dc Talk’s Jesus Freak 9781501331664, 9781501331695, 9781501331688

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Jesus Freak
I I Hate Myself and Want to Die
II The Freak Show
III Jesus People
IV Despair-o
V Walls
Chapter 2: Colored People
I Bill Clinton’s Neoliberal 1990s
II I Luv Rap Music
III Color-blind Utopia
IV What Have We Become?
Chapter 3: Between You and Me
I David and Jonathan
II In the Light
III What If I Stumble?
IV Girlish Masculinity
V Promise Keepers
VI Between You and Me
Outro: Queer Shame
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Outro
Bibliography

Citation preview

JESUS FREAK Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration —The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough —Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33–13 ” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson Hamilton by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti Return to the 36 Chambers by Jarett Kobek Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Southern Accents by Michael Washburn Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin Timeless by Martin Deykers The Holy Bible by David Evans The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner Blue Lines by Ian Bourland Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick xx by Jane Morgan Boy in Da Corner by Sandra Song Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal and many more…

Jesus Freak

Will Stockton and D. Gilson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Will Stockton and D. Gilson, 2019 “Between You And Me (Just Between You And Me)” by Mark Heimermann and Toby McKeehan Copyright © 1995 Achtober Songs (BMI) (adm. at CapitolCMGPublishing.com) / Fun Attic Music (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. “Jesus Freak” by Mark Heimermann and Toby McKeehan Copyright © 1995 Achtober Songs (BMI) (adm. at CapitolCMGPublishing.com) / Fun Attic Music (ASCAP) International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. “Colored People” by George Cocchini and Toby McKeehan Copyright © 1995 Achtober Songs (BMI) (adm. at CapitolCMGPublishing.com) / Tigerback Music (BMI) International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 133 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: 333sound.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-3166-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3168-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-3167-1 Series: 33–13 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

Introduction 1 1 Jesus Freak 2 Colored People 3 Between You and Me

11 57 97

Outro: Queer Shame

129

Acknowledgments Bibliography

133 135

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Introduction Will Stockton and D. Gilson dc Talk was our Beatles, filling arenas with breathless enthusiasm. It seemed there was nothing they couldn’t do. —Joel Heng Hartse, Christianity Today On November 9, 1995, dc Talk’s fourth album, Jesus Freak, debuted at #16 on the Billboard Top 200. Although never rising higher, the album would remain in the Top 200 for 79 weeks—an astonishing amount of time for a group primarily known among Christian audiences alone. Jesus Freak would go on to become an RIAA-certified multi-platinum album, selling in excess of three million copies. These sales, too, were a feat that no other decidedly evangelical album had accomplished before or has accomplished since. In 1995, dc Talk’s Jesus Freak announced the arrival of unabashedly Christian content on a popular music scene otherwise dominated by artists including the Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains, and Mariah Carey. dc Talk sounded bolder in their commitment to Christ than U2 ever had. dc Talk had found what they were searching for. Like postmodern John the Baptists, roaming the wilds of “the culture” to prepare the way for the (second) coming of the Lord, dc Talk opened

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the door for a niche market of Christian evangelical music to go mainstream. For evangelicals in the 1990s—a powerful demographic of the American electorate—dc Talk was nothing less than the Beatles of Christian music. The Beatles formed in Liverpool, England to revolutionize rock-n-roll. dc Talk formed in Lynchburg, Virginia—at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, no less—to evangelize rock-n-roll. This book sets out to study dc Talk’s crossover success— this cultural moment of pronounced convergence between Christian and secular music. In our analysis, dc Talk’s Jesus Freak sounded the decline of an evangelical emphasis on the conservative national politics of the Moral Majority. Founded by Jerry Falwell in the 1970s, the Moral Majority fostered a twodecade alliance between evangelical Christians and Republican Party politics.1 Members of the Moral Majority largely sought to “return” America to its ostensibly Christian foundations by advocating for a “pro-family” agenda that included the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the restoration of prayer in public schools. Children of the Moral Majority, which dissolved in the late 1980s following the election of George H. W. Bush, dc Talk and their Christian youth audience turned their missionary attention from transformations of the American political system to transformations of the self. Although often no less politically conservative than their parents on matters like abortion, the For a history of this alliance, see Michael Sean Winters, God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right (New York: HarperCollins, 2012) and Matthew Avery Sutton, Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford, 2012). 1

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children of the Moral Majority placed less emphasis on the Christian origins of the United States than on the power of God to save souls and heal the broken-hearted. In “dialogue” (to borrow a common evangelical term) with trends in secular music, as popular Christian music long had been, this younger generation of evangelicals made new, harder-edged music that marked this shift in emphasis. Furthermore, this younger generation turned their critical eye on the Christian church itself, which they acknowledged as having been complicit in American political sins, especially slavery and Jim Crow. dc Talk’s trio of Jesus Freaks—Toby “Mac” McKeehan, Michael Tait, and Kevin Max2—found commercial success by both reacting to contemporary secular music and producing revolutionized, accessible, sacred pop/rock tunes. As a cultural artifact, dc Talk’s Jesus Freak derives much of its musical stylings from the grunge and hip-hop contemporary to its release. The album savvily Christianizes the latter’s politics of social agitation and the former’s (anti-)politics of disaffection and apathy, thereby opening the door of mainstream music to a hip Christian alternative. At the same time, Jesus Freak still sought and found a significant place in the history of Christian music—a history that unlike many of their crossover peers, dc Talk did not want to hide under a bushel. The album’s title track recalls the “hippie” Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jesus Freak contains covers of the 1971 Godspell hit “Day by Day” and the Charlie Peacock song “In the Light.” The album’s biggest

Prior to 1997, Max went by Kevin Max Smith.

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commercial hit, a ballad entitled “Between You and Me,” also helped pioneer the trend of Christian artists crafting a second-person addressee (“you”) opaque enough to “pass” as someone other than God. At turns boldly Christian and sonically conventional—and even, we will argue, queerly romantic—Jesus Freak helped its many evangelical fans stake a claim for Christ-like coolness in a secular musical world.3 The three chapters in this book pivot around a particular song from Jesus Freak and that song’s accompanying music video. In Chapter 1, we look to the title track to situate the album within the grunge/alternative scene of contemporary secular music, as well as within the history of contemporary Christian music (hereafter abbreviated as CCM). Highlighting dc Talk’s transition from rap to rap-rock, we read Jesus Freak as an evangelical response to the secular grunge and alternative music so paramount to American culture of the early 1990s. Central to this sacred response is the figure of the “freak”—the cultural outcast whose outsider status becomes the basis for his or her hipness. While this figure harkens back to the origins of CCM in the Of course, from a secular perspective, the cultural products of twentiethcentury Christendom were largely uncool. But as consumer capitalism shifted to account for emergent identity politics, so, too, did Christian media, becoming not only a multibillion-dollar market, but also trendier in its aesthetic appeal. Thomas Kinkade, that famed “Painter of Light,” was, for instance, perhaps the most commercially successful artist of the period, though the art world failed to take him seriously. At the time of his death in 2012, The Los Angeles Times estimated Kinkade’s net worth at over $60 million. He was, we can imagine, laughing all the way to the celestial bank (Ng 2012). 3

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countercultural Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it simultaneously locates Jesus and his followers in the modern alternative scene. The Jesus Freak answers Kurt Cobain’s infamous call for youth entertainment—here we are now, entertain us—with the gospel of a personal savior who likes to rock. The Jesus Freak likewise capitalizes on and Christianizes the mythologized figure of the rock-nroll rebel, whose 1990s exemplars included Cobain, Trent Reznor, and Marilyn Manson. Sonically, Jesus Freak moves beyond the genre of grunge or alternative music. It does not merely appropriate the sounds and stylings of angsty white young men. The album also appropriates, as dc Talk long had, black hip-hop, responding, as it did so, to both secular rap and the Christian church cultures that produced the trio. (The group’s name stands for Decent Christian Talk, as in clean Christian rap.) In Chapter 2, we turn to the album’s most politically polarizing song, “Colored People,” to analyze post–Moral Majority evangelical political activism under the rubric of what cultural studies scholars term “neoliberal multiculturalism.” We focus specifically on the centrality of race erasure to the cultural politics of post–Moral Majority Christianity in the United States. As an economic discourse, neoliberalism works to minimize racial difference by emphasizing the contributions that all people might make to the expansion of capital and markets. As a political discourse, neoliberalism casts race-based conceptions of identity as divisive: a costly distraction from our shared humanity. In “Colored People,” dc Talk—comprised of the black vocalist Michael Tait and fellow white group members Toby McKeehan and Kevin Max—sing “We’re colored people, and they call us the 5

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human race,” potentially collapsing racial victim and victimizer into a single human “us.” That is a troublesome claim insofar as it illustrates white appropriation of racialized victimhood and discourages inquiry into the persistence of structural explanations for racial inequality. At the same time, it is important to recognize that, in “Colored People” and elsewhere, dc Talk offers a powerful rebuke of racism within the Christian tradition—a racism that undoubtedly resonated with a younger generation of multicultural believers. In this chapter, we work to balance our political criticism of the song’s efforts at race erasure with an admiring recognition of how the song’s universalization of the epithet “colored” advances an anti-racist form of modern Christianity—a version of the mainstream American religion predicated on an ethic of love. For both of us, Will and D., dc Talk modeled what it meant to be young Christian men—and white Christian men at that. The truth is that criticizing racism was easy from inside the walls of our predominantly white churches. Alongside dc Talk, we called ourselves “colored people” because we were ashamed of our own religion’s history of supporting segregation, and because there wasn’t anyone around to encourage us to think harder about race. Will remembers, for instance, a church scavenger hunt at the local mall. The list of things to find included two youth group leaders who, as it turned out, hid themselves in black face. Upbraided by several outraged shoppers, our youth group leaders were escorted from the building by mall security. On the van ride back to church, we expressed amazement that people would be so troubled by something obviously not intended as an act of racism. The history of racial minstrelsy never 6

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occurred to us. We were all colored people. We were part of God’s kaleidoscope. In a broader sense, becoming a man was, for both of us, much more difficult business. D. remembers saving money for college by working as a dandyish wedding planner. He would shop with brides for their dresses, scour flea markets for eclectic and original decorations, arrange flowers from his sister’s floral shop into bouquets and centerpieces, and on the day of the wedding, run around the church with a headset barking orders and ensuring everything was magazine-ready. His father, leery of this work, had business cards made for him nonetheless. Below his name, potential clients read Proverbs 18:22—“He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.” In D.’s mind, his future wedding was clear as day. An old barn converted into a reception space, his bride in a vintage A-line gown. But the bride herself was never part of the fantasy. D. fancied himself like the holy and perpetually single apostle Paul. In reality, he was a confused boy, obsessive over his boy friends with nary a girlfriend, let alone a bride, on the horizon. Chapter 3, “Between You and Me,” turns to a series of personal narratives about our adolescence in an effort to queer evangelical forms of masculinity. In the mid-1990s, Will was a keyboard player for a teen worship band in a suburban Atlanta Baptist church, and D. a drama team leader for a Pentecostal megachurch in the Missouri Ozarks. We were teenage evangelical aesthetes—precursors to the literary and cultural studies scholars we have both become. We were also budding homosexuals with a strong attraction to popular music. We listened to dc Talk’s Jesus Freak 7

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in our rooms and in our cars. For both of us, the album’s songs became entangled in our love for other boys and in our efforts to reconcile that love to evangelical notions of friendship. In telling these stories of competing love for Jesus and men, this chapter situates dc Talk within a lineage of queerly suspect boy bands like New Kids on the Block, the Backstreet Boys, and N’Sync—purveyors of a peculiarly feminine type of masculinity often legible as homosexuality. This chapter further explores the album’s articulation of male longing and friendship against the backdrop of mid-1990s evangelical men’s movements like the Promise Keepers, which purported to open men up to their “sensitive” side and heal their broken relationships with other men. Remembering ourselves in the interstices of this evangelical construction of masculinity, we explore how dc Talk and the Christian popular culture of which it was such a formative and exemplary part accommodated a wide range of queer affection and expression. We also analyze how that same culture neutralized and continues to nullify that queerness by formally characterizing it as a nonsexual expression of Christian brotherhood. In her 1993 essay “Queer and Now,” the cultural critic Eve Sedgwick posits that the cultural obsessions of our adolescence might offer a certain (and necessary) insight into queer futurity. She explains “that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival” (3). For both of us, Jesus Freak was one such 8

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cultural object—providing us with a way to “connect” with our secular peers even as we sometimes “perverted” its lyrics for our own queer purposes. Today, neither of us is an evangelical Christian. We have traded these identities: we are atheists and gay men. Yet our lingering attachment to Jesus Freak provides us with one way to live more or less harmoniously alongside a still-powerful evangelical electorate with whom we otherwise mostly disagree politically, culturally, and sexually. Put more simply, this book on dc Talk’s Jesus Freak affords our present gay and godless selves the ability to analyze and explore an album that our past evangelical selves took very seriously. Now at middle age, we recognize that the way we think about culture, race, politics, gender, and sexuality was initially filtered through our churches, the CCM music they encouraged us to listen to, and especially dc Talk, whom we loved, and love still. Jesus Freak is an enormously popular Christian album that few have written about in secular circles. It’s hard for us to write about the album now, too, given the softening influence of nostalgia on our critical instincts. We hope, however, that this book explains why the album had such a profound impact on us as acne-ridden, horny teens, and showcases evangelical culture during one of its most influential and dynamic eras. We might not be Christians anymore. But for now, we’re picking up the past and inviting you to call us Jesus freaks.

