The Soundtrack of My Life

Bad Christian has thrown down the gauntlet. He has a poignant post on his blog about the musical soundtrack of his life. Then he went and invited other people to do the same. Streak did. Now it’s my turn. I’ve been listening to music all my life. I grew up in church after all. Hymns come with the territory. More important, though, is the way in which music winds its way through the map of my life. Music has always been in the background, making the journey all the more emotive and interesting. But it’s also been a main character. Junior high and high school were standard stuff. I started with hip-hop, moved to top 40 and ended up at CCM. Like a lot of youth group kids, I decided that the best way to show my Christian witness was to give up “secular” music for “Christian” music. For a while I had the best of both worlds. If you can call any CCM best. But finally I got rid of all my “secular” CDs and started listening to DC Talk, Third Day, Jars of Clay and anything else that was “Christian.” During my transition from high school to college, I started getting frustrated with Christianity. Well, not so much Christianity. But the church. I questioned all the assumptions I had, all the lies I had been taught growing up. It was around that time that I discovered a 60s/70s musician named Larry Norman. He shook my world. Over a musical tapestry of rock, folk, gospel and blues, Norman encouraged me to rethink this thing. Norman was, and still is, loaded with contradictions. He openly criticized the CCM world. But, as one of the first Christians to lace rock music with lyrics about Jesus, he’s pretty much responsible for the genre. Yet the genre wanted nothing to do with him. In his songs, Norman openly denounced the war in Vietnam, the space program and racism. He sang about environmental issues and sexually transmitted diseases. And Jesus, too. His lyrics were clever and his music was actually, you know, good. In the 90s, he was still at it, leveling charges at the Pope for sitting on immense wealth, the Aryans for making Jesus white and the first Bush administration for invading Iraq for oil. The guy is still doing his thing today. He’s in poor health, but he’s a tremendous influence. The other band that has radically changed my life is an independent band from Seattle called Pedro the Lion. I discovered them in college. Actually, at least back then, “them” was mostly a guy named David Bazan. Today T.W. Walsh is a permanent fixture, too. Anyway, Bazan’s stuff initially attracted me due to its sheer honesty. The music was simple and the vocals mumblish. But this was a guy crooning lines like “Then there’s your girlfriend/ She opens her legs and gives you life meaning/ Is that what you love her for?” and “Could someone please tell me the story of sinners ransomed from the fall?/ I still have never seen You and some days I don't love You at all.” Dissatisfied with himself, Christianity and the state of the arts, Bazan’s lyrical prowess and humble delivery hit me hard. Today Bazan’s songs are populated with cheating husbands, murderous wives, faithless priests and lonely alcoholics. Sad, beautiful and depressing as hell, this is what music should sound like. Those are the two biggest musical influences on my life thus far. There are so many others. I love the abrasive hip-hop poetry of Sage Francis, the exploratory brooding of The Accident Experiment and the revolutionary mentality of Paris. I love the playful creativity of L.A. Symphony, the Sunday School on speed quirkiness of Half-Handed Cloud and the hallucinogenic soundscapes of Starflyer 59. What about you? Who rocks your world?