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Underground > Radio & Music >

Music about god

  
 
doctorbeck
10:44 / 16.04.08
some of my favourite music is, in a broad and sometimes narrow sense very religious or spiritual. i get a great sense of emotional involvement and pleasure from it. yet i am an aetheist.

music i particularly like is old gospel, from rare gotham records reissues to stuff like the aretha franklin gospel lp, johnny cashs religious stuff on the american recording series,john and alice coltranes jazz (love supreme, journey to satchananda) and even van morrisons astral weeks, which seems at times like to most awesome evocation of god i have ever heard.

but i find this puzzling, given my lack of faith, and was wondering how you lot got on with the god music?
 
 
A Hu-Li
(prev. Darrell Rivers)
11:26 / 16.04.08
I was brought up an atheist but sang hymns at my primary school and absolutely loved it. Hymns are wonderful and I love being part of a singing congregation. Even now I adore hymns, peculiarly I sometimes watch Songs of Praise for five minutes at a time, it's a little like a religious karaoke session. I really enjoy listening to gospel music, which is often uncomplicated and showcases singer's voices so well.

Music is appealing, if it has been written as an expression of faith that doesn't mean it has to be listened to or played in that way each time. The vast majority of religious music isn't going to be understood by atheists as it would be by the members of the religion. Depending on the religion and the individual the experience of the religious might vary as well.
 
 
doctorbeck
15:19 / 16.04.08
god yes, hymns, i forgot those. quite a guilty pleasure aren't they?

really like listening to radio 4 on a sunday morning, usually high anglican hymn singing, totally lacking in anything i would describe as edge or soul (iykwim) but lovely none the less. also recommend aled jones sunday evening show called the choir, features some awesome vocal music from a great spread of largely christian traditions. some of it is really out there to my ears.
 
 
My Mom Thinks I'm Cool
(prev. King of Iron Pants)
15:44 / 16.04.08
when I lived in Boise I found myself listening to the Christian station quite a bit in my car, as it was the only one without commercials. Sooner or later I always flipped there to get away from some used car salesman and then it would take me a while to notice.

Anyway one singer I liked so much I ended up buying the album - Ginny Owens. I don't consider myself Christian but, allowing myself a bit of metaphor and reinterpretation, her lyrics seemed really in line with how I was feeling at the time, a search for divine movement and faith in my own life. I'm still quite fond of her and tend to throw bits onto mix CDs for my friends.

As for hymns - often (always?) the most enjoyable bit about church for me, growing up Methodist. my sister's now Wiccan but she still sings in the local choir, as does my grandma and other family members - kind of a tradition. I always thought if I were in a more energetic church, more interaction, more singing, less trying not to fall asleep while the pastor talked about whatever...that I might have stuck with the Christian thing. church should be fun!
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
01:03 / 17.04.08
I'm another atheist former-choirboy who enjoys religious music- the aforementioned Johnny Cash, Gospel, Coltrane and so on.
One of my favorite albums of all time is, in its idiosyncratic way, a Christian* album: Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I could write a book length treatise on this album (Kim Cooper beat me to the punch with an excellently written and researched pocket-sized book of the album for the 33 1/3 series), but, to sum it up and reveal why I like it so much: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea isn't cool. That is, whereas the other great indie albums of the nineties (Slanted and Enchanted, Ok Computer, Loveless and so on) had, even in their rawest moments, a layer of detachment, textualisation or irony, Aeroplane isn't afraid to tell you, repeatedly and earnestly, how much its feeling what its feeling.
Case in point is the album's most religious track, King of Carrot Flowers Parts 2&3. Singer Jeff Mangum repeats 'I love you Jesus Christ...Jesus Christ I love you, yes I do' in his admittedly not great singing voice and the listener is left with no doubt that he's not saying 'Jesus Christ' as an expletive but as the name of his Lord and Savior.
When I first heard this song (it was the first NMH song I'd ever heard in fact) I was deeply unsettled by it. Secular culture teaches us to be repelled by earnestness in any form, especially religious fervor. We are shown films like Jesus Camp and footage of people weeping, laughing or speaking in tongues in churches and the implicit message is: these people have lost control, they have no idea what they're doing even though what they're doing and what they believe is nonsense. However, loss of control is human, very human, and Humanists should honor that- being unable to do anything but proclaim your love for someone, even if that somebody is Jesus, strikes me as a pretty wonderful thing.

So, based on Neutral Milk Hotel and the smattering of other Christian artists I've sampled over the years I'd like to propose a hypothesis: for a secular person religious music serves a similar function to punk rock- it's a cathartic view into a less restrained world that we normally deny ourselves.

*= As a side note, I notice we're talking about Christian music a lot here- what about music that comes from religious cultures other than the one you were raised in? How does an atheist from a predominantly Christian country relate to Islamic/Jewish/Hindu/Buddhist devotional music?
 
  
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