CCM, or Christian Contemporary Music, is big business. Its success story has been celebrated through the media and the ledger numbers it generates are its most sincere testimony. While hardcore Bible thumpers still hold that popular records are "the Devil's hole," enterprising evangelicals have embraced all the trappings of the secular music biz. Bubbling underneath the mainstream CCM acts is an alternative world of sanctified dance, white & unblack metal, darkwave, industrial, goth, and ambient music.

TOP OF THE CHARTS

Let's get practical you say, "What band is right for my spiritual needs?" There's a host of surprisingly extensive (and not surprisingly rather subjective) comparsion charts available for your guidance. New Song Online is a "Mega Christian Music" site that aims to "make people aware that there is Christian Music with a good beat out there!" Its extensive comparsion charts allow you to look up your favorite mainstream acts and find corresponding CCM artists, even if you fancy youself a rude boy into ska! Actually it's only a two cell "chart" but somehow I doubt it will offend the faithful seeking skanktified music.

While Radrockers, an internet music retailer offers a Sounds-Like Chart of "Mainstream to CCM" in the subgenre of "Melodic Metal/Classic Rock" the Metal for Jesus comparsion chart is most illuminating, and practical! If you like Cannibal Corpse or Napalm Death (from the "Death Metal" sub-chart) you'll probably like Crimson Thorn, or say you like Nine Inch Nails or Ministry, you might enjoy the "Hard Industrial Thrash" of Generation. Both the Christian Death Metal and Grindcore and Simon's Unblack Metal sites offer help for your headbanging spiritual quest.

GOSPEL GOTH, INVOCATING INDUSTRIAL, AND LAMBIENT AMBIENT

When one's spiritual thirst can no longer be quenched by repeated visits to Ska shrines or Grindcore grottoes - there are still resources - some borrowed from the 'dark side' - able to slake that thirst. Industrial music and Gothic variants like darkwave and ambient (or 'lambient') at first seem a surprising place for CCM. Canadian label Flaming Fish provides an up-to-date list of Christian industrial sites and promotes "Enlightened Music for the Industrial Age." CyberAge, a Christian industrial radio show on 100,000 watt KUNM 89.9 Albuquerque plays 'a gospel of music of the future that can be heard today' - and is delayed webcast in RealAudio. The Industrial Bible is a monthly webzine out of Winter Park, Florida and covers bands like Velvet Acid Christ, Biopsy, Aghast View, Inertia, and Lateral Tension.

Music label/ministry Velvet Empire "is a place where people can come and learn about our Creator Jesus Christ, in a setting suitable to the dark and gothic cultures" and competes with the 'electro prophetic' Black Light Records that touts its recent compilation CD Collapsing Structures as "high quality experimental noise & industrial experimentation of such mass confusion and destruction that it simply grasps all the hoarded sounds of this industrialized world..." Many 'alt.christian' bands like the industrial duo Industry Eleven are unashamed in their praise of Marilyn Manson, Skinny Puppy, and Ministry, secular acts that generally draw the fire from Christian moral squads. Perhaps the Alabama-based techno-industrial M-Edge said it best (if not exactly spelling it out...)

Musicly we are trying to sound like the chrsitian version of Nine Inch Nails(thats the industrial side), Marylin Manson(the grundge side), Live(the alternative side) and Prodigy(the semi techno side)(or if you are more familur with christian music then like Mortal, Circle Of Dust, Klank, etc..). We feel God is wanting us to write christian industrial music that will apeal to the youth of this day, because we know that evil music has done bad things so good music can do good things.

- M-Edge [ Birmingham, AL]

CCM BACKLASH

Evangelical critics of rock, pop and folk had an open field in the sixties and seventies. Media Christian Bob Larson got his start that way with Hippies, Hindu's and Rock & Roll (1968) and lesser lites Jeff Godwin (What's Wrong with Christian Rock from Jack Chick Publications) and Dial-the-Truth Ministry's Cal Thomas ("For the Spice Girls, There's Nothing Sugar or Nice"), have more recently parlayed their self-descibed status as recovered rockers to carve out a comfortable niche in the CCM backlash. Largely ignored is the pioneering work of David A. Noebel, a disciple of Dr. Billy James Hargis, whose Rhythm, Riots and Revolution (1966) and The Marxist Minstrels: A Handbook of Communist Subversion (1974) are amongst the most highly prized volumes in the collections of Christian literati.

Dial-the-Truth Ministries publishes a scripturally sound but statistically blasphemous actuarial chart of the Premature Death of Rock Stars. Unfortunately the stars' alphabetically ranked deaths, instead of a more logical chronology, produces odd cultural and music segues as one reads of Dead Boys' Stiv Bator's 1990 fatal car accident in Paris, Dr. Feelgood's Lee Brilleaux 1995 "medical" cause of death, and Tim Buckley's 1975 drug overdose. This otherwise wonderful table of 317 rock performer deaths falsely concludes (sorry - it's just the numbers) that the average life expectancy of card-carrying members of the profession is 36.9 years as opposed to the average American's life expectancy of 75.6 years.

And finally, as we emerge from our excursion through the outskirts of the imploded CCM underground let us pause, lift up our ears and enable our browsers with RealAudio. The answer may be blowing in the wind - or howling through a pipeline drilled miles beneath the Siberian wilderness and into the Gates of Hell. Let me know what you think - the cocktail party phenomenon or documentary proof of the ambient sounds of Hell?

---

Adult Christian Home Page © PostFun 1998 All Rights Reserved	Send E-Mail to editor@postfun.com [http://www.postfun.com/pfp/features/98/aug/music.html]