Hair Metal and the Lord

For awhile now, I have tried to put my finger on something that has been nagging at me: what is it that makes Christian music sound so different? That is, when I surf through the radio, there’s a certain something that identifies Christian music as such. Even my 3-year old notices it: while surfing, whenever I hit the Christian station, regardless if any words are being sung, my little munchkin will pipe up; “That song’s about Jesus!”

Today it occurred to me that Christian music (at least the pop Christian music played on the radio) makes a gratuitous use of reverb, echo, and delay effects that you don’t see quite as much in any other genre. There are some bands that use a lot of electronic effects; U2 is well known for the Edge’s trademarked delay sounds. But it doesn’t seem to matter which Christian band it is, they all amp up the delay. Likewise, the drums aren’t your snappy jazz kits, the Christian drum kit sounds big and powerful. Christian vocalists also seem to have more reverb and vocal effects added to their sound, and the bass frequently has a powerful boom to it, rather than the sharp pop-bass you find in a lot of contemporary rock.

There is one other genre that regularly makes use of such tones, and that is 80's hair metal. What’s with that? What’s the connection between 80's metal and Christian rock?

I think the combination of boom tone bass, echoed big drums, guitars with delay, echo and reverb maxed out and a concert-hall echo on the vocalist gives Christian music an “epic” tone. It’s a fitting style of music for the content Christians sing about: the larger-than-life God, the transcendent, the macro themes that make the finite world seem so small. In light of God, the world is just one big, empty canyon that His voice fills up with ease. Can you properly communicate the majesty and grandeur of God with a banjo? Wouldn’t the tone do a disservice to the theme?

You see a similar tone in a lot of Enya’s music, where the tones and instrumentation she uses has that “Spiritually transcendent” feel to it where the echoes and the reverb and delays take the listener to the past, and the earlier notes and words continue to echo in the background as the continues. Like Christian music, the tone fits the themes of the words.

The big joke of course, is 80's hair metal. If the above rationale about musical sound and content has a grain of truth to it, what on earth led rock stars to connect such tones to their lyrical content? Consider Def Leppard, a good example of the quintessential “epic” tone of 80's metal. Rather than using epic tones to fittingly describe epic themes, they use epic tones to describe their epic sex lives, their epic romantic flings, and their own epic rock.

While I generally find fault with the proverb “the medium is the message”, I have to concede there is a grain of truth there. If art is just the mirror of the soul, 80's hair metal might rightly be described as the purest expression of Freudian humanist philosophy: sex as that great transcendent beginning and end of all things.

Philosophically, Freud is depressing. Musically, I think he's hilarious.