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1 Jesus Freak Will Stockton I’m not like them, But I can pretend. The sun is gone, But I have a light. —Kurt Cobain, “Dumb” “Jesus don’t want me for a sunbeam,” Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain sang on MTV Unplugged late in the fall of 1993. The song was the third of that night’s set, and it followed the band’s menacing twist on the common Christian invitational, “Come as You Are.” Originally recorded in 1987 by the Scottish band the Vaselines, “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam” reimagines the Sunday school standard “I’ll be a Sunbeam.” The child singer of the original aspires to become part of Christ’s radiant glory, shining “for Him each day” and “showing how pleasant and happy His little one can be.” But the adult singer of the grunge hymn scorns Christ’s sacrifice

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and wallows in self-isolation. “Sunbeams,” Cobain moans, “are never made like me.” As it did for many grunge and alternative artists of the 1990s, Christianity typically figured in Cobain’s imaginary as a force of conformity and bigotry, welcoming with the one hand, but rejecting with the other. (See also, for instance, Soundgarden’s “Jesus Christ Pose” and “Holy Water.”) In “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” Cobain locates himself outside the sacred community of sunny believers. The song is bitter and melancholic, as Cobain, like the Vaselines’ Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee before him, makes an ironic boast of his unwantedness. Elsewhere Cobain channeled his anger into more punk-flavored critiques of mainstream American religion. In a 1993 interview, Cobain told the LGBT magazine The Advocate that he used to spray-paint “God is Gay” on pickup trucks in his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington (Allman 1993). He also shouts “God is Gay” at the end of Nevermind’s tenth track, “Stay Away.” For Sheep, the original title of Nevermind, Cobain imagined a promotional ad that read, in part, “Abort Christ” (Cross 2001: 154). The pro-choice–themed video for “Heart-Shaped Box” features the crucifixion of a man wearing a bishop’s miter. Although Cobain had experimented briefly with born-again Christianity in his teens, his adult perspective on the religion seemed consumed by disdain (Cross 2001: 62–63). If he had any religious goals, Cobain liked to tell people, it was “to get stoned and worship Satan” (Morgen 2015). By the early 1990s, many of the Christians whom Cobain loathed as misogynistic, homophobic sheep had assembled 12

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into the powerful sector of the American electorate known broadly as the Religious Right.1 Reforming and expanding the Moral Majority alliances of the 1980s, the Religious Right organized Protestants and Catholics alike around protecting an often implicitly white America from the left’s agenda of legalized sodomy and abortion. Members of the Religious Right—including D., me, and our families during this period—seem to rank chief among those people Cobain addresses in the liner notes to the 1993 compilation Incesticide: “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.” Leaders of the Religious Right like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson preached that Christians should love the sinner but hate their sins. In contrast, Cobain taught his audience to love both sinner and sin alike. If God didn’t want you for his sunbeam, fuck Him. Ubiquitous though Nirvana was in the early 1990s, many evangelicals stayed away from Nirvana shows and refrained from buying Nirvana records. I turned fourteen in 1993, and the only grunge album I owned at the time was Pearl Jam’s Ten, which I found noisy, dark, and peppered with unnecessary uses of the f-word. (A friend’s mother confiscated the album after hearing that Jeremy, from the eponymous song, “bit the recess lady’s breast.”) My musical tastes ran more toward For a history of the Religious Right, see Stephen P. Miller, The Age of Evangelicals: America’s Born-Again Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 1

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sacred music, specifically Contemporary Christian Music or CCM. Originating in the evangelical outposts of hippie counterculture, CCM had previously struggled to gain conservative Christian acceptance. It had long endured the attacks of numerous evangelical critics who cast it as a cooptation of irredeemably evil forms of music—be they rockn-roll, whose sounds were ostensibly those of sexual license, drug use, Eastern mysticism, and the occult; or folk, which supposedly propelled the spread of communism in America.2 Yet much of this intra-cultural conflict had settled down by the early 1990s. Christian artists like Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Twila Paris, and Steven Curtis Chapman had become staples on Christian radio, which competed with adult contemporary and pop stations dominated by Bryan Adams and Whitney Houston. Offering a Christian alternative to the likes of Metallica and N.W.A., groups including Stryper and P.I.D. (Preachas in Disguise) had helped carve out CCM subgenres of metal and hip-hop, respectively. Through the rise of Christian bookstores and Christian music festivals, CCM See, for instance, Jimmy Swaggart and Robert Paul Lamb, Religious Rock & Roll: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (Baton Rouge, LA: Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, 1987). Christian criticism of Christian rock borrowed heavily from Christian criticisms of rock in general. Bob Larson and David Noebel were perhaps the most prolific of these critics. Larson’s titles include Rock & Roll: The Devil’s Diversion (Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1967); and Hippies, Hindus, and Rock & Roll (Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1969). Noebel’s include Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles (Tulsa, OK: Christian Crusade Publication, 1965), and The Marxist Minstrels: A Handbook on Communist Subversion of Music (Tulsa, OK: American Christian College Press, 1974). 2

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had become a multimillion dollar industry.3 Jesus may not have wanted Kurt Cobain for a sunbeam. But to many Christians, it sure seemed like Jesus wanted to shine his light on—and take his market share of—the contemporary music scene. This chapter focuses on the mid-1990s transformation of one particularly popular CCM group, dc Talk, toward a mainstream alternative sound. Through this transformation, dc Talk provided both its largely adolescent Christian fan base and a new secular youth audience with an evangelical response to the “anti-Christian” politics of Nirvana and other grunge music. Jesus Freak presented Christ as the solution to despair, loneliness, isolation, and apathy—problems that ostensibly afflicted the new generation of youth consumers. Forged in the crucible of grunge anxiety over authenticity, where artists and consumers alike constantly worried about being and appearing real, Jesus Freak’s title track and lead single drew on both the biblical figure of John the Baptist and the origins of CCM in the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to depict the real Christian as a freak for the Lord. Both song and album invited listeners to join a sacred, but also countercultural, community of Jesus Freaks. dc Talk fashioned the alternative CCM subgenre alongside other groups, including Jars of Clay, the Newsboys, and Audio Adrenaline. But no CCM group found as much success in this effort as dc Talk. On the rise of modern Christian media, see Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004); and Eileen Luhr, Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). 3

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I  I Hate Myself and Want to Die As a response and contribution to grunge music specifically, dc Talk’s December 1995 album was somewhat belated. Music critics routinely trace the beginning of grunge’s end to April 1994, when Cobain shot himself in the room above the garage of his Seattle home.4 Nirvana had ostensibly broken up shortly before Cobain’s suicide. The four albums that in hindsight defined the Seattle sound had all been released three years earlier, in 1991: Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, and Alice in Chains’ Facelift. The year 1994 saw the release of several more significant grunge albums, including Bush’s Sixteen Stone, Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple, Hole’s Live Through This, and Pearl Jam’s Vitology. But it is difficult to argue that grunge thrived following Nirvana’s supposed breakup and Cobain’s death. Merging into the mainstream, grunge music became “alternative music,” a genre so inclusive that it could often house the white-boy funk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the punk/pop of Green Day, the college indie-rock of R.E.M. and the Dave Matthews Band, and the pop/rock of the Goo Goo Dolls and Matchbox 20. In late 1995, dc Talk’s Billboard rock competition included the self-titled third LP by Seattle-grungestalwarts Alice in Chains, as well as Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by the Chicago-based Smashing Pumpkins. Histories of grunge include Kyle Anderson, The Accidental Revolution: The Story of Grunge (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007); Mark Yarm, Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2011); and Catherine Strong, Grunge: Music and Memory (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). 4

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Of course, “grunge” itself had always been an impossibly inclusive term. As Charles Cross writes in his biography of Cobain, Heavier than Heaven, the term “grunge” was originally “meant to describe loud, distorted punk,” but by the early 1990s it had come “to describe virtually every band from the Northwest” (Cross 2001: 132).5 Like metal, this new grunge music was technically skilled, but carefully unpolished and more melodic. It was punk, but with more pop. It was psychedelic and progressive, but with simpler song structures. If it existed as a discreet genre at all—as opposed to a variable blend of rock, punk, pop, and metal influences in several rather extraordinary Seattle-based bands—grunge music preferred minor keys to major ones and dissonant chords over consonant ones. It was gritty, distorted, and above all, ridden with youth angst. Indeed, the label “grunge” arguably captured less a particular style of music than a particular performance of discontent by Generation X. Specifically, grunge described the sound of boredom pervading mostly white, mostly male post–Cold War American youth. Suffering from none of their parents’ paranoia about Soviet annihilation, American teens of the early 1990s turned their anxieties inward, toward themselves and their relatively privileged lives. These teens did not have to hide under their desks for bomb drills. The space race had been won. The Soviet experiment in communist living was over. American teens (again, mostly white, mostly male) now directed their rebellion toward As Cross notes, Mudhoney’s Mark Arm coined the term “grunge” in his writing for a Seattle fanzine (2001: 150–51). 5

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the ostensibly oppressive uniformity of life in middle- and upper-middle-class suburbia. As children of the post–Civil Rights era, growing up almost entirely under the Republican administrations of Reagan and Bush, these teens turned away from advocating for largescale social action. Instead, they began cultivating a personal politics and aesthetic of cynicism toward the marketing machines of capitalist America that allegedly quashed expressions of originality and sincerity.6 These teens could not take the New Kids on the Block seriously when the boy band claimed street smarts or pledged eternal love to their girlfriends. These teens did not believe that MC Hammer was too legitimate to quit. Having seen through the sham, these teenagers knew that such mainstream artists were the money-making products of the big record labels. That’s what the mainstream was after all: a profit stream that drowned truth and honesty. Dressed in thrift-store finds (stereotypically old flannel shirts and torn jeans), fans of grunge took satisfaction in locating and manufacturing “the alternative,” finding in the unpopular a supposedly more authentic form of self-expression. In his essay “The Writing on the Shirt: Nirvana and the Politics of Selling Out,” Hua Hsu contends that “as the Cold War drew to a close, people in the 1990s, particularly young people, began to participate in culture in two distinct new ways: as part of a movement to topple mainstream monoculture in favor of ‘alternative culture’; and as exemplars of a new, ‘multicultural’ age in which diversity would be prized. The question of conformity took on new dimensions, now that the drab grays and olive greens of the iron curtain no longer felt like a viable alternative.” We address the politics of multiculturalism in Chapter 2. 6

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As the story goes, the mainstream market quickly, almost simultaneously, grew to encompass and create the alternative. It became hard to tell the mainstream and the alternative apart, crucial though the difference was supposed to be. Grunge purported to describe a form of anti-commercial authenticity—a model of musicianship as noble savagery, untainted by the marketing machines of the big music labels and their enslavement to the popular tastes of mass consumer society. But in reality, grunge was no less a marketing phenomenon, a massively successful effort by the same big music labels to capitalize on consumer desires to escape mainstream consumerism. The result was a new form of popular music whose makers trumpeted their ostensible unpopularity; who worried ad nauseum, on MTV and in Rolling Stone no less, about the dangers of “selling out” and the corrosive effects of fame; who sometimes forewent opportunities to “cash in”; and who occasionally spent lots of money trying to sound like little money had been spent. Regretting the studio polish of the massive-selling Nevermind, Nirvana hired Steve Albini to roughen up the sound of their sophomore album, 1993’s In Utero. Eddie Vedder complained bitterly about luxury living in the posh studio that Pearl Jam rented to record their second album Vs., and even went so far as to sleep in his truck to help ensure his voice would sound sufficiently rough (Crowe 1993). After the release of Vitology, Pearl Jam went to war with Ticketmaster, forgoing millions in tour revenue rather than selling out to what they argued was the company’s monopolistic control of the concert market.

