Christian Music? No Thanks...

By the time he arrived, the band had already been playing for half an hour. He squeezed through the aisle, each person seeming not to notice until he touched them on the shoulder, then making an awkward display of pressing back against their seat so that he could get by. Thirty minutes, long enough for the acrid stench of the artificial smoke to drift silently up into the fifth row of seats in the lower section. The smell was familiar, yet twisted. It seemed commonplace, yet different, and wrong. He couldn’t place it. The arena had been split in half by a huge curtain, creating an amphitheatre effect and halving the number of available seats, but even so it had failed to sell out. People stood crowded on the floor directly beneath the stage, but on the lower level empty seats were easily discernable, and in the outreaches of the arena small groups hung in clumps, framed against the folded chairs. He wondered why they didn’t move closer, there was plenty of room and it was obvious he was among the last to arrive. Maybe the fact that it was a Christian rock concert had something to do with it. Was it immoral to jump a few balconies and claim a better seat? Would the band stop playing and pray aloud for contentment among God’s people? He was in uncharted waters, and felt that voicing these questions would betray him as an outsider.

He hadn’t intended to attend this concert, nor had he ever heard music by Audio Adrenaline, or the feature band Mercy Me. To be specific, he'd never even heard of Mercy Me. He had planned on staying home, working on his presentation, and falling asleep early. He had picked up a cold during his visit to Michigan, as usual, and wondered if he had contracted it while at the hospital, or while running around downtown Grand Rapids, underdressed, drunk, and lost. Supposedly the colder weather had little to do with the illness, it had more to do with the increased transmission of viruses while sequestered inside for the winter months. While he agreed with that in theory, he still wondered why he seemed to catch cold every time he left the south to visit Michigan in the winter. Regardless of the method of its acquisition, the cold had left him tired and congested, and the music rang hollowly in his plugged ears.

He had been roped into attending the concert by his friend’s parents, whom he was staying with for a few months until he found his own apartment. They had an extra ticket, and he had no excuse why he couldn’t go, save his general aversion to Christian music, and he felt he couldn’t use that excuse without offending them. Plus, he was indebted to them. Not only were they largely responsible for his new job, but also they were putting him up, and refusing his offers to pay rent. If spending a few hours listening to mediocre music helped even the deal, then he would grudgingly attend.

The artificial smoke continued to assault his nostrils. He took out a couple pieces of Trident Tropical Twist gum, but even while chewing with his mouth open the stench wafted up and into his brain. He finally placed it. It smelled like buttery movie popcorn and flatulence. No, not flatulence, ass. Hot, wet, steamy butt. It didn’t have the pungent spice of a good fart, just the heavy, monotonous reek of sweaty ass. It reminded him of a bus trip back from Cedar Point during eighth grade. After a warm day running through the park, the group had stayed for the laser light show, which had been impressive framed against the dark clouds. Halfway through the dark clouds opened up, and twenty plus eighth graders and chaperones had ran a half mile or so back to the bus in the rain. The combination of old sweat and new sweat was magnified from the rain, and overwhelming in the enclosed bus. It was that, plus popcorn. He took a big whiff of the smoke to make sure he had it pegged. He gagged, if anything, quantifying the smell had made it worse, but even so, the description was so precise and perfect that he couldn’t help smiling.

On stage the first band was wrapping up its set. They were attempting a big finish, but for some reason the crowd had trouble matching their enthusiasm, even with the efforts of the tech crew to synchronize the clapping, arm waving, and screaming through a twenty foot screen projected on the curtain behind the band. He no longer had any interest in the music, to be precise; he now had less than the zero interest he had started with. His attention was focused on the crowd, and on exploring the reasons why this concert seemed different from a secular one. Several reasons immediately came to mind, and he started to mentally draft a future post for his blog. First he needed a clever title, something along the lines of “Ten Reasons Christian Concerts Suck.” No, wait; he had a better one, “Why Christian Concerts Have No Soul.” Less polemic, it was drier, subtler, more appropriate.

The obvious first reason was the crowd. On stage the lead singer from Audio Adrenaline was thanking the crowd for fifteen years of devotion, apparently, he had unknowingly attended part of the farewell tour. Fifteen years… that would put the debut date in the early nineties, and explain the proliferation of not-so-young mothers accompanied by their newly balding husbands. They had been in the latter stages of secondary education or the early stages of college back then, at the age where new bands become emblematic of a generation. They were the initial followers, and had been responsible for purchasing initial cassette tapes, then CD’s, and probably now shelled out money for DVD’s of concerts they’d never attended. When the rest of their generation had been mourning the suicide of Kurt Cobain, they had been rejoicing to the accompaniment of their bland, Christian pop-rock, and reading World Magazine as Tupac was gunned down in the streets.

The rest of the crowd was older, and less demonstrative. They’d probably attended Guns and Roses concerts twenty years ago, maybe even had a White Snake jacket. Now they attended Christian Rock concerts in order to feel young without betraying their middle-aged family values, or as a result of some compromise made with their pubescent child. He had it. That was the problem with Christian Rock. Hell, that was the problem with most of Christian music. They were taking genres and divorcing them from their roots, neutering them in the process. Rock without counter-culture, Metal without protest, Grunge without depression, Rap without violence, Music is hollow without context. You can’t explain troubadours without chivalry, classical without the Enlightenment, Jazz without Black America, Pop Music without consumerism. Where is Frank Sinatra without the Fifties? The Beatles without the Sixties? Kanye West without Enron?

He turned his attention to the stage area, not to the band, or the stage itself, but the first few rows of floor seats. One staff member in a yellow shirt relaxed on a folding chair, head nodding along with the music. The audience stood by their seats, hands raised, devoid of the frantic crush and mayhem appropriate to front-row floor seats at a secular concert. On stage the lead singer was rolling through some canned monologue about the graciousness of God, the audience enrapt. Musicians without Megalomania, he was on to something there. At a normal concert the focus is local, superficial. Religious music resists the deification of its performers, and deification is responsible for the intensity of secular concerts.

Ironically, the last concert he had been to had also been in Cleveland. When was that? Four years ago? He had been a college freshman, and had somehow wound up eight rows back from the stage on the aisle watching Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors. He'd felt detached the whole night, the only person in that section who didn't push up against the human security fence when Tim McGraw came up through the floor and ran down the aisle onto the stage. He'd been the only person who laughed out loud when a woman was allowed to climb up on stage sobbing, and show how off her Tim McGraw tattoo. The only person who knew less than half of the songs. The only person more interested in watching the crowd than the performers. He felt the same way now. The difference was the level of excitement. For Tim McGraw, it had been harder not to get swept up in the emotion of the crowd, forty thousand people screaming, clapping, demanding more music. Now there were what? Five thousand? Nor we they packed tight enough to feed off each other's energy. For Tim McGraw, he'd had to stand the whole night just to see the stage from eight rows back. Here, he counted less than eighty people standing in the entire floor section. The audience was reserved, quiet even. After Tim McGraw the girl he'd gone with had been so turned on that he'd wound up rolling around in the back of an Explorer parked outside a self-storage park at three o'clock in the morning. Had they attended a concert like this, he would have been lucky just to get a kiss later. No tongue, no eye contact...