Christian Radio

Recently one of our local rock radio stations got replaced with K-Love, a nationally-syndicated “Christian” station. It left a lot of puzzled/angry rockers wondering what the world was coming to.

In one sense I was glad. As a Christian, I love to see the name of Jesus put out there.

“But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.”

Philippians 1:18

But I’m also sick of this type of music. As an experienced churchgoer, I’m familiar with both traditional hymns and “P&W”. It’s an entire genre, played in almost every “modern” church in the US today. As a professional guitarist, I’ve played this music for years and still do.

I dislike that this music has become associated with what everyone means when they say “Christian music”, and that even the words “praise” and “worship” have been hijacked. When someone in church says, “It’s time to worship,” what they really mean is, “Let’s sing some ambient light rock that 20-year-old girls may like, but grandpa won’t be offended by.”

Despite my current aversion to the genre, I have started listening to K-Love in the car. I wanted to try (again) to get past the cheesy music and figure out what was really bugging me about it. Why do I cringe inside when I listen? Is it me?

As usual, it is my problem. Sometimes I wish I could turn my analytical self off and just appreciate music, especially music that claims to praise the God I love. But that hasn’t happened. I still cringe. I have been able to figure out some reasons.

The music of K-Love is extremely feminine. This is because their target demographic is women, the majority of their listeners. They sing about grace, love, mercy, light, all the fluffy, uplifting things about the faith, and none of the challenging things.

In contrast, the Bible is full of dark, depressing, and difficult things along with the good, like real life. But K-Love is billed as “positive and encouraging” and that’s all it is. This video by John Crist humorously explains the industry around P&W music. “You can only reference your struggles in an abstract way.” This is what people think “Christian” music is, both inside and outside the church.

“K-Love, America’s largest syndicated Christian music radio network, targets its programming at eighteen- to forty-five-year-old females. Two-thirds of K-Love listeners are women… The K-Love disc jockeys have created a mythical average listener, whom they call Kathy. She is a mother in her mid thirties with two kids, a minivan, and a mortgage… Kathy’s name comes up frequently during staff meetings, and the DJs make sure their on-air antics won’t upset or offend her sensibilities.”

David Murrow, “Why Men Hate Going to Church”

Even the song lyrics seem carefully crafted to soothe Kathy’s fears, to reassure her that Jesus is, and always will be, her boyfriend. The man who always listens, always sympathizes, never says anything mean or offensive, and always comes to the rescue – unlike her real-life husbands/boyfriends, who always seem to disappoint.

The majority of these songs are sung by a soothing male lead vocalist who pronounces the word “pray” like “pry” because he has some kind of weird Australian accent. He sings everything Kathy wants to hear. It’s romantic because he’s “leading” her to the Lord in a special way.

I get mad at this because it’s not the whole picture. Jesus is a man who commands the loyalty of the men he trains. He is downright offensive and rude at times, occasionally violent, always challenging, unpredictable. He died like a lamb but lived like a lion. Men dropped everything they were doing because he said “follow me”. Then they died for him. He commands respect, he’s not a whimpering boyfriend who bows to Kathy’s every whim.

“He was not at all like the psychologist’s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can’t really be very well ‘adjusted’ to your world if it says you ‘have a devil’ and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.”

CS Lewis, The Four Loves

But none of this is ever in songs that K-Love would play. For contrast, check out the Psalms. The range of human emotion is staggering and covers just about everything. Songs that are poetic, honest, raw.

Finally, none of the music makes me *think*. I have a theory that this is due to the repetition (yes Lord yes Lord yes yes Lord) and limited vocabulary of K-Love P&W. So I actually did a comparison today.

I used five different sources:

• 100.7 WZLX (Classic Rock)
• 1965 Hymnal
• 97.7 WKAF (80s/90s HipHop/R&B/Pop)
• 107.3 K-Love (P&W)
• Psalms

I then randomly selected four songs from each. For the radio stations, recently played songs. In the hymnal, four random hymns. I used Psalms 12, 24, 36, and 48, for no particular reason.

Then I found lyrics for every song, put them in a document, and removed all punctuation. I found a count of unique words using the following code:

cat "lyricfile" | sed "s/ /\n/g" | sort -u -f | wc -l

This sorts each word onto a separate line, removes all duplicates, and finally tells us how many unique words. You can see the songs and lyrics I used here.

So what do you think? If you listen randomly to 90s R&B, classic rock, read the Psalms, sing the hymnal, or listen to K-Love, which has the biggest vocabulary? I laughed pretty hard at the results. It’s much more fun as a graph:

The R&B station has more variety of words by far because one of the songs (Hip Hop Hooray) is rap and has a lot of words per minute! That song alone really pushed it over the edge.

And there’s K-Love way down there at the bottom. If you check out those lyrics the reason why becomes clear. There is SO much mindless repetition in these songs. I feel like my brain cells are dying when I listen.

I didn’t factor in the length of the songs – K-Love P&W songs are often really long. Five-minute songs are not rare, like in many churches – just endless choruses stuck on repeat.

“What I, like many other laymen, chiefly desire in church are fewer, better, and shorter hymns; especially fewer.”

CS Lewis, “On Church Music”