If you listen to the radio, you should know by now that most radio stations are computer-controlled jukeboxes stuffed with demographically determined collections of popular songs — and often not even that. Wealthy people buy them up and then program them to play the music they think you ought to hear, whether you want to or not, one of their worst angles is deciding that you, yes you, need to listen to more Christian Rock. No, no, not me, I turn that stuff off the instant I hear it, usually with a sulfurous curse.
There’s a company called the Educational Media Foundation (EMF). They’ve been buying up radio stations and converting them to the same boring format everywhere.
On the surface, EMF’s broadcasts are glaringly apolitical. They opt instead for their trite brand of Christian rock, all teed off by the same, small cast of nationally syndicated, Anywhere-USA DJs who smile through everything from squeaky-clean jokes about the drink sizes at Starbucks to prayers asking God to watch over those who have donated to the organization. But behind its politically neutral facade, the organization — and the CCM industry more broadly — appears to be an inherently conservative project. Many right-wing Christian culture bearers have long believed in the “Breitbart Doctrine” — the idea that, to change politics, you must first change culture — and have fought for decades to build a parallel popular culture free of sharp edges, hard questions, or representations of lives that veer from the straight and narrow. The world of CCM, in turn, “reflects the values of the religious right,” says religious-studies historian and author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music Leah Payne, by providing “suburban families with safe Christian listening experiences in the car.” And while EMF stations may not have the “attention-getting, rage-inducing content” of an explicitly political outlet like Fox News, she says, “K-LOVE is the softer side of that conservatism.”
Today, the organization’s nationwide network of radio stations plays mostly white, male artists. Though it professes to broadcast “Christian music,” it largely steers clear of genres like religious rap or gospel, as well as any Christian rock that grapples too heavily with doubt or hardship. Christian artists who have wavered in their faith have quietly been dropped from EMF’s playlists; several queer Christian artists have lost work and airtime on CCM radio after coming out.
As a Christian radio station, you know they also have all the profit-making tricks down pat. Like churches, they’ve scammed the government into thinking they’re non-profit.
As the company built its broadcast network, one business decision proved to be peculiarly prescient: the choice to incorporate as a “not-for-profit” entity. Not only did that status let it avoid paying tax, it also gave EMF several legs up in the radio world. It allowed the organization to take advantage of long-held FCC policies intended to keep the radio dial from being sold to the highest bidder, such as waiving application costs and other fees for nonprofits due to their inherently “limited funding.” EMF also made use of a federal policy that let new nonprofit stations opt out of the requirement of having a local broadcast studio. Furthermore, EMF could legally get donations from listeners — a revenue stream commercial stations don’t have at their disposal. For EMF, “it was just a matter of expansion,” says Todd Urick, a radio engineer and community-radio advocate in Los Angeles County. By the early 2000s, the nonprofit had well over 50 radio stations and was bringing in around $25 million in donations annually.
You’ve probably all heard Contemporary Christian Music, but hopefully not much. It has a recognizable formula, fortunately, so it’s pretty easy to spot it as you’re flipping around the radio dial. When I hear a chorus with a long drawn-out “HIIIIIIM” I know it’s time to kill the channel, but there are other cues.
But in the CCM industry, getting that immediately recognizable sound — however derided — has been a science. “You just can’t be too heavy,” says Grace Semler Baldridge, an independent Christian artist who performs as Semler and who has topped both the iTunes Christian albums and song charts. In addition to her own crop of frankly honest songs about her faith, she’s done session work and built relationships with artists in the CCM industry. There, she immediately became aware of a few soft rules of the genre.
First, she says, there’s a just-right spot when it comes to beats per minute — not too fast, not too slow. After BPMs, there are “JPMs,” or “Jesuses per minute.” While there’s no hard-and-fast rule on the required number of JPMs, more tends to be better — and a reference to “Him,” “God,” “Father,” etc., counts, Semler says. Choruses should be rife with repetition so that listeners can sing along by the second round. The guitar must be warm but just a bit bright, with a touch of drive and a long-tail reverb that hangs in the air. Most important, there’s the delay, which nearly doubles the guitars’ slow strums and picked melodies — a technique that Reverb.com’s “The Gear, Tones, and Techniques of Modern Worship Guitar” guide says was pulled directly from U2’s the Edge.
Ick. There are a few radio stations in my area that fit that description.
Personally, I like KUMM, the student run college station here in town, but it has a very limited range, you can hear it in Morris and practically nowhere else. You go on a quick trip to any of the neighboring towns, and it’s going to drop out. It’s also quirky and weird, with all kinds of odd student conversations and unusual musical choices. It’s kind of the antithesis of EMF.
