A very bright man named Christopher posted a well written comment on this thread, which inspired me to follow up on the original essay. Christopher’s last paragraph:

I think the problem most have with “Christian” music is that the vast amount of songs just arent very good, lyrical or not. I’ve personally always found their melodies soft, their sound soft, their sentiment soft. it’s a preference for me, but it’s a great cause of concern for the genre because I think it’s created a stigma that’s difficult to outrun.

Christopher’s description reminds me of programs they showed us in grade school about drugs, or safe sex, or something similar. They tried to be down with the kids. You could hear it a mile away. It had no power.

In my opinion, an experience of enlightenment and connection with the divine means acknowledging all aspects of one’s self. We can’t remove one aspect and keep another. Deepak Chopra points out that we need to acknowledge both the sacred and the profane, the divine and the diabolical, and I think he’s correct.

I think art has two aspects to it: power and beauty. A given piece might be stronger on one or the other, and that’s fine. Frank Zappa’s “Dirty Love” speaks to a fairly different part of us than Karen Carpenter’s version of “Close To You”, but both are great songs. Each plays to different aspects of our humanity, but each is wonderful in its way. Completely remove either power or beauty from a piece however, make it completely dark or insipidly bright, and you’ve lost your resonance. If an artist wants to achieve anything truly meaningful, she has to embrace the dark side as well as the light.

Sometimes you walk into a nightclub, and the music just pulls you in it’s so alive up there. Spontaneous, driving. Beautiful. In my opinion, the players up on that stage are revealing everything. There is lust in their playing; there’s anger, there is compassion and kindness at the most sublime level.

I feel language affords us another clear example. Many of us are familiar with an old school point of view that profanity is the language of the ignorant, but I don’t think that is necessarily true. It is, in that the ignorant or dumb may rely on it much the way a lesser artist will rely on certain manipulative or cheap tricks available to him, but a gifted artist can make great use of profanity. It’s an expressive tool, a color in the pallette like anything else, and the best artists reserve the right to use any of those colors. I hear the word fuck as a great color to have in your pallete. It has the guttural schwa, the f and the hard k sound. Phonetically it is satisfying and effective.

Genuine art is truthful. Artists aren’t like the politicians you hear on television with their speech so insipid and lifeless you wonder if there’s something wrong with you for your lack of interest. An artist cannot afford to deny her pain, her vulnerability, her sexuality. She has to develop the courage to reveal them, along with the technical aspects of her craft.

I think what Chris was suggesting above, is that to impose arbitrary constraints on your work takes away that power. It is cowardly, and good art necessitates courage. It is courage with which people break out of the social conditioning that upholds systems of cruelty, dreariness and inhumanity, and artists can play a role in that. Only if our work is sincere.

Tristan L. Sullivan

My Fiction
My Music