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In keeping with this ethic of authenticity, grunge artists also loudly eschewed rock braggadocio. Here was no irresistible sexual prowess—no championing of fat bottomed girls, no genital innuendos involving custard or sweet cherry pies, and no locker room talk that one was hot for teacher. (Such violent machismo, grunge implied, belonged only to rapists: see Nirvana’s “Polly” or Stone Temple Pilots’ “Sex Type Thing.”) Here, too, was no hip-hop boasting about fame, money, or artistic greatness. Mostly, grunge songs were songs about masochism—songs about self-loathing (Nirvana’s “I Hate Myself and Want to Die,” the intended title for In Utero), depression (Soundgarden’s “Fell on Black Days”), crumbling relationships (Pearl Jam’s “Black”), drug addiction (Alice in Chains’ “Junkhead”), and the agonies of conformity (Hole’s “Miss World”). Here was abject desire, like Cobain’s wish that he could “eat your cancer when you turn black” (“Heart-Shaped Box”). Within the wider terrain of alternative music, here were hundreds of thousands of teens asking, along with Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, whether anyone had time to listen to them whine (“Basket Case”). Hundreds of thousands identifying with Beck as losers or raging against the machine. And hundreds of thousands more wearing their Zero shirts to Smashing Pumpkins concerts. Here was the adolescent poetry of rejection sold to millions of Gen X Americans united in nothing if not their sense of alienation. But here, too, amid all these ostensibly real, if also selfabsorbed, sentiments, was a new social justice outlook in popular rock music. As Catherine Strong has argued, grunge music was not as politically explicit as punk (2011: 19) or hip20

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hop for that matter. Nonetheless, grunge music shone light on the plights of rape victims (Nirvana’s “Polly”), the homeless (Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow”), bullied children (Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy”), and veterans (Alice in Chains’ “Rooster”). Eddie Vedder received no small amount of press, not to mention new fans, when he wrote “pro choice” on his arm during Pearl Jam’s 1992 taping of MTV Unplugged. Political concern for the welfare of others—especially women and gay people— helped energize the grunge aura of authenticity. The men of Nirvana and Pearl Jam were unabashed feminists. Cobain was a vocal LGBT-rights activist who admitted to The Advocate that he had once wondered if he was gay (Allman 1993). For naysayers, grunge music ceased to be authentic the moment it became categorized—and sold—as grunge.7 Grunge artists themselves tended to disparage the term for exactly that reason. Yet there is no doubt that many artists and consumers alike understood grunge music to actually be a more authentic form of personal, political, and artistic expression. Certainly more authentic than what the mainstream had to offer. More socially aware and responsible than anything Poison, Vanilla Ice, C&C Music Factory, or even Guns N’ Roses put out for sale. As grunge music in its original incarnation waned, alternative music took up the dual cross of authenticity and anti-Christianity. The daughter of a preacher, Tori Amos Even years after his death, Cobain retains his selling power. Witness the 2008 release of the special edition Converse sneakers featuring lines from Cobain’s journal. Cobain frequently wore Converse shoes on stage, but always eschewed any official endorsements of name-brand products. 7

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held down the “softer” side of the alt-scene with her pianodriven, confessional albums Little Earthquakes (1992), Under the Pink (1994), and Boys for Pele (1996). Calling herself a “recovering Christian” (“In the Springtime of His Voodoo”), Amos wrote about masturbating while her family sang hymns (“Icicle”), boys who fancy themselves Jesus because they can make her cum (“Precious Things”), and a God who just isn’t there when you need him (“God”). On “Zero,” from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Smashing Pumpkins’ frontman Billy Corgan declared that “God is empty, just like me”; and on the same album’s “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” chanted, “I still believe that I cannot be saved.” None of this sat well with evangelicals, myself included. A late-bloomer, as far as secular alternative music was concerned, I worried that my parents would confiscate my Smashing Pumpkins and Tori Amos CDs if I ever played them loudly enough to make the lyrics audible from my bedroom. Fortunately for me, by the mid-1990s, evangelical parents evangelical parents had even bigger musical threats against which to protect their sheep. Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails (NIN) was notorious in Christian media literature— their name easy to imagine as a reference to the spikes driven through the savior’s hands and feet. On “Heresy,” from 1994’s The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor informed an evangelist that “your god is dead.” On “Closer,” from the same album, Reznor predicated proximity to God on having sex “like an animal.” In a review of The Downward Spiral for the Focus on the Family magazine Plugged In (yes, we had a subscription), Bob Waliszewski warned parents of Reznor’s “obscenely meanspirited” music: “Anyone connected with this hateful sewage 22

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should be ashamed. So should the millions of young fans who bought copies. Pray your teen isn’t one of them” (1996a). Of course it was Reznor’s proté gé e, Marilyn Manson, who soon came to play the role of bogeyman in the evangelical parental imagination. Outfitted in little more than a few black leather straps and thick white makeup, Manson spewed even more hateful sewage into the ears of teens with the release of 1996’s Antichrist Superstar. “Angry lyrics promote murder, suicide, perverse eroticism, and a satanic distaste for Christianity,” wrote Waliszewski, “80-obscenity-strewn minutes of nihilistic trash” (1996b). The ambiguously gendered “antichrist” compared Christianity to fascism, and celebrated, rather than agonized over, his use of drugs. “Admittedly, I have assumed the role of Antichrist,” Marilyn Manson wrote in Rolling Stone. “I am the Nineties voice of individuality, and people tend to associate anyone who looks and behaves differently with illegal or immoral activity” (1999). Hearing the sounds of “Beautiful People” from my younger sister’s bedroom, our parents confiscated her copy of Manson’s album. She rebelled by smoking marijuana and not feeling terrible about it, by wearing black makeup and sneaking out with boys. We worried that she was going to get in as much trouble with the law as she was with God. Needless to say, what my parents didn’t realize at the time was that, by confiscating the album, they were just proving Manson’s point. Nor did I, for that matter. Manson was terrifying.8 My first Manson album was 1998’s Mechanical Animals. I bought it because I heard that Billy Corgan helped write several of its songs. I have to admit that I like it. A lot. The Smashing Pumpkins were my gateway drug. 8

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II  The Freak Show Conservative Christian parents and popular media often referred to mid-1990s Manson as a “freak.” Manson affectionately referred to those around him in this way, too. In his autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, Manson described bassist Twiggy Ramirez (Jeordie White) as a “friendly freak” (1998: 84) and his early group, Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids, as a “freak show” (1998: 92). The term “freak” has long appeared in R&B and hip-hop songs as a term for the gleefully promiscuous, whether in bed or on the dance floor. (See Rick James’s 1981 “Super Freak” or Missy Elliot’s 2001 “Get Ur Freak On,” respectively.) For most young middle-class white males of the 1990s, however, the epithet denoted nonconformity with the ways of a profoundly conformist world. It was an epithet to reclaim. Alice in Chains paved the way toward this reclamation with “Bleed the Freak,” off 1990’s Facelift. Singer Layne Staley cast himself as a sacrificial grunge god, dying for the salvation of all those who mocked him. Such appropriation of Christ’s passion strengthened the grunge aura of authenticity. The message of Staley, and sometimes Manson, too, seemed to be that modern Christians are not like the Christ they purport to idealize. The real Christian was more like Staley—ridiculed and unpopular. Australia’s teenage grunge band Silverchair came out as a bunch of freaks on their second album, 1997’s Freak Show. “Body and soul,” sang Daniel Johns on the album’s lead single, “I’m a freak.” (Johns would later admit to a long battle with anorexia that began with the recording of Freak Show. A victim of bullying, Johns really did hate 24

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his body.) One year later, Jonathan Davis of the nü -metal progenitor group KoЯ n described himself as a “Freak on a Leash.” From Alice in Chains to Marilyn Manson, Silverchair to KoЯ n, alternative music, as well as industrial rock and nü  metal, embraced the freak identity.9 This mid-1990s alternative culture of “the freak show” is the one into which dc Talk released “Jesus Freak,” a song that frequently courts comparison to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The comparison is entirely justified. The songs are structured around similar riffs and chord progressions. Dave Grohl’s instantly recognizable drum intro to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—bass, snare flam, bass, high-hat—repeats in the introduction to “Jesus Freak” as a bass and snare-flam cadence. Both songs churn out a loud chorus but quiet down for the verses. They have similar tempos: around 105 for “Jesus Freak” and 117 for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (moderate to moderate fast). In an article on CCM alternative rock, Rolling Stone’s Eric Boehlert dismissed “Jesus Freak” as a “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’-style knockoff,” and, for good measure, derided dc Talk’s Kevin Max as a “cleaner-cut Kurt Cobain” (1996: 23–26). Again, he was not exactly wrong to do so. Charges of derivativeness—if not crass imitation—

When Radiohead scored a surprise 1992 hit with a song the band notoriously hated, “Creep,” they did so in part because the chorus was so well-suited to the culture of the (slant-rhyming) freak. As much as Radiohead would have preferred not to, alternative bands like themselves developed and sold this “freak show” culture mostly to adolescent music consumers already hormonally primed to feel that they do not fit in their own bodies, much less their communities. 9

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dogged other, mostly second-wave grunge bands like Stone Temple Pilots (STP). But whereas STP turned to glam rock in 1996’s Tiny Music .  .  . Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop in an effort to escape their identity as the poor man’s Pearl Jam, dc Talk’s “Jesus Freak” self-consciously worked to replicate and sanctify the sonic patterns and lyrical terrain of grunge and alternative music so closely associated with Nirvana’s mega-hit. Through this work of adaptation and appropriation, dc Talk strove to replace the self-loathing subjects at the center of grunge-based alternative music with the “saved” subject of CCM. This work of replacement shows up in the narrative of “Jesus Freak,” where the loathed self is emphatically a past or passing self—the “me I’ve divorced,” as Michael Tait sings. Where Kurt Cobain loathed the supposed conformity of Christian sheep while singing that he felt “stupid and contagious,” dc Talk strove to carve out individual identities within the flock: fallen and reborn souls. For the members of dc Talk’s Freak Show, prior conformity to the ways of the world has been exchanged for radical nonconformity in the name of Jesus—an endemic, born-again freakiness. In their effort to offer a Christian alternative to secular alternative rock, dc Talk brought “Jesus Freak” to MTV. They doubled-down on their efforts at responsive adaptation by hiring Director Simon Maxwell, then best known for his work with NIN, to make the lead single’s video. For NIN’s “Hurt,” filmed live on 1995’s Self-Destruct Tour, Maxwell captured the sweat-drenched Reznor singing his sadomasochistic anthem before a series of macabre images including mushroom clouds, dead animals, dying plants, 26

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wounded and dead soldiers, war-torn cities, Jesus Christ, and the quiet, still head of a snake. For “Jesus Freak,” Maxwell set dc Talk in what seems to be a prison cell, complete with dark concrete walls and iron bars. The band sings as images of Christ, book burnings, cross burnings, Second World War propaganda films, and footage from Civil Rights protests flicker across the screen. dc Talk wanted the video for “Jesus Freak” to capitalize on alternative music’s concerns with social justice. They wanted to recast Christianity as an agent of progressive social change. “The video shows the perseverance of standing up for what you believe in— even in the midst of persecution,” McKeehan said. “The visuals point toward many types of oppression, whether it is based on religious belief or color of skin” (Atwood 1995: 85). Yet the videos for “Hurt” and “Jesus Freak” parallel one another in ways that suggest a more studied political and theological objective. Both videos draw a connection between the suffering of the singer(s) and the suffering of the world by setting their performances against a slideshow of death, injustice, and Christian iconography. The video for “Hurt” suggests that Reznor hurts as everyone hurts, as everything hurts.10 Debris scatters across the screen as Reznor sings of wearing his “crown of shit” on his “liar’s throne.” Destruction and deceit reign. Nothing is sure because the whole world is a dying mess. On the one hand, the aching sincerity of “Hurt”—arguably best realized in Johnny Cash’s 2002 cover—takes form in the

Or, as R.E.M. would sing, as “Everybody Hurts.”

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video as world-centering self-obsession. Visually, the video locates Reznor’s hurt at the center of history, beginning in the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, such expression of depressive narcissism is precisely what makes the video such a powerful artifact of the era’s alternative music—and so ripe for Christian response. In “Hurt,” Reznor figures himself (prior to Marilyn Manson) as a kind of antichrist, one who suffers without hope of redeeming himself or others. Through the video for “Jesus Freak,” and the savvy hiring of Maxwell, dc Talk offers their song as something more than a Christian version of the generation-grabbing sounds of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” They offer “Jesus Freak” as a response to the deep personal and political pessimism of NIN’s “Hurt.” dc Talk’s video suggests that Jesus reverses the downward spiral. During the Freakshow tour, dc Talk covered several songs that helped further contour their alt-friendly Christian message of salvation from a world of hurt. They opened the show with the Beatles’s “Help”—capitalizing on the popularity of The Beatles Anthology (volume 1 of which occupied the number one spot on the Billboard chart the week of Jesus Freak’s release) and placing themselves in a Fab Four– musical lineage that Cobain had also stepped into via songs like “About a Girl” and “Pennyroyal Tea.” But patterning their response to alternative music as a whole, dc Talk performed a verse from “Help” before segueing into their own “So Help Me God” (the first track on Jesus Freak), shifting the object of the speaker’s need from other people to Jesus Christ. Midshow, they launched into R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” As evangelicals, they brought “And I Feel Fine” out of the parenthetical, reminding 28

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their audience that while this earthly “world serves its own needs,” Christians await the apocalypse with the serenity of the saved. In the outro to “Jesus Freak,” which closed the show, dc Talk finally sang Nirvana’s “All Apologies.” Only they “freaked” the lyrics. Where Cobain sang, “What else can I say? Everyone is gay,” dc Talk rejected the punk thesis of universal queerness. What else could they say as Christians? Simple: “Jesus is the way.” III  Jesus People John the Baptist first proclaimed, at least in so many words, that “Jesus is the way.”11 A promotional agent hyping the immediate coming of Christ, John baptized all those who came before him—“the people of Jerusalem and all Judea .  .  . and all the region along the [River] Jordan,” according to the Gospel of Matthew (3:5). As Matthew and Mark both relate, however, Herod imprisoned John not for his efforts to bring people to Christ, but for speaking truth to power. Citing Jewish law, John publicly opposed the king’s marriage to his brother Philip’s wife Herodias. To be sure, the king did not want to kill John. Too many people believed the desertdweller a prophet, and killing prophets was tricky business in Roman-occupied Palestine. Additionally, according to Mark, Herod knew John to be “righteous and holy”; and even I am not counting any of the prophets in the Old Testament, whom mainstream Christian theology tells us were merely predicting the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth. 11

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though he did not like what the man had to say, Herod still “liked to listen to him” (6:20). The story of John the Baptist’s death is now well known. On his birthday, King Herod was so pleased by the dancing of Herodias’s daughter that he promised to give her whatever she requested, “up to half my kingdom” (Mk 6:23). The daughter, traditionally identified as Salome, demanded John’s head, which was soon delivered to her on a platter. The gospels are clear that Herod did not want to do what he did: he ordered John executed because he had made a promise to Salome in front of dinner guests (Mt. 14:9; Mk 6:26). Having made a promise, he could not help but keep his word. Or so the gospels say. One might also say that Herod sold out. In “Jesus Freak,” Toby McKeehan raps the story of John the Baptist. Yet McKeehan’s John is not a Jewish legal critic who loses his head because King Herod incestuously cedes to the cruel demands of a femme fatale. McKeehan’s John is a dirty hippie who loses his head because he loves Jesus: There was a man from the desert with naps in his head. The sand that he walked was also his bed. The words that he spoke made the people assume There wasn’t too much left in the upper room. With skins on his back and hair on his face, They thought he was strange by the locusts he ate. The Pharisees tripped when they heard him speak, Until the king took the head of this Jesus freak. McKeehan’s rap offers a curious retelling, voiding the life of John the Baptist of all its political complications and reducing the prophet to a Jesus Freak who angers Herod 30

