Lament as a Genre in Contemporary Christian Music: A Grassroots Theology in the Hong Kong Protests

Contemporary Christian music (CCM) in general refers to a music genre that carries Christian messages with popular music styles. Today CCM in US has evolved into a genre that has its own magazines, charts, awards as well as being listed as multiple Grammy categories, and certainly also making good sales. In Hong Kong, for 30 years, a creative community has been struggling to find the right mix for the genre and push the music to a secular audience since local CCM took shape in the 1980s. Throughout the years, the CCM creative community has to simultaneously overcome resistance from church traditionalists and handles opportunities and obstacles presented by the mainstream music industry. In this paper, a brief history of Hong Kong CCM is included and mapped against certain trends and changes in the mainstream music business in Hong Kong. Next, the article elaborates four cases of crossover acts between the CCM scene and the mainstream music scene to discuss the possibilities and limitations for CCM to be culturally relevant under the backdrop of the Hong Kong pop music soundscape.

Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), popular music featuring evangelical Christian lyrics, is one of the most widely consumed forms of commercial entertainment for America's 70–80 million white evangelical Christians. CCM is an excellent lens through which to examine the complex interactions of religious faith, community sentiment, and popular music practices in the contemporary US. I explain how CCM performs the ‘pastoral’ task of reinforcing Christian faith in an evangelical megachurch in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. I argue that a monthly concert series not only guides evangelical Christians in their ‘walk’, but also helps constitute the flock by building a sense of community. I suggest three spatial analytics to understand CCM's pastoral role: the place of the suburb, the sacred space of the church coffeehouse, and the body. At all three scales of analysis, the musical and religious practices of CCM at one suburban church spiritualize the everyday lives of the participants.

Because of the dominant place Christianity holds both in secular and sacred music videos, this chapter begins by tracing the history of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) as the dominant religious alternative to contemporary popular music and the development of music videos for this genre. I then explore many of the ways American religious minorities, particularly Scientologists and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (whose members are formerly known as Mormons), are represented by current members, former members, and critics through the use, appropriation, or parody of iconography, music, and reenactments of various religious rites and traditions of these faith groups within music videos. This chapter also includes discussions of how elements from these religious traditions are “redemptively” appropriated by former members of these communities as a way to process religious trauma and to find community.

This study examines the influence of K-pop consumers' (online/offline) fandom activities on their happiness and their contemporary Christian music (CCM) listening intention and does so considering two base theories: activity theory and the content theory of motivation. In this context, we also examine the influence of happiness and CCM listening intention on CCM loyalty (word of mouth/purchase). We focus on global consumers of K-pop (people with experience in online/offline K-pop fandom activities) from two countries: the US and the UK. For our investigation, we surveyed these consumers between 1 April and 30 September 2022 through two global research agencies, namely Entrust Survey and META G DATA lnc. We received valid responses from 331 participants. We then used structural equation modeling to analyze the data and found the following: First, although K-pop consumers' online fandom activities did not have a statistically significant effect on their happiness, their offline fandom activities did. Second, their fandom activities had a statistically significant positive effect on their CCM listening intention, although their offline fandom activities did not. Third, their happiness also had a statistically significant positive effect on their CCM listening intention. Ultimately, their happiness and CCM listening intention had a statistically significant positive effect on their loyalty (CCM word of mouth/purchase). We identified a new trend and applied it in the context of K-pop culture and CCM, thereby contributing to consumer psychology studies through creative/innovative empirical research.

Few things frightened conservative white Protestant parents of the 1950s and the 1960s more than the thought of their children falling prey to the “menace to Christendom” known as rock and roll. The raucous sounds seemed tailor-made to destroy the faith of their young and, in the process, undermine the moral foundations of the United States. Parents and pastors launched a crusade against rock music, but they were fighting an uphill battle. Salvation came in a most unlikely form when a revival swept through counterculture hippie communities of the West Coast in the 1960s and 1970s. Known as the Jesus Movement, the revival was short-lived. But by combining the rock and folk music of the counterculture with religious ideas and aims of conservative white evangelicals, Jesus people and evangelical media moguls gave birth to an entire genre known as Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). By the 1980s and 1990s, CCM had grown into a massive, multimillion-dollar industry. Contemporary Christian artists were appearing on Top 40 radio, and some crossed over into the mainstream. And yet, today, the industry is a shadow of what it once was. In this book, Leah Payne traces the history and trajectory of CCM in America and, in the process, demonstrates how the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped—and continue to shape—conservative, (mostly) white, Protestant evangelicalism. Ultimately, the book argues, CCM spurred evangelical activism in more potent and lasting ways than any particular doctrine, denomination, culture war, or legislative agenda had before.

The City Lament: Jerusalem Across the Medieval Mediterranean

The neoliberalization of Contemporary Christian Music’s new Social Gospel

Chapter 4 explores how Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) professionalized and expanded, fueled by the buying power, and social concerns, of the baby-boomer generation. Self-taught evangelical “media experts” of the 1980s told white evangelical parents and teens that popular music was a key battlefield in a cosmic war for the souls of the young and the future of the United States. If mainstream music could be used by the devil to destroy American young adults, however, perhaps CCM could save them. As the market niche of CCM coalesced and grew between 1979 and 1991, the top of the CCM charts were filled with figures who fulfilled these parental wishes. While mass-media magnates mobilized conservative white Protestants to lobby for conservative public policy as part of the “Reagan revolution,” top-selling CCM created imaginative moral and spiritual visions that energized and shaped those efforts.