We also have a classic rock station, 97.3 The Kangaroo (it has an odd Australian theme, sort of, with promos read off by a woman with an Australian accent, and really really bad canned jokey commentary). They play music from the 70s-90s, and that’s the only appeal. It also has an automated playlist, no real DJs, no actual connection to the area, and forget about local news.
But that’s where radio has been going: getting bought up by millionaires who then feed the public flavorless noise without a speck of personality…unless you’re in a metropolitan area, where there is way too much obnoxious personality by way of the “Morning Zoo.” I turn that crap off too.
On long trips I play podcasts and my preferred music on my phone, over the car speakers. Radio is mostly dead.
Well, I keep my radio on ABC 891 which has the cricket in Summer and news and the late night quiz year round plus occassionally, thankfully not too occassionally the likes of Chris Daniels (https://cms.australianoftheyear.org.au/recipients/professor-christopher-daniels ) & Paul Curnow (https://nightskytourist.com/34/ ) but that’s here in Oz..
Rarely if ever hear “Christian rock” here mercifully. Of cours ewe are talking AM radio tho’theres also famously, well famously here, Triple J and their hottest 100.
Mind you we do have our share of disgraceful, bigoted Shock jocks like Alan (not the 1980 F1 champ the other one) Jones :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Jones_(radio_broadcaster)
Paradoxically, the state-owned program 3 in Sweden provides a very wide variety of music, even at night (good if you have insomnia). They list the music titles on internet so if you hear that tune from 20 years ago you want the name of, it is no problem tracing it.
The commercial radio channels – I never started listening to them, I do not need them!
Odd TV channels provided by the state: a lot of wildlife cameras are set up in nature, so you can follow the migration of Swedish moose/ elk.
The Germans have signed on to have the channel. It is very restful, you watch nature go by.
Yeah, I can’t imagine the younger generations paying any attention to regular radio stations anymore when they all have Spotify accounts of the equivalent that can delivery exactly the music they want without the ads.
As someone raised on BBC Radio 4 (high quality talk radio in the UK), aside from the odd NPR show I just can’t stand American talk radio, so I too will listen to podcasts in the car whenever possible. The only station I listen to these days is Relevant Radio (a syndicated conservative Catholic talk radio station) simply because I like to keep up on whatever nonsense religious conservatives are spouting these days and they don’t have many ad breaks.
They also have the occasional fun really awkward moment, like yesterday when they have a guest on telling them how many trillions of dollars the US needs in infrastructure spending just to get everything up to standard, and how the “recent administration’s” infrastructure bill was a good down payment, even if it fell short of what’s necessary. The host couldn’t wait to move on. Overall though, far-right Catholics are just as insane as far-right Protestants.
Christian rock is almost an oxymoron.
I know exactly what PZ means though.
I only listen to xian rock on my trips up north from the Bay area.
As you leave the SF area, the good radio stations drop out. By the time you get to far northern California on I-5, most of the stations are either country or xian rock.
Xian rock isn’t very good.
It all sounds the same. A generic guitars with drums music with someone, usually male who can’t sing very well, droning on about something not very interesting.
I don’t listen to xian rock but not because I’m an ex-xian.
I don’t listen to xian rock because it is trite, generic, and not worth listening to.
What’s that Family Guy (?) joke about Christian rock not making Christianity better, but music worse?
In my college years, I actually listened to (some) Christian music, mostly following a few artists who were actually good and had their own style. (I was also a Xian then).
There’s a good local radio station in my rural county in far Northern California that I have listened to, but, frankly, I just never turn the radio on.
I almost exclusively listen to audio books (and occasionally, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me).
I’ve tried listening to the radio, but except for my local station, which plays classical, jazz, irish, scottish, “world”, etc., it’s all crap!
Try WXRT Chicago live stream. Best radio station in town IMO. Real DJs playing an eclectic mix of classic to new rock. Sometimes even from old vinyl.
In the Detroit area we have a local, non-profit, Classical/Jazz station: WRCJ.
Classical from 5AM to 7PM and Jazz from 7PM to 5AM. Very little news, very little commentary, but good music. They play more familiar stuff in the afternoons, and more contemporary classical during the workday. A lot of stuff which is not played regularly on other stations, if you can find a classical station. Local DJs.
They also have a streaming service for people too far away to pick up their signal.
I used to listen to the local classic rock station in Eugene, one of the longest-running rock stations in the country. But I got thoroughly sick of the moronic morning show DJs, and as soon as MP3 technology developed, I stopped listening to broadcast radio almost entirely. I can’t recall the last time I listened to a radio, and I like it that way.
@6. Matt G : Couldn’t find that immediately but did find Cartman writes a Christian rock song (42 seconds long.)
