelical Christianity cannot simply be a lateral move from “secular” to “sacred.” Rather, it is a complex series of negotiations which involve race, class, and gender, among other things.
Without knowledge of each other’s work, Hicks and I both made connections
between EDM dancing and religious ecstasy, between the arrival of “the drop” and the arrival of the eschaton, between the narrative structures of worship and EDM sets, and between the function of worship leaders and DJs. But Hicks’s purpose in writing his piece was to help other evangelicals realize that EDM constituted an important theological and musical resource for contemporary churches.
Tomlin’s decision to split the final verse, pausing on this clear evocation of the
eschaton, is a powerful demonstration of the ways in which musical and textual elements of
praise and worship performance inform each other. The strong textual reference to heaven....“eschaton,” referring to both the (present) heavenly community and the community at the end of time, particularly as depicted in the book of Revelation.
the “transvaluation of all values” proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche in his
book The Antichrist. In her landmark study of heavy metal, Weinstein uses the term “transvaluation” to describe the ways that artists and fans appropriate images from other cultural spaces and rearticulating them into a new value system, resulting in differing or even antithetical meanings. One example of this might be the ways in which the fundamentalist Christian imagery of spiritual warfare (angels, demons, Satan, etc.) is used in heavy metal but with an opposite valence, in which Satan and the demons are protagonist rather than antagonist of the cosmic conflict. Weinstein observes that many subcultures transvalue markers of this sort in an effort to perform their own disenfranchisement. See Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (New York: Lexington Books, 1991)
Incorporating applause and cheering into the ritual context of worship inevitably
brings other aspects of popular music into view. For instance, in the pop culture world,
applause and cheering is generally reserved for performers or celebrities, but in the Passion
setting, it isn’t clear here who is “famous” or why. Responding to the attention they have
received from the popular press, Tomlin and other Passion artists have consistently
disavowed their celebrity status.
The stadium undergoes a ritualization from a “dome” into “one massive dance
floor.” Similarly, the gatherings of people close to the stage are refigured from mere
congregation into “the praise pits.”
Dance music is not simply the musical model for the song, it is also the model for
any proper understanding of the song. Smith and Tomlin seem to assume and even require
that their audience already possess an embodied understanding of dance music participation
in order to even engage the song as ritually meaningful.
songs such as 'Oceans', '10,000
Reasons', and 'All the Earth Will Sing Your Praises' tend to emphasise
hyper-intentional intonational centres (especially in choruses) and
functional repetition of key motifs, creating a space of emotional
ecstasy aimed at inclusive participation in congregational singing. In
the context of theological semantics, this contributes to a deeper
immersion in a state of prayer, forming music as a medium of confession,
worship, and Christian unity.
Contemporary Worship Music in the Interaction of Poetic Structures, Melodic-Harmonic Organisation, and Theological Rhetoric
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