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and the Pharisees alike. The verse renders John a Christian martyr instead of a Jewish political dissident. The Pharisees were a Jewish political sect, now commonly associated in evangelical theology with harsh legalism of the kind Jesus ostensibly opposed with Christian grace. It’s true, according to Matthew, that John did not like them. He addresses both the Pharisees and Sadducees (another Jewish sect) as “a brood of vipers” (Mt. 7:8). John’s implication seems to be that they are hypocrites whose sense of moral righteousness relies on their ancestry as children of Abraham rather than their good works (Mt. 3:8-9). But none of the theological differences between the Pharisees, Sadducees, and John’s likely sect, the Essenes—or political tensions between the Jews and their Roman king, or the family tensions between that king and his step-daughter—matter in McKeehan’s retelling. In “Jesus Freak,” John the Baptist is simply a cultural aberration whose dirty hair, desert living, and insect diet attract negative attention. He seems crazy, and that’s the important part. (The people around John suspect, as we might now say, that not all is right upstairs. But “the upper room” also references the location of the Last Supper, from which Jesus departs to redeem mankind through his death on the cross.) As an unrelenting prophet of God, and nothing else, McKeehan’s John the Baptist never stops preaching that “Jesus is the way” until Herod makes it impossible for him to speak. Arguably, McKeehan’s rap exemplifies evangelical Christianity’s relative disinterest in its own ancient history. It would be easy enough to criticize the rap, and evangelical Christianity as a whole, for ignoring narrative complexity in favor of promoting a simple gospel message. But my 31

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argument here is that this evangelical disinterest in historical detail serves the larger purpose of encouraging young Christians’ otherwise impossible identification with John the Baptist. Certainly, there is not much that modern teenagers in Lynchburg, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, have in common with a first-century apocalyptic preacher. Once such a teen myself, I never faced public imprisonment for my religious beliefs or political opinions. I never ate locusts. I washed my hair daily and shaved once or twice a week. McKeehan’s rap, however, invited me to identify with John the Baptist through a recognition of my own refusal to conform to the ways of the secular world. Like John, I was a freak in the eyes of the unsaved—a Jesus Freak in a fallen world. “Jesus Freak” invites listeners to identify with other figures of history, too. After all, “Jesus Freak” is neither an Aramaic nor a Greek phrase. It’s an English phrase, first applied to the spiritual descendants of John the Baptist who walked off the sands and into the streets of Costa Mesa, California, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Baptized in the Pacific Ocean, many of these “street Christians” had found Christ after running away from abusive homes, or in the depths of a struggle with drug and alcohol addiction. Many of them came from middle-class or wealthy suburbs. Mimicking John’s asceticism, they turned their backs on their former lives to minister on the streets, where they made little money. Like the itinerant Christ and his disciplines, they sometimes depended on the charity of others for shelter and food. Most of them identified, too, with the counterculture movement. As hippies, they stood in opposition to the “square” mainstream, which shamed people for their fashion and music choices. But as Christian 32

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hippies, they rejected the counterculture’s associations with mind-expanding drugs and consciousness-raising Eastern mysticism. They preached free love, but reworked the hippie message from an ethic of sexual “promiscuity” to an ethic of Christian charity born out of knowledge of Christ’s sacrifice. They also cared little about denominational differences, organizing instead around a simplified doctrine of personal salvation through belief in Jesus (Luhr 2009: 72–73). Formally, these street evangelicals were Jesus People, or members of the Jesus Movement. But derided by other hippies as Jesus Freaks, they reclaimed the label. Jesus Freaks were supposed to be cultural aberrations—to be in the world but not of it (Jn 17:16). Jesus Freaks conveyed an unquenchable enthusiasm for their Lord and Savior. Jesus Freaks were eager sunbeams. Much has been written about the Jesus Movement, which eventually brought hundreds of thousands of young people into the evangelical fold through a combination of charismatic leadership and community outreach.12 The Jesus People published and distributed their own newsletter, the Hollywood Free Paper. Under the guidance of one of the Movement’s principal “gurus,” Lonnie Frisbee, they established a series of communal houses known as the House of Miracles. Transforming acid freaks into Jesus Freaks, the Jesus People recreated Jesus in the image of the hippie—a See, for instance, Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Richard A. Bustraan, The Jesus People Movement: A Story of Spiritual Revolution among the Hippies (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014). 12

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minister of peace and love who hangs out with prostitutes and drug users and concerns himself less with condemning sin than with saving souls. It is important to note that many children of the Jesus People would grow up to reject this softer image of their savior. Fostered by institutions like Liberty University (established in 1971), the Moral Majority would reinvent Jesus yet again as a culture warrior—an activist against the forces of feminism, homosexuality, and secularism. (Tragically, Frisbee would himself test his own movement’s tolerance for sinners. His “struggles” with homosexuality led many Christians to turn their backs on him. Frisbee died of AIDS-related complications in 1993.) Thanks to the Jesus People, however, the Moral Majority also understood the importance of contributing to “the culture” through the creation of Christian popular music and other art. Evangelicals produced CCM not only to spread the message of Christ, but also to keep young Christians in the flock. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the Jesus People reshaped Christian youth culture with their music. They produced popular singer-songwriters including Randy Stonehill, Keith Green, and Nancy Honeytree. They formed groups like Love Song, Resurrection Band, and the All Saved Freak Band. They were, for evangelicals, rebellious. The Jesus People disputed the idea, then common among evangelicals, that popular styles of music, especially folk and rock, were intrinsically evil. They rejected the claim that folk music was inherently allied to the forces of atheism and communism, and that Satan and his demons hung out in a strong backbeat. Their musical attitude is best captured by the title of CCM 34

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pioneer and “longhair” Larry Norman’s 1972 rockabilly song “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” Why, indeed? The Jesus People saw in music the power of Christian fellowship, and they looked upon Christian youth, especially, as a flock in need of godly entertainment. This idea of a Christian culture organized around popular music represented quite a shift in evangelical outlook. And through the Jesus People, music became central to the cultural politics of American evangelicalism. David W. Stowe has argued that through music and other forms of popular culture (including film and books), young Christians discovered new ways to understand and inspire themselves, as well as to spread the message of salvation to their unsaved peers; evangelicals “found narratives that helped them make sense of their experiences and emotions; role models with which to identify; language to guide self-understanding and expression; and sound to move the body, lift the spirit, challenge the mind, and create bonds of community” (2011: 4). Evangelicals accordingly continued to invest in Christian forms of popular media long after the Jesus Movement had waned. By the 1995 release of Jesus Freak, dc Talk needed to offer nothing like Larry Norman’s apology for loving and playing rock-n-roll. On tour they issued no apologies for covering—and Christianizing—songs by the Beatles, R.E.M., and Nirvana. At the same time, dc Talk conveyed a deep knowledge of their CCM origins among the Jesus People and the new evangelical youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s. The band did not simply cite these origins by calling themselves Jesus Freaks. On the single for “Jesus Freak,” they included 35

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their 1994 Christian Music Award performance with Larry Norman of his song “Wish We’d All Been Ready.” (Larry Norman would himself cover the song “Jesus Freak” on his 1998 album Breathe In, Breathe Out.) dc Talk also cited these origins through their cover of the song “Day by Day” from 1971’s Godspell—one of numerous Jesus-themed musicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s that drew on the Christian countercultural movement, although Godspell was itself not explicitly evangelical. In these ways, Jesus Freak aimed to reboot the Jesus People Movement for an alternative audience. The album wanted to bring 1990s suburban evangelicals into fellowship with hippie street Christians. It wanted listeners to recognize that contemporary believers are no less countercultural, no less defined in opposition to the immorality of the secular world, than Frisbee and his followers. Never mind the differences between a 1970s’ street Christian and a 1990s’ youth group leader, which are in any case far less pronounced than those between the latter and John the Baptist. What matters is that both are Jesus Freaks. Ultimately, the album aims to facilitate modern evangelical identification with the Jesus People and John the Baptist. Historical distance, theological differences, and political complexities all vanish in the album’s creation of a universal Jesus Freak identity, an ahistorical community of nonconformists in which modern believers mingle with ancient ones. The design of the Jesus Freak album aids in this creation. The cover looks like aged parchment, stamped with a Romanesque seal featuring the initials of the band. If the music inside bridges the gap between Christian hippies and alternative Christians, between the 1960s, 1970s, and 36

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1990s, the cover promises to transport the listener of the album to first-century Palestine, where John the Baptist first proclaimed the coming of Christ. It is worth adding that Jesus Freak re-radicalizes John for the children of the Jesus People, who had largely rejected their parent’s “peace and love” gospel for a neo-conservative Christ, a savior more Reagan or Rambo than Redeemer. Advocating for racial equality on songs like “What Have We Become” and “Colored People” (both subjects of the next chapter), dc Talk enlists John the Baptist and the Jesus Freaks to criticize the current Christian generation just as much as the secular world. The modern Jesus Freak, alongside his or her earlier twentieth-century and first-century brothers and sisters in Christ, crusades for social justice—particularly against racism—while also saving souls. The 1999 book Jesus Freaks: Stories of Those Who Stood for Jesus: The Ultimate Jesus Freaks, a co-production of dc Talk and missionary organization The Voice of the Martyrs, further develops the album’s goal of facilitating the modern believer’s identification with ancient Freaks like John the Baptist. The book features the same cover of aged parchment. Inside the front flap, one reads, “There are more Christian martyrs in the world today than there were in 100 AD—in the days of the Roman Empire.” This is the temporal gap— between “Today” and “100 AD”—that this book of martyrs seeks to bridge. Most of the Freaks whose stories the book relates lived in either the first four centuries or the twentieth century; with only a few exceptions, the Jesus Freaks in Jesus Freaks are martyrs of the early church. Their tales are largely apocryphal, historical accuracy subordinated to the 37

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evangelical mission of creating an imagined community of Freaks that the reader—perhaps one day a martyr for Christ, too—may join. The modern Jesus Freak learns that the apostle Paul was beheaded, and the apostle Peter crucified upside down (dc Talk 1999: 311–13, 250–54). The reader learns that Doubting Thomas abandoned his skepticism to spread the gospel in India, where he was tossed into a fire but did not burn, only then to be killed with a spear (dc Talk 1999: 56– 58). Stories like these, offered with no citations outside the Bible itself, provide the presumably adolescent reader with a sense that Christian history is a history of persecution. By heroicizing these martyrs, these stories also invite readers to prepare themselves for martyrdom. Who is to say, after all, that Christians living in wealthy suburbs will not be asked to die for their faith? It’s no coincidence that Jesus Freaks opens with the now-discredited story of Cassie Bernall, a victim of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. Bernall goes unnamed—she is an everyperson for all Jesus Freaks—who stares into the barrel of a gun and hears “her executioner” ask, “Do you believe in God?” (dc Talk 1999: 17).13 Jesus Freaks wants its reader not only to identify with the Freaks, but also to see him or herself as a Jesus Freak struggling alongside the apostles to spread the gospel of Christ in a hostile world, regardless as to whether that struggle is actually manifest. The book seeks Although the Bernalls and their church sought to profit off the sales of She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, Dave Cullen reports in his book Columbine that police, witnesses, and forensic experts all concluded the story was not credible (2009: 287). 13

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to inculcate so deep a sense of belonging among the Freaks that one is prepared to die in defense of the faith. These stories of martyrdom are unlikely to win many unbelievers to Christ. But they are not necessarily designed to. When I read them as a young evangelical, I did so for inspiration. I did so because I, too, experienced my adolescent ennui as a spiritual struggle for membership in the community of believers. Identifying as a Jesus Freak, whether through listening to the song or reading the book, not only reconfirmed me in the faith. It also located me in a group of people who knew what they believed in was worth dying for. Of course, I hoped never to face martyrdom. But I also hoped that I would never deny Christ to save myself. (The desire toward martyrdom was easy from the safe confines of my shady suburban cul-de-sac.) A Jesus Freak knew he or she was a Jesus Freak and loved being a Jesus Freak. We were freaks in our zealotry and freaks in relation to the values of the secular world. If that world mocked us, we professed not to care. Our love of Christ and defiance of the fallen was all there in the guitar-grinding chorus of “Jesus Freak”: What will people think when they hear that I’m a Jesus Freak? What will people do when they find that it’s true? I don’t really care if they label me a Jesus Freak. There ain’t no disguising the truth. To be a Jesus Freak was to be an outcast from the mainstream, whether that mainstream was a first-century Judaism that would deny Jesus’s identity as the Messiah; the mainstream 39