@ StevoR
John Laws was a piece of shit. (Not from the ABC).
https://au.news.yahoo.com/broadcaster-john-laws-insists-female-staff-wear-skirts-to-work-35522456.html
I listen to Oregon Public Broadcasting. Best source of unbiased local news in the area.
The closest I get to christain rock is on KQAC as is by JS Bach.
My daughter has a DJ gig at a local non profit radio station here in Seattle, 90.3 KEXP. Her show focuses on psychedelic music from the 60’s to the present and from cultures all around the word. They just expanded by buying a station in the Bay Area. If you like psychedelic music, her show is called Astral Planes and it’s on every Wednesday from 7pm (Pacific time) to !0pm. You can also stream it at KEXP.org
Matt G @ 6
That was from King of the Hill: https://youtu.be/oPwaqaOcAyE?si=iR2U1Z5c3U6gEIxk
Speaking for myself, I stopped listening to broadcast radio around the same time I found a way to connect my iPhone to my car radio. Now I listen to what I want.
In the Dallas area, we have two great music stations that are both co-owned by our NPR org (which is strikingly good) – KKXT (91.7 – https://kxt.org/) and KWRR (https://www.wrr101.org/), the classical station. Both have been standards for me since I discovered them, and tuned out all the others.
Before I left it all behind, I spent a lot of years deep in the tepid water that is “Christian Rock.” It was background noise, at best, with most of it being subpar bands that had enough skill, to some being legitimately good but unfortunately in a subject. Looking back at the few I did like, I realize that my current tastes were on display, since I was pretty far into the “alt” and folk scene even then, and once I cut the Christian junk out, I got a whole huge chunk of quality to enjoy.
I haven’t listened to radio in years though I used to listen to Dave Morey on KQED everyday driving to/from work…that was a great time. The last “Christian” radio station I listened to was KUSF in the early 80s, a station operated by the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school. However, the DJs did not play religious music. At the time it was quite eclectic including punk thrash like the Dead Kennedys, dub, and so forth.
Back in the mid-60s, the youth pastor at my “home church” told us that if we had choice we should always listen to Christian radio. Almost everyone in the room reacted negatively to that idea, even the fairly straitlaced teens in the group. It just so happened that the youth pastor was the younger brother of the main preacher. For me, that was a clue to the con in religion.
birgerjohansson @3
I saw a segment about Sweden’s nature Channel on CBS Sunday Morning. The channel is very similar to that program’s “Moment of Nature” that closes each episode.
I’m an NPR junkie, but I prefer silence to the 9-12 morning music. Sometimes, if I’m going to be listening to a long segment about Trump, I turn it off, too. I’ve been listening to my podcasts on long drives (like when I drive down to Loveland with my dog for a nosework class). No better time to catch up on Science Friday! As music stations go, there’s a good one broadcast by Colorado State University, but that only gets you so far (I wish stations here had longer ranges). Otherwise, it’s a lot of Christian rock and people trying to make me believe stuff I didn’t believe when I was in elementary school. No thanks.
My transition from believer to non-believer started when I began to realize religion was, as I called it back then, a form of mind control. This pumping of Xian rock into the airwaves is another strategy they are employing to infect minds. This is also culture appropriation.
My “alarm clock” (single board computer + 7 inch display and speakers) just streams KDFC, the San Francisco Classical station.
I have listened to very little radio in the past several years. I have a microSD card installed in my console with about 20 gigs of music I like to listen to while driving. Works for me.
I have BBC Radio 4 on in the car and will listen to most of their output, although I tend not to listen to plays and will turn the Archers off before the first not of the theme tune plays. I sometimes listen to catch up Radio 4, say all of one series of the science programme or all of a series of The Infinite Monkey Cage – which is also science, but with jokes – when I’m cooking, so if the cooking gets too loud it’s easy to back up to the start of the part I didn’t hear. Music is mostly from my own collection or stuff I’ve found on line by people I like if it’s not available for sale eg Robert Plant and Saving Grace despite having been working together on live shows don’t have any records out, but you can find the odd bootleg of some of the concerts.
A note for people outside North America: Terrestrial radio in Canada and the US is still pretty much straight analog medium wave AM and FM. Digital radio never took off here because the industry didn’t decide on a standard, and the CRTC in Canada and FCC in the US didn’t mandate a format or announce a firm date for a switchover. Compare this with TV, where the majority of analog transmitters were shut down more than a decade ago. HD Radio, which uses existing FM stations to broadcast several digital channels at once, has been adopted by a considerable number of US stations, but only 40 in Canada, and is not found in much of the country.
Saskatoon has a single Christian music station which somehow has managed to survive despite having a low powered transmitter. It’s interesting that some of the lyrics could be secular love songs, while others are more blatantly of the groveling ot Jesus sort.
