that's what she said

If you are an atheist and christian radio just gives you more proof that evangelicals fail at life, I apologize for the indiscretions of my peers, and I hope that one day your ears are graced by the truly artistic endeavors of christian musicians that strive for quality and risky creativity instead of hiding behind the safety net of christian subculture. They do exist.

Every now and then in the car, I turn on the christian station. I haven’t listened to christian radio regularly for probably six years or more. But sometimes I find myself venturing back out of morbid curiosity. I do this to be intellectually honest; if I love to hate a rapidly changing medium I haven’t checked out in years, I can’t justify criticizing others who do the same.

Or maybe I just get really, really bored.

At any rate, christian radio is a barrel full of fish for the shooting. I could address the prevailing Third Daddy Crowns sound that resembles a ripoff of a ripoff of a ripoff of Chris Daughtry. I could bring up the absurdly high percentage of obsolete songs that are not even classic material filling up the playlists, a clear indicator that christian music is embarrassingly content to ride on its own coattails. But if there are middle aged people who get their kicks from that music, let them. Instead I will dig into the greater mindset which christian radio merely reflects.

Almost all christian hit radio stations share the same theme, generally voiced in slogans like “family friendly,” “positive hits,” “safe,” “uplifting,” and so on. The morning starts off with instruction from Focus on the Family, and throughout the day the music is peppered with public service announcements for parents and “inspirational” self-esteem reassurance for soccer moms. The DJ’s address themselves almost exclusively to parents. The entire industry emanates a message of safe, white, commercial American status quo.

Where is the love for college students? Yuppie singles? Teenagers that are less sheltered than their parents would like to think? Just because these demographics are increasingly devoid of believers and thus commercially inviable doesn’t mean that we have a license to pretend they don’t exist, or expect them to fit their needs to a mold meant for somebody else. When it comes to the church, I have learned by experience that if people are told often enough that their kind is not welcome, they eventually leave. Christian radio is just another outlet for this message of rejection and neglect. I wouldn’t be so concerned about something as comparatively shallow as radio, but I see the same attitudes every day in the American church. These attitudes would not survive if christian radio’s supporters didn’t agree with them on some level.

I used to live in an area serviced by Orlando’s christian station. On Friday nights, they used to have a three hour show for indie electronic music, much of it local. It was great to hear all that underground talent on a major station. The show was a big influence in my budding musical tastes. Electronic music is not exactly a cesspool of immoral lyrics begging for a christian counterpart, but this was a time before mainstream crossovers were almost a given and before Andy Hunter was appearing in every action movie soundtrack known to man. It was nice to have a niche show marketed to somebody besides the soccer moms pledging to the station every telethon. However, the show was eventually cancelled, and Friday nights were filled with the same generic christianese as the rest of the week, and it is now just another station cruising teenagers are definitely not listening to. Yet again, christian media sent the message that christianity is only for sheltered children and naive old people.

The shortcomings of christian radio are just a mole on a greater cancer in the church. We may not be able to change the minds of those responsible, but the only way we can replace their values with our own is to stick around long enough to receive the passing of the torch.

I recently resolved to start writing again. I used to love writing, before college forced me to downgrade myself to a soullessly efficient book report mill. Writing has been at the heart of some of my deepest relationships. I can hold my own in a conversation, but the only time I feel that I’m saying all that I need to say is when I am writing, poring over my words and carefully tweaking every little nuance of meaning. So when I decided that the only way to rescue my mind-numbingly dull summer was to strive to do something “creative” almost every day, I chose to devote at least part of that effort to writing for pleasure.

I used to blog more. I have never been one to blog about my daily doings, and my bloggings have generally consisted of short comments. Occasionally I would come up with some stream-of-consciousness humor piece, if I was in the right mood. I suppose I stopped blogging altogether because my life problems took on more and more of a private nature. As a wide-eyed, idealistic adolescent, I never suspected that I would have “secrets,” but apparently I was just fooling myself. I would be more within my comfort zone to keep those secrets safe, but I also truly believe that painful things happen so that you can be equipped to help others going through similar situations. Thus I will try to process some things in the light, and hopefully somebody will benefit.