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hippie movement that would value drugs, rather than the gospel, as the way of expanding one’s consciousness; or the modern alternative mainstream that would champion abortion and sexual promiscuity in the name of freedom. Ultimately, to be a Jesus Freak, in dc Talk’s terms, was to embrace one’s outcast status as the truth of the saved self—to put a Christian spin on grunge and alternative music’s expressed desire to be an outcast, and to stake out what John Radwan terms a position of “defiant indifference” toward the jeering masses of the unsaved (2006: 11). Jesus Freaks have been “marked by their maker, a peculiar display,” as Kevin Max sings in the second verse. They cannot hide their freakiness. Nor, when all the hip people fetishize their freakiness, would they want to. IV Despair-o “Nirvana had a big influence on this generation musically,” Toby McKeehan told a Philadelphia newspaper in 1996, “but lyrically it definitely rubs me the wrong way. . . . There’s just a lot of despair out there. It’s gloomy. People are getting tired of [living] in these catacombs of darkness. I think people are ready for something that’s a little more hopeful” (20). “Like It, Love It, Need It” is one such hopeful track on Jesus Freak. It’s a variation on the album’s title track. (And it sounds a bit like Weezer.) Hardly a local Seattle figure who hesitates over fame, Jesus, in this song, is a salvational product that dc Talk markets with a slogan-ready chorus. The snare on each quarter note of the 4/4 beat drives the sales pitch: “You gotta like it, you gotta love it, I know you need some freedom 40

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from the strife. You gotta like it, you gotta love it. I know you need some Jesus in your life.” There is no punk here. No irony. Here Jesus is something to get. To need. To know you need. Like a can of Coke. A McDonald’s hamburger. A t-shirt hung in the window of a Christian bookstore. Of all the songs on Jesus Freak, “Like It, Love It, Need It” offers the album’s most direct lyrical response to life in those “catacombs of darkness.” McKeehan, who sings lead on the verses, walks the thin line of a Christian in the popular music marketplace, identifying with the angst expressed in grunge and alternative music, but rejecting the notion that all is without hope, as his hope lies with Jesus. McKeehan’s pronouns slip, and his position relative to the secular music world along with it. In verse one, he looks out on a “they” who “can hardly cope,” and whose “fleeting glances” convey “their lack of hope.” By line four, however, “they” are identified as “my generation, drowning in despair.” He is one of them, even if he is not drowning along with them—in their world, but not of it. In verse two, the distance between “they” and “me” closes into a “we” who listen to “an angry sound” (of presumably alternative music) and thereby “circumvent our feelings.” This “we” is made up of self-centered martyrs, who instead of recognizing Christ’s ultimate sacrifice and seeking to imitate it, award the “fattest crown” to the one among them who “complains the loudest.” (Cue Green Day’s “Basket Case.”) “We’re anti-everybody,” McKeehan declares, seeming to include himself. But then he stakes out his distance from that “we,” claiming, despite the value judgments inherent in his sentiments, that he “ain’t no judge or jury,” and he’s just “praying for ya.” 41

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If “Jesus Freak” works as a song to the freaks, “Like It, Love It, Need It” seeks an audience of saved and unsaved alike. The song shifts both the speaker and the listener between identification with and pity for the hopeless. The first part of the chorus, a three-part harmony, addresses an ambiguous and pluralistic “you.” This second person is searching for “peace of mind,” but is told that he or she will never find it in a narcissistic “pool of self,” “a sea of wealth,” or ironically, “rock-n-roll.” There’s no peace of mind to be had “if you sell your soul.” This second person “will [also] never find peace of mind in your lucky charm,” “on a hippie farm,” “in a one night stand,” “or in your superman.” On the one hand, this second person is clearly the unsaved listener of alternative music’s “angry sounds.” She is a rat in a cage. A man in a box. On the other hand, this second person is the saved listener of this song that preaches to the choir. The Christian listeners of “Like It, Love It, Need It” have already bought (into) Jesus. They already do like, love, and need Jesus. And they confirm Christ’s fulfillment of their lives, and the absence of despair, by singing as much, by repeating the slogan. For the saved listeners of “Like It, Love It, Need It,” Jesus is one commodity that has actually satisfied consumer desire. At the same time, the song’s title and lyrics undercut that feeling of satisfaction with the triple imperative to like, love, and need Jesus more (and “day by day”). Their present adoration of Jesus is never enough. Their need for salvation has been fulfilled, but also always remains unfulfilled. We could say that “Like It, Love It, Need It” exemplifies a paradox of capitalism, if not human desire itself: the market’s dependence on our pervasive sense that whatever we have is never enough, that 42

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our satisfactions do not fully satisfy. “Like It, Love It, Need It” gives voice to this paradox in the Christian marketplace, where Christ has become a commodity shaped by consumer demand for alternative music. Christians do not necessarily perceive the marketing of Christ as a problem: the market offers but another way to spread the message of salvation. Yet the problem with the marketing approach of “Like It, Love It, Need It,” one only audible to me now as a nonbeliever, is that the song trips into alternative parody. Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, Courtney Love, Layne Stanley, Eddie Vedder, Billy Corgan, and Scott Weiland would never be so lazy as to rhyme “care” with “despair” or “cope” with “hope.” But McKeehan does. The result is a song that sounds out of touch with the emotional poetry of good alternative music, with the vocabulary of the “drowning” generations it is trying to reach. The result is less Kurt Cobain than Weird Al Yankovic parodying Kurt Cobain, although without Yankovic’s sense of humor. McKeehan sounds, in a word, old—as many evangelicals can when trying to appear hip. It does not bolster his generational credentials that he tacks on an “o” at the end of “care” and “despair,” infusing the predictable rhyme with the sound of doo-wop. Despair-o. Care-o. The rhyme sounds like something from a mid-century black urban youth group. To add insult to injury, the bridge on “Like It, Love It, Need It” is a rap that, oh dear, “drop[s us] right into the middle of a freak attack.” Both doo-wop and rap have deep cultural histories worth addressing in relation to the success of dc Talk and CCM. It would be hard to chart out the history of dc Talk’s vocal harmonics, not to mention their often sexy youth appeal, without referencing doo-wop. As we discuss 43

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at length in the next chapter, dc Talk also found in rap a politics of protest and social criticism that they turned against hypocritical Christians. For unsaved teenage fans of alternative music, however, these dips in the “oldies” and profanity-free freak-attack raps probably just sound corny. That’s certainly how they sound to my heathen self today. By fusing grunge and hip-hop, “Like It, Love It, Need It” falls into pastiche. Trying to sound hip, dc Talk sounds derivative and cheesy, like a group of outsiders trying to identify as insiders. Freaks, but not in a good way. For as much mainstream success as dc Talk had, their status as Christian artists still limited their market appeal. For Christians, they may have been the Beatles—which is to say, extraordinary musical translators and innovators, a sexy group of guys around whom the young (white) people could rally. The trio were men teenage Christian boys wanted to emulate and girls wanted to marry, and at times whom D. and I wanted to both emulate and marry. But plenty of people, those not involved in 1990s evangelical youth groups, had no idea who dc Talk were. They were never household names outside evangelical homes. As we will see below, the persistent parochialism of their appeal contributed to the group’s shifting sense of themselves as Christian musicians. The band’s next and last album, 1998’s Supernatural, made a more strident appeal than Jesus Freak for the alternative mainstream by dropping most of the hip-hop and a lot of the Jesus. But, we should ask, what does it even mean to be Christian musicians as opposed to musicians who are also Christians? How should they steer their sound, tailor their lyrics, or position themselves on the market to both satisfy the 44

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Christian fan base and reach a new audience of the unsaved? How could they sound like Jesus Freaks in a good way—a way appreciated by Christians and non-Christians alike? In short, how could they ever be inside the musical mainstream, or recognized for their contributions to music, if they were still largely perceived as—and sounded like—CCM artists? These grunge-like anxieties about belonging are apparent in the introduction to “Like It, Love It, Need It” on their concert video Welcome to the Freak Show. McKeehan and Tait walk the streets of London, smiling when asked by other pedestrians if they are famous and if they are pop stars. “Am I a pop star?” Tait repeats. He is not mocking the question. He seems genuinely unsure. Then, seated at a table outside a café , McKeehan and Tait strike up a conversation with an older man on the origins of rock-n-roll. “The rock and roll years was before the Beatles was even around,” the man informs them, citing Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard. “You cannot beat the rock and roll years of the fifties,” he continues, adding the poppier Gene Vincent, Fabian, and Frankie Avalon to his list of stars. McKeehan states that he and Tait hail “from right down the road from Elvis, from Nashville, Tennessee.” He then asks, “So we had a good start as a rockand-roller?” But the man seems not to know who they are. “Well how come you never made it?” V Walls The story of dc Talk’s success—of how they “made it”—is in many ways a story about CCM itself. Brentwood, Tennessee, 45

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a wealthy and conservative suburb of Nashville, serves as the home of many CCM artists and of ForeFront Records, one of several imprints of the Capital Christian Music Group. Founded in 1987, and purchased by EMI in 1996, ForeFront released each of dc Talk’s albums, from their 1989 self-titled debut to 1998’s Supernatural. As the market for CCM grew over the 1980s and 1990s, mainstream record companies like EMI bought up small Christian labels. Occasional partnerships between Christian and secular labels also helped expand the audience of CCM. Beginning with 1985’s Unguarded, for instance, Amy Grant teamed with A&M to co-release her albums from the Christian label Myrrh. The partnership would produce Grant’s most commercially successful album, 1991’s Heart in Motion (an album gay men with Christian pasts often cite as formative). Following the success of dc Talk’s 1992 album Free at Last, which won a 1994 Grammy for Best Rock Gospel Album, Virgin Records signed on with ForeFront to handle the secular distribution of both Jesus Freak and 1998’s Supernatural. In one version of this CCM success story, dc Talk sold out the more they made it—concealing their freakiness for the sake of a greater market share. The same story may be told, instructively, of Amy Grant. Heart in Motion featured radio-friendly pop love songs like “Baby, Baby” and “Every Heartbeat”—chart toppers that never mentioned Jesus, God, or salvation. The songs on Heart in Motion were anodyne enough. Grant did not shed her identity as a Christian artist to work a pole alongside Madonna or grind up on a male dancer like Janet Jackson. It was also entirely possible to hear love lyrics like “Every 46

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heartbeat bears your name” as references to Jesus, the creator of heartbeats. Nonetheless, Heart in Motion became something of an evangelical scandal. How could the artist behind such hits as “Sing Your Praise to the Lord” and “El Shaddai” (a Hebrew name for God, and a song with most of the chorus sung in Hebrew) now be hiding her light under a bushel? Grant’s difficulties with her evangelical fan base were compounded by her 1999 divorce from Gary Chapman, himself a Christian music producer, and immediate remarriage to country star Vince Gill. Since the 1990s, Grant has continued to record both Christian and secular albums, challenging and expanding what it means to be a Christian artist. Yet for many evangelicals, who value authenticity as earnestly as the grungiest of grunge fans, her story will always be one of compromising Christian values for commercial success. In 2016, LifeWay Christian Resources, a Southern Baptist Christian bookstore chain, even declined to sell Grant’s album Tennessee Christmas. Grant’s manager speculated that LifeWay thought the album “not Christian enough” (Meyer 2016). dc Talk never faced Grant’s level of Christian rejection, but the trajectory of their albums, as well as the trios’ subsequent solo careers, suggests they might have struggled to define themselves as a Christian group had they stayed together.14 Every song on dc Talk’s self-titled 1989 debut “puts God’s The members of dc Talk have continued to perform on each other’s solo albums, and most recently appeared together on TobyMac’s “Love Feels Like” from 2015’s This is Not a Test. In 2017, dc Talk formally reunited for a series of shows aboard the Jesus Freak Cruise. 14

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word right up in your face,” to quote from “Time Ta Jam.” The opening track announces that the group’s members are “Heavenbound, reachin for that higher ground,” and the album closes with a rendition of “Jesus Loves Me.” For the most part, these are straight-up praise songs about God’s awesomeness and love. On 1990’s Nu Thang and 1992’s Free at Last, however, the lyrical terrain expands to include criticism of Christian racism. On Nu Thang’s “Walls,” dc Talk’s version of Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation,” McKeehan, Tait, and Max call for “God’s people to take a stand” against church segregation: “To label churches by color ain’t nothin’ but wrong. We’re in the same crew, we’re singin’ one song.” On “Jesus is Still Alright” from 1992’s Free at Last (a reworking of the 1966 gospel song “Jesus is Just Alright” by the Art Reynolds Singers), McKeehan brags about his use of the “J-word”: “No I ain’t too soft to say it, even if DJs don’t play it.” But Free at Last also features a cover of Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me,” a secular song about the need for friends in times of hardship. Jesus Freak’s “Between You and Me,” another song about friendship we discuss in the final chapter of this book, does not explicitly reference God at all, and it would be the group’s second highest charting Billboard Hot 100 single, peaking at #29. 1998’s Supernatural is dc Talk’s most secular—which is to say least Jesus Freaky—album. “My Friend (So Long)” imagines a fourth member of the group who left to seek mainstream fame (complete with an “interview in Rolling Stone”) that compromised his evangelism. “I remember when you used to say, ‘Jesus is the way,’” Tait laments. “I never thought I’d see your light begin to fade.” Yet the first song, 48

