Michael Gungor is a singer-songwriter from Grammy-nominated group Gungor.
I’ve taken a lot of time off from this project, but this blog post by Michael Gungor compelled me to return to the keyboard.
In it, Gungor highlights some of what he terms problems within Contemporary Christian Music. While these are couched in theological terms, the piece touches on some interesting ethnomusicological ideas.
Gungor begins by playing a cynical little game that identifies Contemporary Christian music from secular, and in it identifies several core qualities, which boil down to an overemphasis on lyrical content (“the message”), and what he terms false emotions.
This is relevant to my project because while I’m trying to separate a highly-ingrained lyrical tradition from the music, Gungor seems to be protesting an industry that shoehorns a narrow lyrical agenda into a wide variety of musical styles; he argues that it is nothing more than marketing, repackaging the product (in this case, a religious message) to appeal to different audiences.
This makes me question my original goal of writing a number of hymns with an atheist or secular tone, however since marketing is something I’m appallingly bad at I feel my motives are still good; I want these hymns to see if they will give me (and possibly others) comfort like their religious counterparts once did.
Regardless, Gungor’s article is an interesting take on a musical genre built entirely around a lyrical message. No non-religious musical culture that I’ve come across has such a specific requirement, and it’s interesting to hear an insider’s perspective on the limitations it produces.
A Godless Song 