This study examines racial discourse evident in gospel music, a predominantly African American genre and contemporary Christian music (CCM), a predominantly White American genre. Analyzing 45 songs on the Billboard year-end charts for 2007 and 2008, the study reveals differences in messages predicated on sociocultural influences. Whereas gospel songs, possessing roots in blues, emphasize opposition and overcoming, CCM songs, establishing its root in the aftermath of the Hippie movement, emphasizes devotion and inspiration. This comparative study lays a foundation for future thematic analysis of Christian music and holds implications for the intersection between social and spiritual identity, the influence of industry practices on cultural production and offers a contributing explanation for issues of race relations even among Christians.

Following the uses and gratifications approach, this study explores why people visit and use Web sites for Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) radio stations. An online survey of 320 visitors to 9 CCM radio Web sites found that listening online is the most commonly used feature of these Web sites followed by features related to finding information. A factor analysis identified two underlying gratification dimensions: lifestyle management and information seeking. Simple regression analysis found that different gratifications sought are related to using different features on these Web sites.

The research entitled "Adaptation of the Drum Chops Technique in the Song You Are Good in the Liturgical Serving of GBI Keluarga Allah Surakarta" was proposed by raising the assumption that this phenomenon occurs consciously and is related to many things in religious and cultural life in GBI Keluarga Allah Surakarta. There are two problem formulations, namely; 1) Why was gospel music adapted with drum chops technique in liturgical music at GBI Keluarga Allah Surakarta? 2) How was gospel music adapted and drum chops technique adapted to liturgical music at GBI Keluarga Allah Surakarta? and 3) How is the position of gospel music with drum chops technique in worship at GBI Keluarga Allah? The theory of cross-cultural adaptation is used as the basis for the analysis of this research by applying qualitative methods of field research techniques. The results of this study indicate that the GBI Keluarga Allah consciously accepts the gospel flow and uses Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) as the dominant music style because the concept of using liturgical music in GBI Keluarga Allah is a reference to the popular gospel music genre. The adaptation process that occurs in applying the linear drum chops technique is at least three things, namely simplification, mixing, and complicating the game references that are absorbed by the drummer through social media. The adjustment of the drum chops game is considered sufficient to affect the achievement of the desired atmosphere as in the part of the worship service.

Contemporary Christian music has been called the fastest growing form of popular music in the United States today (Dawidoff 42). While traditional gospel music has remained confined within “the individual house of worship, connected to a loose national mosaic of churches” (Ennis 27), the new sound has borrowed from secular styles including hard rock, rap, country, and pop to reach a much larger and more mainstream audience. Already a fixture in a nationwide network of Christian bookstores (Adams A18), contemporary Christian music is becoming more available through secular record stores, retailers such as K-Mart and Wal-Mart, and the well-known Columbia House mail-order club. A key factor in this wider availability has been the entrance of major record companies into the Christian field. Over the past several years mainstream labels such as BMG and EMI have purchased Christian labels, and companies including Virgin and Elektra have signed Christian bands to their rosters (Price, “With” 34). This interest from mainstream investors has enabled contemporary Christian music to garner revenues of some $500 million a year (Bates A18) and to grow at a rate in which the genre is projected to account for 10 to 13 percent of American popular music sales by the end of the century (Dawidoff 42).

Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) is a genre that uses popular styles to express religious ideas. "Jesus Freak" (McKeehan & Heimermann, 1995), an enormously successful CCM song, is approached from the perspective of constitutive rhetorical theory. Both lyrics and music are critiqued to determine how the song invites its teen audience to develop shared definitions of Self and Other. Lyrically the song creates a Freak subject position for young Christians that meets mainstream secular judgment with pride and defiant indifference. Musically, a fusion of grunge and rap styles is combined with harmonic and rhythmic composition techniques, such as direct allusions to hit songs by Nirvana and the appropriation of historically non-Christian perfect discords, to demonstrate how being a Christian can be rebellious and cool. Close textual–musical analyses can move us beyond traditional theories of influence derived from linguistic persuasion and into conceptions of mediated and presentational "proof" that more fully account for how contemporary media do ideological work.

Chapter 6 analyzes how the evangelical norms of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) youth culture went mainstream through pop music. Conservative white evangelical media makers came to see the young women of CCM as ideal partners to protest Clinton-era “safe sex” policies in partnership with purity-culture purveyors like True Love Waits. Their efforts resulted in thousands of young people, including some of the biggest pop stars of the new millennium, making public virginity pledges. When the Columbine mass shooting horrified and fascinated the nation, CCM stars created music that framed the event as a form of persecution, and the death of Christian students as a form of Christian martyrdom. Meanwhile, star worship leaders began to gain popularity as a new “personality trend” made evangelical worship liturgy resemble rock concerts. Even as sales reached their zenith, however, there were signs that the world of evangelical entertainment was under threat.

Drawing from social location and the uses and gratification approach, the purpose of this study is to examine the reasons Christian music listeners engage with different types of Christian music. Specifically, we examine how social location influences listeners' relationship with racialized Christian music, namely Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and gospel music. While both genres share a common focus—that is faith—they differ in musical styles and marketability. The gospel genre primarily targets the African American community, while the contemporary Christian genre casts a wider net, which includes primarily White listeners. Findings reveal that there are connections between focus group participants' background and needs. We explore the ways in which focus group participants experience, perceive and come to understand the gratifications they seek and gain when listening to CCM or gospel music.