Bell Media in Canada shut down or sold a bunch of their radio stations in recent years. Amongst the casualties were what must be one of the worst commercial radio formats ever, Funny. Vancouver’s Funny 1040 and its sister stations in Winnipeg, Hamilton, and Calgary played bits cut out of stand up comedy acts. No on air staff, no local forecasts or syndicated news, just a minute or 2 of comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, interspersed with lazy canned identification like “That was Jerry Seinfeld.” And because of a loophole in Canadian content regulations they didn’t have to play any Canadian comedians. Yet this dirt cheap format couldn’t generate enough ad revenue to pay for electricity for their transmitters.
“appears to be an inherently conservative project”. Why are the media so mealy-mouthed about what the Right are up to?
Do Christian rock singers ever sing about Jesus telling people to be kind to even the despised minorities (modern day) Samaritans, telling people topray inprivate a she wished and pay their taxes -oh and how much he hate sfigs fro not providing figs out of season? I think I know the answer..
Does the Byrds Turn turn, turn! (A season to) count a s Christian Rock? That one is okay ..
.^ ..telling people to pray in private as he wished and pay their taxes – Oh and how much he hates figs fro not providing figs out of season
StevoR #27
Ecclesiastes is Old Testament so it’s hard to say if Christers like it.
In my youth, teen years, and even early 20s, I was always glued to my radio. But around 1995 or so, it seemed like almost every station out there shrunk their playlists to miniscule proportions and bombarded us with the same 7 songs over and over and over and over. Then XM came along and was a breath of fresh air… until Sirius bought it and did the same thing that was already done to terrestrial radio. Same. Damn. Songs. Over. And. Over.
It’s why I now have a thoroughly ridiculous collection of physical media.
There’s more of value in the cultural wasteland of network television than of commercial radio. And there’s worse than xtian rock: Sinclair Media. Unfortunately, if you’re driving and need to get traffic updates without taking your eyes off the road, the various “news radio” Sinclair Media stations have a nationwide stranglehold. It’s literally the only part of their formula I like: 20 seconds every ten minutes. But it’s literally a lifesaver — it’s the one part of their “news” operation that emphasizes facts, facts, facts, right now. But I often miss the reports, because I turn the radio off for 20 minutes when they play an outright-deceptive commercial from one of their right-wing sponsors like a gun club, or an “investment advisor” who’ll help you with your $250k+ portfolio for an 8-10% commission and place you in annuities, or…
Unfortunately, NPR hasn’t figured out yet that “radio” usually means “while travelling, either on a car radio or otherwise.”
I don’t listen to music on the radio. It’s all crap regardless of format — there are only so many times one can put up with a classical playlist on heavy rotation of the lesser works of the three Bs occasionally sprinkled with badly-done Mozart; and the poor musicianship and offensively bad songwriting in radio popular music, regardless of type, would drive me nuts if I hadn’t run away from it 40 years ago.
I listened to Christian music from middle school until… well until about 2009 when I found this Website >w>
Aside from the few Relient K songs that still make me smirk – just listening to any of the music makes me sad… It’s just so bad. So poorly written, so badly played, and it’s about the message not the music. Now there are groups whose music is designed to send a message (I’m looking at you, RatM) but they at least have the skills to make their message not… bad.
I used to listen to a station when I was in high school in the southeastern PA area which played rock music, but not just the stuff that was on every other radio station. They played local bands, college bands, indie bands – and they’d always end the play with “Hey that was Tibetan Mouse Rest and they’re going to be playing at the Electric Factory next Friday, tickets are on sale!”
Then that station got bought up and replaced with an adult contemporary station…
The OT is part (indeed, most) of the Christian Bible. And there are places in the NT where Jesus is quoted as approving large parts of it (“the law and the prophets” – “the law” meaning the first five OT books, while “the prophets” is a bit vaguer but certainly references large parts of what is now the OT; the actual OT didn’t exist at that point, and that’s true of the Tanakh – the Jewish Bible – as well). So if Christians don’t like it, they appear to be at odds with both their church, and its supposed founder.
StevoR @ 11
You beat me to it.
Sinclair media is unfortunately expanding, taking over local TV stations and Foxifying them.
The irony, of course, is that U2 itself is almost never played on Christian radio stations, despite at least 3/4 of the band (Adam Clayton’s more ambiguous) being devout Christians and half their songs having religious themes. Too many references to sex and drugs, too much criticism of bigotry, capitalism and imperialism, too many admssions of doubt.
Likewise, you don’t hear much rockabilly or rap on those stations. The artists are often very proudly and explicitly Christian, but they’re just not the right kind of Christian. (Or, for rap, the right color.)
I’m surprised that the FCC allowed KUMM as a call sign. I believe that they shut down KOME some time after it started using the slogan “Don’t touch that dial! You’ve got KOME on your radio!”