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SOUND AND SPIRIT: LIFE, PASSION AND DISCERNMENT IN CONTEMPORARY YOUTH MUSIC
By Garry J. Moes
MTV, cable television's musical cesspool for the young, recently asked teenagers whether they would rather give up food or music. More than half said they'd junk their munchies before they'd jettison their melodies. For today's teenager, music is life — and lifeblood.
group magazine, a religious youth leaders' publication, reports that "during junior and senior high, teenagers spend almost 10,000 hours listening to music — close to all the hours they spend in class by the time they graduate from high school."
Developmental psychologist Kelly Schwartz of Canadian Nazarene College in Calgary, writes, "Their allegiance to music is second only to their commitment to their friends. Socially, kids use their music to relieve loneliness, to initiate and maintain friendships, and to rebel against adult-inspired expectations."
Schwartz concluded, rather unremarkably, from a survey he conducted that the typical teenager's musical preferences reflect the "issues, conflicts, and needs that make up his internal world. And those internal forces drive his emotions, values, and beliefs."
Schwartz found that girls are more apt to use music as the impetus for their inner lives and to find more meaning in musical lyrics then guys do. But for both sexes, musical tastes mirror personality profiles. Kids who have problems with relationships, sexuality, and peer acceptance prefer mainstream pop, county or dance music. Kids who are domineering, indifferent, impulsive, disrespectful or prone to push societal boundaries prefer hard rock, rap, heavy metal and fringe alternative music.
group's music columnist Bryan Belknap wisely advises church youth leaders to take seriously the impact that contemporary music has on the lives and souls of teenagers. In an otherwise very disappointing advice article in the September/October issue of his magazine, Belknap rightly recognizes that "Jesus wants access into every area of their lives."
"And isn't the core of our calling to teach young people a new way to live — to filter all they say and do through the heart of Jesus?" he asks youth leaders. "Aren't we hoping to impact the way kids act and think not only at church but at work, school, the movies, the grocery store, on dates, and cruising in their cars on a Friday night?"
Most appropriately, he cites Philippians 1:9-10: "This I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ...."
Alas, Belknap then takes up the popular mantra of youth leadership today warning adults away from any objective or dogmatic instruction that might suggest any need to reorder the coming generation's life. "Resist the urge to condemn and correct," he dogmatically instructs.
Rather, adult leaders should immerse themselves in the craven world of contemporary music, listen, appreciate, evaluate, facilitate, be nonjudgmental and then rely on conviction by Holy Spirit, the "still, small voice" to which Belknap, ironically, readily admits young people "rarely learn how to listen."
"...[R]emember your mission — you're teaching kids to think for themselves and listen for the Holy Spirit's guidance," he admonishes.
Fact is, kids need little teaching on how to develop their own mind-sets, especially on contemporary cultural issues. What they desperately need is clear, sound teaching on how to think God's thoughts after Him. And this requires objective instruction in divine absolutes and the requirements of holiness. It requires honest, unabashed condemnation of evil and loving correction toward righteousness — the "fear and admonition of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4). Yet these simple truths are anathema to today's religious youth leaders. "Youth culture isn't evil, it's simply foreign," Belknap tells youth leaders, urging them, in effect, to use the garbage as an avenue to the gospel. "Your job is to discover the intersections between youth culture and the gospel, then help kids set up camp in those intersections."
It is difficult to imagine that St. Paul had this kind of socialization mush in mind when he urged the Philippians to abound in "real knowledge and all discernment."
Belknap offers a second piece of ill-informed and misplaced advice when he urges youth leaders to "focus on lyrics, not music styles."
"God made each of us unique, with unique musical tastes. What sounds like a chainsaw symphony to you is an artistic, spiritual experience for another," he writes. "By confining your focus strictly to lyrics, you can objectively dissect the content."
This advice reflects the popular Christian mis-supposition that the divine imperative in art (and all other expressions of truth) speaks only to content, not to form. Content may be godly or ungodly, but form is neutral — a matter of personal taste. But this is patent nonsense, and never more so than in the realm of music.
If form is neutral, then all instrumental music would be somehow messageless. It isn't, of course. Tune in public radio's "Music from the Hearts of Space," for example, where 99 percent of the play list for this weekly New Age musical odyssey is instrumental, yet deeply spiritual and evocative of the principalities and powers of the air. No honest student of music would ever argue that musical form has no meaning. And if it has meaning, it has moral or ethical implications.
Not too many months ago, I broached this subject with the nondenominational community church youth group I was then leading (it was well received by the youth, but not the church leadership and therefore was the last subject I was able to address). In several sessions, I argued two key "Principles for Godly Music":
I argued that the three expressions of musical truth — content, form, and spirit — constitute a musical tri-unity (trinity). The content (the verbal message, the words) and the form (the design, rhythm, balance, unity, variety, melody, harmony) combine to create the spirit (emotion, feeling, essence, moral tone, character, thought, overall impression) of the musical work. Most of us are reasonably good judges of content but illiterates when it comes to knowledge of the intricacies of form. Yet nearly all of us can grasp the spirit of a piece, and it is here we can fairly easily apply the discernment of which Paul spoke in Philippians 1. If we're honest listeners, we can quite easily discern the grating sounds of a chainsaw symphony; and if we're even reasonably in tune with scripture, we will know that chainsaw symphonies do not satisfy the fit harmonies of divine creation — the "music of the spheres" in this our Father's world.