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“It’s Killing Me,” about another deteriorating relationship, only mentions God indirectly as “the one that I pray to.” Other songs like “Consume Me,” “Dive,” and “Since I Met You” reference God as a “you” that a less discerning listener could easily interpret as another human being. “Wanna Be Loved” is perhaps the most spiritually subtle. Only the claim that love is a “heavenly prescription” cues the listener to the fact that the love one seeks, or should seek, is God’s. With songs like the title track, “Into Jesus” and “Red Letters” (this last is a reference to Christ’s words in the Bible), Supernatural does not lack for explicitly evangelical moments. Still, it would be easy to say that after declaring themselves to be Jesus Freaks, dc Talk sold out. On “Jesus is Still Alright,” McKeehan raps that he would never do such a thing: “I ain’t in the biz for the dough or the me, or the ray, all the dough’s gotta stay, cause I can’t, no I can’t, take it home anyway.” Money and fame do not follow one to heaven, as Jesus explains in Mk 8:36: “What does it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and forfeit his life?” In the same vein, Jesus Freak’s “What if I Stumble?” trades in the hip-hop boasting for a more studied self-examination about the perils of fame. “Is this one for the people?” Tait asks. “Is this one for the Lord? Or do I simply serenade for things I must afford?” One might turn the same question about material motivations back on the group that recorded Supernatural. “What if I Stumble?” opens with a clip from evangelical author and public speaker Brennan Manning: “The single greatest cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and then walk out the door and deny him by their lifestyle. This is what an unbelieving world simply finds 49

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unbelievable.” What about Christians who cease to even acknowledge Jesus with their lips? What responsibilities do they bear when it comes to the cause of disbelief? Are Christian artists like dc Talk and Amy Grant bound to use the J-word in every song? Not necessarily, but these questions are controversial. As Heather Hendershot has argued, the claim that CCM artists compromise their Christian values to join the more financially profitable ranks either ignores or rejects the “seed-planting” theory of many such artists and their Christian fans (2004: 61–64). According to this theory, much of the more commercially popular Christian music that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s rightly sought to avoid the stigmas of corniness and sentimentality widely associated with the genre of CCM. Especially among young people, CCM was cheesy. Nonbelievers were not buying albums by Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, or by P.I.D. or Stryper. For the most part, nonbelievers mocked CCM as cloyingly earnest and melodramatic. Even as a Michael W. Smith–loving Jesus Freak, I too remember being less than impressed, for instance, with Carman, whose shortfilm music videos were often shown in our church. On “Revival in the Land,” a rubber-suited demon informs Satan of their success in increasing the number of abortions and expanding the reach of the occult, all before hell crumbles from the sounds of Christian worship. On “Satan Bite the Dust!” Carman engages in a saloon shoot-out with the devil and his minions. These videos were pure camp—painful in their sincerity, and entirely unaware of how awful they were. Countless keyboard-driven, soft-rock love songs, like 50

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Matthew Ward’s “Perfect Union” (“There’s a love that lasts a lifetime, a love between man and wife, a love so strong it flows from God above”) often made nonbelievers, and even more aesthetically minded believers, cringe. By avoiding the CCM label altogether, or seeking to work outside of it, a new generation of evangelical artists sought to reach listeners who had not yet been turned off to Christian music. These artists also sought, in evangelical terms, to “plant a seed” that, watered by God, may one day flower. After all, who knows what spiritual journey a listener may take after hearing Grant’s “Baby, Baby?” Maybe the listener would go back to Grant’s earlier albums and discover there the gospel of Christ. Only God knows, because He’s the one with the plan. But Grant was sure to reach a larger audience with “Baby, Baby” than Carman would with “Satan Bite the Dust!” or even the Newsboys with their 1996 CCM hit “Breakfast.” On that memorable chorus, the boys sing, “When all the toast is burned and all the milk has turned and Captain Crunch is waving farewell, when the big one finds you may this song remind you that they don’t serve breakfast in hell.” “Secular” Christian music developed as an effort to reach an audience receptive to, even eager for, spiritual messages, but not necessarily for messages about the lack of meal options in an afterlife of eternal damnation. The new generation of evangelical musicians—most of whom worked broadly in the genre of alternative rock— also argued that the CCM label was pigeonholing. The label limited not only one’s audience, but also the public perception of the artists’ capabilities and interests. Of the three members of dc Talk, Kevin Max has made the most concerted effort in 51

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his solo career to lose the CCM label. In Unfinished Work, published alongside the release of his first album Stereotype Be (2001), Max writes, I believe that one of the primary purposes of my life is to present truth through my music, but even that can become a trap. Being a “Christian artist” is as much a tag or a box as any other title. A friend who makes music happens to be a Buddhist. Yet no one calls what he does “Buddhist music” or refers to him as a “Buddhist singer.” (2001: 10) Max makes no secret of his faith in Christ. He even concedes the evangelical label to dc Talk, which was “founded on a premise of making accessible music with Christian lyrics” (2001: 10). But like Grant, who has been public about her marital difficulties, Max is also concerned to take himself off a pedestal of spiritual perfection. Using evangelical terminology to speak to his ready evangelical audience, Max describes his life as God’s work-in-progress. But part of that work, which tracks back to the Great Commission Jesus gives to his disciples in Mt. 28:19 (“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations”), involves reaching a new, nonevangelical audience with little patience for anyone who even appears like a sanctimonious Bible-thumper. The casual mention of a Buddhist friend also signals how far Max stands from older evangelical critics of popular music. The older generation waxed hysterical over the influence of the “East” and played albums backwards to discover their hidden Satanic messages. They reduced the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin, to the music of adolescent drug abuse, 52

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premarital sex, and occult experimentation. They treated Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper as actual Satanists. It is hard to imagine these critics dropping a reference to their musician friend who happens to be a Buddhist. But that of course is Max’s point: intolerant evangelists alienate Buddhists and therefore are not likely to win Buddhists for God. “I’m vocal about the fact that I believe in Christ,” Max told the Atlanta magazine Creative Loafing in 2010, “but I’m scared of Christians. The Christian public is such an intolerant bunch that I shy away from them. That makes me a thorn in a lot of people’s sides because they want me to be a certain Christian widget, which I’m not and never will be” (Radford 2010). Bringing people to Christ, a mission to which Max is nonetheless committed, often requires a more accommodating rhetorical strategy, if not also a willingness to dialogue with secular artists. With help from McKeehan and Tait, Max covered Prince’s “The Cross” on 2007’s gospel-heavy album The Blood. He also covered Stevie Wonder’s “They Won’t Go When I Go.” Max flirted with a return to old-school CCM in 2013, when he took a break from his solo career to become the vocalist for a new incarnation of Audio Adrenaline. He recorded one pop/ rock album with them, Kings & Queens, but then left the group in 2015 when they decided to move toward making more traditional praise and worship music. At the level of sales, Max has not been as successful with his solo career as McKeehan, or “TobyMac,” one of the biggest and most unabashed of CCM pop stars today. Michael Tait has also found considerable post–dc Talk success as lead singer for once rival act the Newsboys, who again scored 53

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a massive CCM hit in 2011 with God’s Not Dead. (The title track, on which Max also sings, charted a second time in 2014 alongside the release of the film of the same name.) Yet Max’s desire to be recognized as a musician who is also a Christian, rather than simply a Christian musician, far more accurately characterizes the generation of alt-rock Christians who “made it” mainstream in the 1990s and 2000s. Jars of Clay offers one ready example. Their self-titled 1995 album includes the popular radio song “Flood,” which works as a song about one’s need for God and, simultaneously, other people. The ambiguity allows the nonbeliever as well as the believer to identify with the feeling of drowning in worldly despair. At the same time, the album produced “Love Song for a Savior,” a Dave Matthewslike version of the traditional CCM romantic ballad to Jesus, and a song about which we will say much more in Chapter 3. Jars of Clay’s debut album was lyrically diverse enough to court an audience of Christians and non-Christians alike, even as the band was firmly identified as CCM. Beginning with 1997’s Much Afraid, however, Jars of Clay sought to escape the limits of CCM identity. One can listen to Much Afraid, and the albums that follow it, with no idea that Jars of Clay is witnessing for Christ. “We’re not really here to have an agenda,” lead singer Dan Haseltine said in 2014. “We’re not an evangelical group”. Numerous other bands like Sixpence None the Richer, P.O.D., Caedmon’s Call, Smalltown Poets, Switchfoot, and Reliant K have all adopted some version of this strategy, to different degrees in different songs, and with varying levels of market success. Meanwhile, bands like Creed and Hanson, and more 54

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recently Mumford & Sons, The Civil Wars, and Belle and Sebastian, have followed in the lead of U2, never denying their Christian faith but nonetheless playing something other than singularly “Christian music.” CCM struggled for years to defend its evangelical value against Christians critical of contemporary music itself. To accuse dc Talk of selling out to the mainstream on Jesus Freak and, especially, Supernatural might therefore be to overlook what they and other CCM artists understand themselves to be doing when they write, record, and perform more “secular” music. They are not simply trying to preach to the choir. They seek to speak about topics other than their walk with Christ and their belief in the afterlife. Some also seek, Haseltine’s disclaimer notwithstanding, to evangelize. By avoiding the CCM label and engaging more directly with mainstream audiences in songs that do not always “put God’s word right up in your face,” these artists become missionaries of another sort. They gradually reveal their Jesus Freakiness rather than affronting the listener with it. They seek to connect to a larger audience of people—and to plant a seed. (Or as Nirvana sings on “Curmudgeon,” “I’m a lender. I’m a planter. I put something in the garden.”) dc Talk took up grunge and alternative music as part of their missionary agenda, bringing a message of hope to young people ostensibly wallowing in despair. In doing so, they produced an album poised between older, explicitly evangelical CCM and the newer generation of more “quietly” Christian musicians. The 1995 album contains both “Jesus Freak” and “Between You and Me.” It turns its critical eye on both the world without God and the supposedly godly world of the church. In a similar cross-genre fashion, dc Talk 55

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had taken up hip-hop in their previous work, but with little success outside the evangelical marketplace. On Jesus Freak’s second single “Colored People,” however, they married the sound of alt-grunge to the radical black politics of hip-hop, the focus of the next chapter.

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2 Colored People D. Gilson I don’t know whether anybody can remember back around the time when rock and roll first came on in a big commercial way. But it’s a fact that American white radio stations tried to kill it because, I presume, they didn’t like white kids listening to and enjoying colored music. —Eric Burdon, Ebony Magazine, December 1966 The whole idea of a music genre called “Christian music” is based on a false premise. Rock-n-roll was born in the church, and anyone who has gone to a full-on black gospel service knows it’s true. —Kevin Max In 1995, our entirely white youth group listened to “Colored People,” the second track from dc Talk’s Jesus Freak, on repeat. We sang along as it poured from boom boxes on sweaty bus rides to Six Flags St. Louis. We conjured acoustic guitar renditions beside riverbanks during camping trips.

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We swayed to the less-grungy, mellowed-out track before Wednesday night youth services. Perhaps we were drawn to the more grown-up feeling the song fabricated: attempts at politically progressive lyrics heard through the sound of adult pop/rock, acoustic guitars, and string sections with the occasional electric guitar riff for emotional swell. The song made us feel mature. It showed us to be socially responsible anti-racists, on fire for a Lord who loved all people, regardless of skin tone. On a high school missions trip—during which our youth group painted houses in a blighted Detroit neighborhood by day and held revivals for residents in an abandoned city park by night—we performed “Colored People.” Yes, our entirely white worship team from a solidly middle- to upper-class church sang to mostly black Detroit residents: We’re colored people, and we live in a tainted place. We’re colored people, and they call us the human race. We’ve got a history so full of mistakes. And we are colored people who depend on a holy grace. In hindsight, who did we think we were? Did we think we were latter-day versions of the apostle Paul, who in 1 Corinthians explains that “to the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews?” (9:20) Were we performing a specifically evangelical form of blackface? Or were we heeding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote from his Birmingham jail cell of the need to be “cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states,” blurring the color line between urban black and suburban white in the name of Christ’s love? (1963) Were we protesting against modern society’s violent 58

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reinscription of that very color line?1 Or were we bratty children of privilege drawn to taboo? Just some awkward evangelical teens trying to be cool? It is worth noting that we had never actually read Dr. King. Thinking back to our odd performance of “Colored People,” I am of two minds. The residents of Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood were not visibly taken aback by our lyric claim on coloredness, our singing “we’re colored people, and they call us the human race” on repeat to the poppy strum of an acoustic guitar (played by the whitest boy among us, who, nonetheless, struggled to even keep time). They did not protest. And some, as was our goal, committed their lives to Jesus Christ. Having grown up to become a progressively minded cultural studies scholar, I am clearly more bothered now than I was then by my teenage proclamation. As I write this, I sit in a hip coffee shop watching the music video for “Colored People” over and over, hoping no one sees, let alone recognizes, what I’m watching. This nostalgia I feel for this video does not whitewash our performance; but my somewhat shameful lingering over it speaks to the complicated nature of singing a song that the present me—after years of reading critical race theory and As Paul Gilroy explains in Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, “the modern times that W.E.B. Du Bois once identified as the century of the color line have now passed,” though “racial hierarchy is still with us” (1) and has a “foundational relationship to racialized violence and terror” (285). In the last decade of the twentieth century, this racialized violence is bracketed and publicly visualized beginning with the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police and the backlash against MuslimAmericans following the events of September 11, 2001. 1

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recently witnessing the political right rage “all lives matter” in response to the Black Lives Matter movement—wants to simply dismiss as regressive or racist. The truth, I now think, is that we performed “Colored People” as instruments of what cultural studies scholars call the ideology of “neoliberal multiculturalism”—a set of values and beliefs about race embedded within late twentieth-century capitalism. Broadly speaking, neoliberal multiculturalism accepts racial difference on the one hand, or nullifies its significance under the banner of “equality.” On the other hand, neoliberal multiculturalism cites market forces, or the logic of capitalism, in carefully proscribing what kinds of racial difference are acceptable. Celebrations of shared humanity can be tricky in this way. For all its championing of human sameness across the color line, neoliberal multiculturalism often ignores structural barriers to equality that still persist given the long history of discriminating against people of color politically and economically. This chapter looks primarily to “Colored People,” but also “What Have We Become?” and “I Luv Rap Music” (the latter off 1990’s Nu Thang) to situate dc Talk’s evangelical political activism within the ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism. If “Jesus Freak” finds dc Talk engaged with the social justice politics of grunge and alternative music, then “Colored People” takes that politics to the neoliberal mainstage. For the record, I want to hate this song now—to see it as the expression of neoliberal multiculturalism par excellence, a sign of white America’s efforts to enact what might be called “race erasure,” and, worse, to appropriate minority status as “colored.” The song is more complicated than this 60

