Why We Like Our Music

I was chatting to a friend the other day about how we are beginning to say ‘old people things.’ Whether complaining about the way things used to be, the price of fuel, or the size of chocolate bars, there has been a shift in how I think about the world. I still feel pretty young at heart, but as we chatted about this subject, one topic really underpins the old person vibe…Music.Music is never as good as the music we grew up with.Every generation of course has the same conversation. One person hears beauty, another just loud noise. I have a pretty weird set of musical tastes and it seems to cycle every so often, but one thing remains the same; my kids hate my music. We go on road trips and each choose songs to go on there, but my selections normally get the most eye rolls. However, since my steering wheel has the controls for the music, I can normally get two-thirds of the way through a song before having to turn it off. I try to explain the lyrics, talk to them about the guitarist and why his solos are epic, but it normally gets huffed down, and there are murmurs of my music being from “the 1900s.” Accurate I know, but somehow stinging as if I like parlour music played on wind up gramophones. There is a major issue with this though, and in the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about what this says about our world, but also how we engage with culture as Christians.You see, music is never just music to us. Music carries memories and feelings. A few weeks back we were in a clothing shop for camping wear. As my son tried on a new heavy duty jacket to prepare for the Irish summer weather, a song playing on the PA system stopped me in my tracks. It was a song by Loverboy, a Canadian rock band. Now, you might be thinking about how I knew that random song, but there is a story. When I was 11 years old, I stayed for a summer on an exchange trip with a family in Virginia in the US. The Dad of the family was a former pilot, and I got to watch Top Gun for the very first time with their family. I remember how it blew me away with the speed and the danger and, most importantly, the soundtrack. So, when I was heading home, tucked inside my luggage, was a cassette tape of the soundtrack. I played and played and played that tape until it became unusable. I knew all the lyrics, understood few of them as an 11-year old boy, but it wormed its way into my life. So when standing looking at tents, as the song “Heaven in your Eyes” wafted over the camping equipment, my kids stared at their middle aged Dad, mouthing the words to another song from the 1900s! Even my wife was a little embarrassed, and she’s known me for well over 20 years! I tried to explain, even tried to play it in the car on the way home, but they just couldn’t understand. It was then I realized the issue.We really struggle to understand other people’s music.My kids laugh at me, because nothing is ever just a song, just a movie, just an anything. I want to noodle into what it says about us, our culture, and the path it might direct us on. I went down a rabbit trail of why we like and dislike music, but also, why we struggle not only to like other people’s music, but why they would even like it themselves. It put me in mind of a comedian who talked about other people’s houses smelling like their dinner, only to realise that his own house smelled like dinner also, he’d just grown used to it. Perhaps this is the lesson then, even as I direct us to thinking about culture and contextualization. Perhaps as those called to ‘mission’ by Jesus, we have become blind (and deaf) to the soundtracks that are all around us, and are hopeful that everyone else will get on board with ours, rather than us seeking to understand theirs.Music and the Feeling of HomeThis article isn’t really about music, but in some ways it is. I’m writing an article about C.S. Lewis’ comparison of (capital N) Noise, with (capital M) Music. Noise is distracting and divisive. Music is harmony and heavenly. Our issue, it seems, is that we want to subjectively decide which is which, and ours always wins. We can even rationalize it. However, our musical tastes are attached more to our memory that the melodies themselves. I love the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and The Rat Pack, primarily because my grandfather loved them and played them constantly on his record player. I love Massive Attack, Portishead, Alanis Morissette, Prince and Madonna, because my uncle who we stayed with each summer played them on his futuristic CD player. These influences shaped my identity, my personality. So, when a new artist finds its way into our family playlist, I want to remind them that Bruno Mars is just a budget Prince. Or that Taylor Swift may have sold lots of albums, but she’ll never be better than peak Madonna. What I am doing is judging their music by the standards of my formation. I have mistaken familiarity for objectivity. But what has this