Commander Birdsong
Crusader
This topic interests me greatly. Christian contemporary music, and especially Christian Rock, has no soul today. Gospel as a living medium is not what it once was in the 50s - I can't name a great Gospel song that's been written since the 70s, and only a few from that era.
But once, religious music was full of soul. All the great composers wrote great Masses. A few years ago I was in Vienna for Easter with the family, and we went to the Augstinerkirke to hear a Haydn mass on Easter morning. Just gorgeous. And in the late 1800s in the US, there was an outpouring of, if not great, pretty good religious music. Many of the popular hymns today date from the 1880s to 1910s. But after about 1920, this, too died out. Writers such as Fanny Crosby and Charles Tyndley churned out much of the music that mainstream US churches use today. Then in the 50s, there was a flowering of the Gospel that sprang from the blues from writers such as Clara Ward and Dorothy Norwood.
Today's Christian music seems so soulless.
I wonder about this dynamic. Certainly I suspect many of the great composers were driven as much by ego as faith in their masses. This means they put their own soul, and not just an imagined version of God's soul, into their music. One can also say that the hymns of the 1880s and 1900s, and the Gospel of the 1950s ,was driven by lives of hardship such as people don't experience as much today, and those with the inner fire to create music no longer seek solace in the church for that.
I don't know.
But I do notice that listening to contemporary Christian music and Christian "rock" is the aural equivalent of chewing cardboard.
mahalia fukkin' jackson f'crissakes...