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feeling allows, however. As a song directed in large part to other Christians, “Colored People” also offers a powerful, historically self-aware rebuke of Christian racism. And more importantly, it preaches an ethic of love that joins dc Talk to a twenty- and twenty-first-century canon of intellectuals— from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin to bell hooks and Cornel West—calling for unconditional love to forefront our activism. To place “Colored People” in its historical context, this chapter first explores the relationship between rap music and race erasure within the cultural politics of post–Moral Majority Christianity. During the mid-1990s, American evangelicals moved beyond their mobilization around domestic issues, such as segregation, to attain even vaster political and cultural power. They did so vis-à -vis a newly imagined Great Commission. By shifting their focus from home to abroad, from issues like school prayer to sex trafficking and AIDS in Africa, evangelicals expanded their political reach without abandoning their religious conviction to “save” the world.2 Not coincidentally, this evangelical ascendency to power coincides with the rise of neoliberalism as standard domestic and foreign policy in the United States. D. Michael Lindsay contends that “as evangelicals became politically engaged in the 1960s and 1970s, most of their political ambitions revolved around domestic issues like abortion and public schooling. By the mid1990s, evangelicals had started to frame foreign policy issues in religious terms, and in a span of ten years, they have become the foreign policy conscience of political conservatives, championing issues like religious freedom, human rights, the abolition of human trafficking, and increased foreign aid” (2008: 42). 2

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For most critics, the age of neoliberalism begins with the elections of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1979 and Ronald Reagan as president of the United States in 1980, although certainly the mechanisms making this emergence possible began decades earlier. Following the economic strains of the 1970s for both superpowers, a group of economists, elected officials, and US Treasury Department appointees coalesced to mandate a return to liberal “free markets,” achieved specifically, as David Harvey explains, by “deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision” (2005: 3).3 Lisa Duggan similarly describes how within the United States, “the New Deal consensus was dismantled in the creation of a new vision of national and world order, a vision of competition, inequality, market ‘discipline,’ public austerity, and ‘law and order’” (2004: x). As the domestic public sphere shrank under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, the flow of global capital and dependence on the private sector to meet public needs increased. Ultimately, neoliberalism’s success was secured through key leaders, like Reagan and Thatcher, positioning the liberal system itself as natural, reasonable, and best. This strategy served to separate the sphere of the economic, subsequently seen as the sphere of “practical” concern, from both the political and cultural, significantly weakening the radical These economic strains emerged alongside, but not as a result of, limited advancements for women, people of color, and queers through the emergence of second-wave feminism, the civil rights movement, and gay liberation. 3

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and progressive activism that had emerged after the Second World War, and in the 1960s and 1970s especially. As Lauren Berlant explains, neoliberalism’s “aim was the privatization of U.S. citizenship. One part of its project involved rerouting the critical energies of the emerging political sphere into sentimental spaces of an amorphous opinion culture, characterized by strong patriotic identification mixed with feelings of practical political powerlessness” (1997: 3). These feelings of “practical political powerlessness” are certainly manifest in grunge angst, the focus of the previous chapter, but more broadly in the supposedly inevitable move rightward by the Democratic Party, evidenced specifically by the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. Clinton differed little on most substantive fronts from Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush before him, and his election ushered in an era that would succeed in naturalizing centrist (neoliberal) Democrats as “practical” problem solvers, while painting progressive Leftists as un-American extremists.4 The late twentieth-century rise of outsourcing, downsizing, and especially privatizing is closely entangled with the rise of a specifically neocolonial, post–Moral Majority evangelical outreach to Africa and other countries in the so-called

Lisa Duggan explains how the bourgeoning of the center in thirdwave politics, especially under President Bill Clinton, produced strange bedfellows of abandonment for the foreseeable future: “Leftists, ‘old liberals,’ multiculturalist ‘special interest’ groups, and a right wing composed of religious moralists and overtly racist nationalists (referred to in some quarters as ‘paleoconservatives’) were increasingly marginalized and excluded from political power and mainstream visibility” (2004: 10). 4

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Third World. (Both Will and I participated in such outreach. I donated my used eyeglasses to far-sighted Nicaraguan children, while Will sent care-packages containing genericbrand canned goods to families in Uganda.) At the same time, privatization’s rise and evangelicalism’s international missions were closely entangled with neoliberalism’s racial politics. Neoliberalism embraces racial difference when economically or politically beneficial, while casting such differences as divisive when they are not. From multicultural advertisements for the luxury brand United Colors of Benetton, to the election of Bill Clinton as America’s “first black president,” secular and Christian culture alike largely replaced a progressive Civil Rights agenda with a market-driven attitude hell-bent on un-racing race relations. That is, American culture writ large reformulated racial difference as a marketable commodity, arguing that such difference should not (even though it often did) alienate non-whites from upward mobility. In hindsight—after the continued drug war at home and the global War on Terror abroad, after the election of President Barack Obama, after the death of Trayvon Martin and so many other young black men, after Black Lives Matter—it’s pretty easy to read the central thesis of dc Talk’s provocative song, that we’re all colored people, as some neoliberal bullshit.5 But the song also participates in rap music’s own complicated, often conflicting, negotiation of this new Though interestingly, after all these cultural touchstones, dc Talk performed the song again when they reunited some twenty-odd years later for the Jesus Freak Cruise, which took place July 11–15, 2017. 5

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multicultural ethic. Rap music, be it secular or sacred, has never been entirely willing to reject neoliberal capitalism; the genre offers, as many critics have argued, one of the most spectacularly viable forms of class mobility for historically disenfranchised peoples alongside professional sports (Dyson 1997). In fact, rappers often equate success with material excess. (To quote Puff Daddy, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.”) Once hip-hop artists reach such success, however, it is often crucial that they, like so many of their grunge peers, not lose sight of their roots—their authentic selves. Authenticity in rap and hip-hop culture, Alexander Riley contends, “means being ‘the realest,’ or the one most in touch (through purportedly direct life experience) with the agonistic, tragic rules of the subculture—the one most able to face, affirm, and overcome suffering and to report it unflinchingly to others” (2005: 309). If so much rap music of the early 1990s insists on such a “hard” authenticity of black culture, “Colored People” develops hip-hop’s simultaneous critique of a racist marketplace and desire to become a central part of that very marketplace. dc Talk joins other alternative 1990s hip-hop acts like Arrested Development, De La Soul, and Digable Planets in creating new and expansive mythologies within the genre. In graduate school, that land where you learn to think of every text as always and forever “problematic,” I took a course called Popular Music Cultures. The professor asked us to share a song that had informed, for better or for worse or for both, our own listening identities. I shared dc Talk’s “Colored People,” a song the class universally agreed was problematic, at best, but more likely flat-out racist. Their reaction, in fact, 65

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largely propelled my early thinking on this book years later. In class that day, I didn’t know quite how to react. (Was the song racist? Was I bad for bringing it into the classroom? Had I done the reading that week?) But looking back, I have a better idea: to simply dismiss “Colored People” as offensive is to risk not only reinforcing strict divisions between black and white, but also missing neoliberalism’s surprising, if still unrealized, potential to develop a public ethic of love. I  Bill Clinton’s Neoliberal 1990s Less than a week after Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols—more conservative and dangerous archetypes of the disenchanted Gen Xer at the center of our last chapter— bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, President Bill Clinton attended a prayer service at the still-smoldering bomb site. “You have lost too much,” the president told the crowd of mourners, emergency respondents, and media, “but you have not lost everything. And you have certainly not lost America.” For many youth of the 1990s, the Oklahoma City bombing was the first event we experienced as a collective, informing how we came to think of ourselves as part of a nation, and that nation as specifically “America.”6 The event

Garth Brooks’s 1995 song “The Change” pays tribute to the bombing while illustrating this vulnerability. “One hand reaches out and pulls a lost soul from harm,” Brooks croons, “while a thousand more go unspoken for.” 6

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shaped our idea of national belonging and citizenship, our sense of ourselves as vulnerable patriots. That week in April 1995, we sat glued to our television sets, powerless and watching a mounting public panic and death toll. For many of us, it was the first instance of national victimization we could claim, regardless of (or perhaps despite) our individual prosperity and privilege. My father worked in a minor federal office building hundreds of miles from the one in Oklahoma City, and even at twelve years old, this tangentially related fact left me feeling helpless, scared, and unsafe. We were all in danger, and the political climate of the decades to follow—including the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in a seemingly endless global War on Terror—only served to confirm this impression. Black and brown people were statistically most imperiled by the era’s domestic War on Drugs, ever-growing prison-industrial complex, and perpetually under-funded public schools. Abroad, they were imperiled by US imperialism in the Middle East. Our military forces sent to carry out this neocolonial project were also disproportionately African American or Latino, two people groups the US government actively recruited as the military downsized its white forces throughout the Clinton administration to rely on “cheaper” labor. (“The army is the only way out for a young black teenager,” Ice Cube raps on 1991’s “I Wanna Kill Sam.”) But we suburban whites felt this violent peril as our own. Throughout middle and high school, my friends and I prayed that God would protect our school, our sleepy suburban town, and our country from an enemy now manifest. Our battle was not only spiritual, but also physical, 67

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a terror that made the Cold War feel like a playground fight. Our Pastor John prayed every Sunday morning: “Lord, protect us in this sanctuary. We are in danger.” Fearfully, I believed his warning of imminent danger. dc Talk released Jesus Freak into this culture of sudden white victimization, quick on the heels of the white boredom that characterized the grunge and alternative music of the decade’s first half. Indeed, only in this culture, and at this moment in history, could white frontman Toby McKeehan unironically sing alongside his black bandmate Michael Tait, “We’re colored people, and they call us the human race.” This was the neoliberal 1990s, an era when Toni Morrison wrote of Bill Clinton that “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President” (1998).7 The economically focused nature of neoliberalism might initially appear to have little concern for issues of race and culture beyond their financial capacities. But as Duggan explains, neoliberalism actually “organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion” (2004: 3). Furthermore, she argues, “The categories through which Liberalism (and thus also neoliberalism) classify human activity and relationships actively obscure the connections among these organizing terms” (2004: 3). During the 1990s It’s tricky to characterize Morrison’s statement on Clinton as purely neoliberal. After all, for those already privileged in many ways, such as the black feminist Morrison or the southern, white, working-class Clinton, neoliberal multiculturalism combined with state powers to advance certain acceptable bodies, although often at a huge expense to other bodies. 7

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in particular, racial difference was often actively obscured by proclamations of our shared, cross-racial humanity. (“They call us the human race,” dc Talk sang, adding to Michael Jackson’s earlier proclamation that “it don’t matter if you’re black or white.”) These declarations presume that all people— at least all American or Western people—are equally able to thrive within market capitalism, and that difference easily reduces to a benign form of communal otherness. (“We’re colored people, and we all gotta share this space.”) Not surprisingly, the supposed color blindness of the 1990s’ boom economy was largely a myth for black people. Despite overall drops in unemployment, for instance, black unemployment remained at least double white unemployment nationwide. During the same period, twice as many whites held college degrees as African Americans, and the average white household held between four and six times the average wealth of black households.8 These figures point to a worsening economic, political, and cultural standing for black Americans during the Clinton 1990s, not an improvement, even if some cultural texts, from dc Talk’s music to Clinton’s political rhetoric of bootstrapism, appear to argue otherwise. Despite this worsening economic situation for the poorest, disproportionately black Americans, Clinton overthrew “welfare as we know it” in favor of a system that centralizes the color-blind values of “work and independence.” In hindsight today, we think of this era as “the New Jim Crow,” the period legal scholar Michelle Alexander See Neil Irwin, Claire Cain Miller, and Margot Sanger-Katz’s New York Times article “America’s Racial Divide, Charted” (August 19, 2014). 8

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characterizes by the disproportionate imprisonment of black men. A result of the Clinton administration’s stringent support for heightened police presence and harsh drug legislation, this growth of imprisonment restricted the financial growth or wealth accumulation of black families.9 Alexander points out that given his focus on incarceration, coupled with his clandestine conservative and racialized welfare reform agenda, “Clinton—more than any other president—created the current racial undercaste” (2012: 57) that continued well beyond his presidency.