got to do with Christianity and, in particular, mission?The Soundtrack of ChristianityI learned many of the kid’s songs at church at the same time as my own kids. I now know that Father Abraham had many sons, that Noah’s ark building was quite a lark, and that you never get kids to stand too close together on Deep and Wide, or someone is getting a slap. I’ve also never really understood modern Christian music. It all sounds very samey. As I grew in my faith, I fell in love with hymns. Really old, drudgy, organ heavy, 16th century depth. Something that had 15 verses, no choruses, and a theology that you could build your life upon. But that made me weird in certain circles, especially those younger than 70. What I came to realise was that as we grow as disciples, we’re not so much being taught how to live to be more like Christ, but to become more immersed in Christian culture. We want people to know Jesus of course, but also read the right books, have the right Bible, listen to the right Christian artists. But that quickly becomes our evangelism. Don’t listen to Nirvana, listen to Creed. Don’t listen to Counting Crows, but Casting Crowns. Don’t listen to U2, listen to… well, maybe it’s ok to listen to U2, just don’t listen to Bono! We take our cue from the culture we grow up in, as much as the music we listen to.Our expression of church, leadership style, dress, aesthetic, as well as our music, tells something about us. Again, none of those things are wrong, but they are part of our culture and memory. We inevitably want to reproduce ourselves. So when we went to Mexico we sang Hillsongs songs that were translated from English to Spanish. At a recent Irish church conference we had a Northern Irish worship team, singing songs written by Americans, as an Australian guy who lives in England was preparing to preach to Irish people. None of this is ‘wrong’, please don’t hear me say that, but are we tailoring our mission towards drawing people into ‘our music’ rather than helping them express praise in their own culture and memory? This might seem natural, but it doesn’t seem to play out with many of our instincts. It takes effort to hear and perhaps appreciate other people’s music. And therefore, to make music of our own.Hearing The Music of OthersWe’ve done a good job packaging Christianity today, with branding and culture spreading across the world. It’s not really from a specific place, but a kind of generic Western, English speaking, vague cultural expression of what we like. But if we are to truly be on mission as the people of God, from every place, to every place, then it requires us to distinguish between the Gospel and our cultural expression of our faith in Christ. It does bear repeating that this does not mean changing the Gospel, but therein lies the rub, if we see churches singing different songs or sitting in circles rather than pews, we immediately feel that they are doing something outside the bounds of orthodoxy. Missiologically thinking begins with learning what belongs to Christ, and what belongs to us.I’ve considered this a lot in the last few years. I have a friend who spends a lot of his time encouraging the church to reach ‘hard’ places. Now, as soon as I say that, we immediately think of social deprivation, or areas where the Gospel might not be welcomed without some sort of challenge. However, ‘hard’ is a relative term. For some of us, ‘hard’ might be an area or a people group who are obscenely wealthy and don’t seem to have needs. Or indeed, maybe our ‘hard’ is just people like us! But for many of us the hardest people to reach are those who don’t naturally enjoy our music. That’s the test then, whether it is culture, style, history, or whatever our most natural identity; could someone who dislikes almost everything about these still discover that Jesus is for them? If the answer is no, then perhaps we’ve relied more on our culture than we’ve proclaimed the Gospel.ConclusionThe debates over our music, as our family journeys testify to, are rarely about music. But they do reveal how deeply our lives, and instincts, are shaped by our story and formative influences. The songs that feel natural to me are those that had a hand in raising me. The same is true of our churches, we develop culture as a natural thing, as the line goes ‘it’s how things work around here.’ So, the question for us on mission, is not so much whether we have a culture, but if we can recognize our own, and indeed recognize and learn from others. Even, and perhaps more awkwardly, if we don’t really understand it. It might be that until we recognize our own culture in a critical sense that are free to communicate Christ across cultures without first expecting that people become like us. Maybe it is a bit more simple than that. Maybe it’s learning to appreciate the songs that others are singing before we ask them to sing ours. Get full access to Missional Imagination at jonnypollockwrites.substack.com/subscribe