I also hope to become more well-versed in certain philosophical and social issues by forcing myself to talk about them. It is my tendency to rely on vague impressions of the issues instead of truly exploring what I believe, so hopefully the effort of writing about them will help me to explore deeper. I may never be a Mike Janke, but it is disturbing that most of my knowledge of current events comes from the four headlines on the Yahoo! front page. I can do better.

I guess this blog is part of my effort to stop living on cruise control. This is a mindset that I can’t seem to shed, carrying over from high school. I spent my free time dreaming of the glorious future and killing time until it would arrive. Most of that glorious future consisted of the sure-to-be-glamorous college life which I have supposedly now attained, so I need to learn to savor the present. Kicking back and waiting for the stage of life to arrive that will cure all my ills is a hard habit to break. To top it off, I keep having increasingly busy semesters that leave little time to pursue anything other than getting all my work turned in on time, but those are over at the moment. But so far my summer has been a wretched void of stimulus. Almost as soon as I got home I spent my days job hunting at progressively less lucrative establishments, finally degenerating into days of late sleeping and mindless video gaming as I waited by the phone for interview offers that never came. I finally got hired last week, so thankfully those days are over, but I still need to get into the habit of pursuing enriching activities off the clock.
Four years is an incredibly short time, and it’s already half over. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, I’ve been waiting to be this age my entire life, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to stay here. That is an exaggeration, but it does describe my vaguely growing sense of panic at times. But I digress.

So, enriching activities. In addition to crapping words into the latrine of the internet, I plan to spend the rest of the summer reading, painting, and wokring on my music. I vowed the entire schoolyear that I would read the Twilight series over the summer, but the abysmal local library system has failed me. I even attempted to get it from the Columbia downtown library when I was up there visiting, but there were 15 requests ahead of me. In lieu of this, I may tackle LOTR or read the Chronicles of Narnia for the first time since I was about 8 years old. Anything to shake this irrational anti-fiction mood I have been in for the past few years.

I have started painting again. I used to paint when I was a kid, but I was a perfectionist back then and hated everything I produced. (That is worth a future essay in itself.) 8x11 paper is not the best medium for painting anyway. I am not sure when the change occurred, but sometime last year I picked up the brush again and discovered the joys of slathering. Now that I have progressed to canvas and sizable pieces of cardboard, I find immense pleasure in liberally, frantically coating huge sections. One of my favorite techniques is to wad up pieces of paper and blot on splotchy, multicolored backgrounds. I think I enjoy making the backgrounds almost more than the foreground details. It is pure motel art, but it is terribly satisfying.

I am getting my songwriting muse back as well. Songwriting suffers from much the same risk as blogging about personal issues, so that plus an accute awareness of my lack of actual instrumental ability kept me stymied for awhile. However, three semesters of basic lessons later, I have the guitar knowledge to write more complex melodies, and I am more accepting of the voice I was born with. I have some recording equipment and actually recorded a few (bad) songs when I was 14, so I hope to attempt this again now that I have actual musical knowledge and better material and tastes. A good friend told me back then that he would be surprised if I had more than 7 passable songs recorded before college. He was right.

I’ve been admitting lately that a lot of people were right about things that I was wrong about. There was a time that I would have spent considerable energy trying to make myself look as good as possible upon realization of my wrongness, but that concerns me less now. No, I can’t hold down a job and pay for school and pay for the responsibilities of marriage at the same time. No, I don’t need or even care about a four year degree to teach Sunday school, and no, I don’t like teaching as much as I thought I would. But that’s all okay. I haven’t wasted time. I haven’t screwed up my shot at a perfect life. I’ve learned things that I couldn’t have learned without those experiences, and that’s okay. I hope this realization is a sign of growing up, because somewhere under the goth clothes and living off my dad and trying desperately to be a social butterfly, there lies a 21 year old woman.