In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindess (New York: The New Press, 2012), Alexander explains how, “once elected, [despite his supposed Blackness] Clinton endorsed the idea of a federal ‘three strikes and you’re out’ law, which he advocated in his 1994 State of the Union address to enthusiastic applause on both sides of the aisle. The $30 billion crime bill sent to President Clinton in August 1994 was hailed as a victory for the Democrats, who ‘were able to wrest the crime issue away from the Republicans and make it their own.’ .  .  . Far from resisting the emergence of a new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, ‘the Clinton administration’s “tough on crime” policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates [disproportionately black] of any president in American history’” (56). But this view, too, is complicated. In hindsight, the drug war was at least in part led by black activists (and members of the Congressional Black Caucus in particular). Reporting for NPR’s Code Switch, in an article for which Michelle Alexander refused comment, Arun Venugopal explains “This idea—that strict drug laws have done more harm than good in black America—is common these days. But early on, many African-American leaders championed those same tough-on-crime policies” (“The Shift in Black Views of the War on Drugs,” August 16, 2013). 9

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We live with Clinton’s neoliberal legacy today—this legacy of politically prioritizing the economy over seemingly unconnected social or cultural concerns. Neoliberal politics enters these arenas only insofar as it can promote “free markets” (in quotes because of persistent state involvement in these markets, often in the form of private-public partnerships) and the accumulation of wealth. But the neoliberal project ultimately renders many people of color, queers, and women less fit for economic prowess. In short, neoliberalism embraces a supposedly benevolent color blindness to obfuscate any systematic racism inherent to the political structure and its evolving needs. If we’re all colored people, as dc Talk sings and Bill Clinton embodies, then we are all equal under the supposedly race-neutral law. But as 2Pac raps back to the 1990s political context, “Come on, come on, I see no changes.” One month before the release of Jesus Freak, President Clinton delivered an official address on race relations at the University of Texas. Much of Clinton’s speech illustrates the political transition from a progressive Civil Rights agenda of systemic reform to a neoliberal message of economic uplift and personal responsibility. Speaking on the same day as Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March in Washington D.C., Clinton compares Farrakhan’s rally to one of Martin Luther King’s marches: Almost 30 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King took his last march with sanitation workers in Memphis. They marched for dignity, equality, and economic justice. Many carried placards that read simply, “I am a man.” The throngs of men marching in Washington today, almost

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all of them, are doing so for the same stated reason. But there is a profound difference between this march today and those of 30 years ago. Thirty years ago, the marchers were demanding the dignity and opportunity they were due because in the face of terrible discrimination, they had worked hard, raised their children, paid their taxes, obeyed the laws, and fought our wars. Well, today’s march is also about pride and dignity and respect. But after a generation of deepening social problems that disproportionately impact black Americans, it is also about black men taking renewed responsibility for themselves, their families, and their communities. It’s about saying no to crime and drugs and violence. It’s about standing up for atonement and reconciliation. It’s about insisting that others do the same and offering to help them. It’s about the frank admission that unless black men shoulder their load, no one else can help them or their brothers, their sisters, and their children escape the hard, bleak lives that too many of them still face. (1995) In the span of thirty years (as measured between King’s march and Clinton’s speech), political rhetoric shifted from dismantling racism to covertly blaming its victims by calling for them to take responsibility for the injustices they face. Clinton’s call for personal responsibility despite the systemic disadvantages that accompany black racial identity befits the diminution of the public sphere central to the president’s agenda. It illustrates Alexander’s portrait of the Clinton administration as one that weakened the welfare system and strengthened the incarceration state. In 72

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part, Clinton’s speech even pre-emptively defends the welfare reform his administration would pass in conjunction with a Republican-led Congress in 1996. Clinton’s speech proceeds optimistically, conjuring the iconic American individual as one who matches his personal freedom with a sense of the nation as a racial melting pot. The president explains, “I am convinced, based on a rich lifetime of friendships and common endeavors with people of different races, that the American people will find out they have a lot more in common than they think they do” (1995). These supposed commonalities erase any material difference of access to upward mobility. Clinton basically asks the nation to trust him with leading race relations because, as the joke goes, he has a black friend. Or perhaps here Clinton is implicitly identifying as a black man or claiming, like the white members of dc Talk, coloredness. Arguably, this identification had been Clinton’s modus operandi all along. The day after beating progressive California governor Jerry Brown to secure the Democratic Party’s 1992 presidential nomination, Clinton appeared on the June 3 episode of The Arsenio Hall Show, wearing dark sunglasses and wielding a saxophone, playing “Heartbreak Hotel” to millions of Americans. “The big man in the glasses,” Hall says, sweeping his arms open to Clinton, who seems completely at ease on the decidedly black television program. During their interview, Hall and Clinton discuss M. C. Hammer, the black church, Elvis, and the South Central Los Angeles uprising following the beating of Rodney King. When Hall asks Clinton if he understands the riots, the worst urban unrest of the twentieth century, Clinton relies on a 73

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supposedly innate black knowledge he possesses: “I think I understand some of why it happened. . . . After we clean up this mess that the riots caused, let’s clean up the mess that caused the riots” (Hall 1992). From the beginning, Clinton attempted—and largely succeeded at—speaking, perhaps even becoming, black while white. Though white, he strove to perform, in the vein of N.W.A., a significant amount of “street knowledge.” In one reading of “Colored People,” we can imagine McKeehan using the image of his black bandmate Tait in the same manner President Clinton used black surrogates, rhetoric, and his own slippery racial identity to obscure structural inequalities with a message of personal responsibility and cultural reconciliation. Both McKeehan, from the Washington D.C., metro area, and Clinton, from the Arkansas delta, were born into economic geographies more typical for black Americans. McKeehan colors his upbringing as racially diverse, yet united; in an interview with JCTV, he recalls his middle school slogan: “We’re black, you’re black, we’re all black at Luther Jack” (JCTV 2011). As youth, both McKeehan and Clinton largely listened to black forms of music—hip-hop and rhythm and blues, respectively—that helped to form both their future personae. Rarely, however, does either man explicitly point to the economic, political, and cultural advantages their whiteness affords them. Clinton, after all, left dusty and dried-up Hope, Arkansas, for Georgetown, Yale, and Oxford, returning to the South as a lawyer, professor, and upwardly mobile public servant. McKeehan left the poor suburbs of Washington for an expensive private liberal arts college that helped catapult him to wealthy CCM stardom. We 74

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must at least hear “Colored People” as a lyric encapsulation of such economic overcoming, even if that overcoming itself is, inherently and by design, raced white. II  I Luv Rap Music “Serious lyrics don’t disregard: no treason, gotta reason that I rap so hard,” Toby McKeehan claimed on 1989’s “Heavenbound.” For dc Talk, blurring the musical color line was nothing new. Prior to Jesus Freak’s 1995 release, the band worked primarily in hip-hop. “When I was a kid,” one message board respondent known as “goofy4god” explains, “dc Talk was our Vanilla Ice.” More on that analogy shortly. But suffice it to say, the ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism in CCM here is not without a history, lyric or sonic or visual. The influence of this ideology is also well established, if not as overtly political, in the dc Talk catalog prior to 1995. Nu Thang (1990) was the first R.I.A.A.–certified record from the trio, and its lead single, “I Luv Rap Music,” provides a useful precedent to 1995’s “Colored People.”10 Before “Colored People” took Christian neoliberal multiculturalism mainstream, “I Luv Rap Music” appropriated the hip-hop dominating the era, while also whitewashing, or “redeeming,” the sins dc Talk saw permeating rap culture writ large. This song of redemption begins with an aside that speaks back to This certification is interesting at a time when Christian music sales were exploding. By late 1996, in fact, a year after Jesus Freak’s release, CCM reported gospel as the fastest growing genre of music (Gillespie 1997). 10

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dc Talk’s ostensible secular contemporaries—“Some people out there givin’ rap a bad name. Well I’m here to let you know, we ain’t down with that.” The year of Nu Thang’s release, 1990, was a particularly charged and politically engaged one for mainstream hip-hop. Released alongside Nu Thang were such seminal albums as Salt-n-Pepa’s Blacks’ Magic, Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, and LL Cool J’s Mama Said Knock You Out. But the preeminent hip-hop album still holding influence (and club rotation) was N.W.A.’s two-year-old Straight Outta Compton. In the title track, N.W.A. speaks back to the dominant conformist culture of 1988—the implicitly white evangelical suburbia Ronald Reagan evokes when he portrays America as a “city upon a hill.” “Straight Outta Compton” explains the meaning of the acronym N.W.A., Niggas With Attitude; praises drug use and drug selling; calls for violence toward both the police and rival gangs; and embraces hyper-masculine, arguably misogynistic, sexuality (“I find a good piece o’ pussy, I go up in it”). Whereas N.W.A.’s momentous success began the now-infamous rivalry between East coast and West coast rap groups, dc Talk worked alongside other CCM groups like P.I.D. to shift the hip-hop turf war from American to spiritual geography: secular rap versus sacred rap. In “I Luv Rap Music,” dc Talk casts contemporary secular rap as mired in vulgarity: “Today some rappers boast, some are makin’ me ill. And those obscene lyrics are overkill.” Trading those obscene lyrics for evangelical ones, dc Talk boasts instead of Christ’s ability to provide them with “a brand new start,” a redeemed life making Christian music: “He cold gave me my dreams: Doin’ hip-hop music with a 76

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Christian theme.” Of course, dc Talk’s boast garnered little to no response from secular rappers. It is difficult to imagine the wide spectrum of their black hip-hop contemporaries— ranging from N.W.A. to DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince— even beginning to think of the dc Talk boys as their artistic peers. By adopting hip-hop to Christian themes, however, dc Talk set themselves apart from the black rappers they both emulated and aggressively critiqued. Like the Jesus People before them, their efforts helped open Christians, and evangelical youth culture more specifically, to a genre once considered outside the boundaries of Christian cultural production and consumption. At the same time, this fissure—this “setting apart” within a specific musical genre—places dc Talk squarely within the political complexity of rap music and black cultural production more broadly. As Tricia Rose has argued, rap music brings together a tangle of some of the most complex social, cultural and political issues in contemporary American society. Rap’s contradictory articulations are not signs of absent intellectual clarity; they are a common feature of community and popular cultural dialogues that always offer more than one cultural, social or political viewpoint. (1994: 2) The juxtaposition of “Straight Outta Compton” and “I Luv Rap Music” illustrates Rose’s point about the existence of “more than one cultural, social or political viewpoint,” a heterogeneity, within the black community. The black church, for instance, might espouse more of the morality of dc Talk, while other artists or public intellectuals, such as 77

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bell hooks and Cornel West, might defend or contextualize the politics of N.W.A. To draw another comparison, if Public Enemy, precursors to N.W.A., were self-identified “prophets of rage,” then dc Talk’s members attempted to become prophets of love and reconciliation.11 The genre of hip-hop itself can accommodate both forms of prophecy. Indeed, it gives rise to both. And as dc Talk raps, “There’s a common ground (word!).” This confluence of rage and reconciliation joins both musical groups in a long, complex lineage of black music, with roots reaching back to both the church altar and the church of the street. The melodic rhythms of black gospel certainly helped to produce many important genres throughout the twentieth century: jazz, R&B, soul, funk, and finally, hiphop. The rhythms of church services themselves are also evident in the ad-lib nature of much rap music. Further, the black altar and the black street shared many of the same urgent desires for survival and hope which have always counterbalanced black life in America. Both the altar and the street became important institutions of cultural critique in black America and beyond. When not boasting of their own success and skills, rappers often criticize the social, political, In “Prophets of Rage,” the lead single from their 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy offers a powerful reading of both the established and emergent conditions of race under neoliberal politics: “Left or right, black or white, they tell lies in the books that you’re readin’. It’s knowledge of yourself that you’re needin’. Like Vescey or Prosser we have a reason why to debate the hate. That’s why we’re born to die. Mandela, cell dweller. Thatcher, you can tell her clear the way for the prophets of rage.” 11

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and ideological forces that shape the racist topography of contemporary America. But dc Talk, especially in “I Luv Rap Music” and “Colored People,” simultaneously critiques a racist evangelical public, America writ large, and an often violent hip-hop culture in particular. What makes this act of critique at turns provocative and egregious is not necessarily the message of Christ’s salvation (as if America’s racial divisions could easily be healed by a first-century Jesus), but the messenger: the delivery of such a critique primarily through the voice of the white McKeehan, a voice reinforced by the backup provided by his black bandmate Tait. The white performance of traditionally black forms is certainly controversial.12 One need only look to the public reaction to recent white Seattle rapper Macklemore— who won the 2014 “Best Rap Album” Grammy Award for The Heist—to see this controversy come alive. For no small number of rap fans and music journalists, Macklemore was not simply a mediocre rapper; he was an appropriator of black music, the modern Vanilla Ice, whose admittedly catchy hit “Thrift Shop” aestheticizes the consumer venues of the poor for white, middle-class consumption. Such criticism might be too harsh, however—or at least inadequate in its failure While Fred Moten, for instance, paints the white taking up of black forms as a violent fetish that often denies the form’s original radical politic, Gayle Wald argues that whites imitating blacks not only often demonstrate the desirability of blackness, but also destabilize race as a secure biological binary. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Radical Black Tradition (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003); Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke, 2000). 12

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to grasp Macklemore’s appreciation of the genre in which he works. Looking back to an earlier moment in American history, Eric Lott successfully articulates the complicated nature of Elvis Presley’s cross-racial performance when he argues that “the art of impersonation is built on a contradiction. Appreciation, deference, spectatorship, and emulation compete with inhabitation, aggression, usurpation, and vampirism. . . .   There is an unsteady but continual oscillation between these stances” (1997: 198). Through taking up specifically black musical styles, the white McKeehan, like Macklemore, Elvis, and, yes, Vanilla Ice, demonstrates this complicated nature of appropriation, at turns showing appreciation and obscuring the black roots of his performance. In part what makes any reading of dc Talk’s (mis)use of black forms particularly difficult is dc Talk’s whiteness, which is, in and of itself, not exactly clear. The group is comprised of two white men, Toby McKeehan and Kevin Max, and one black man, Michael Tait. To overemphasize McKeehan’s potential appropriation of black forms is to erase Tait’s role in dc Talk, a role certainly more central than that of Max, who often comes off as a third wheel to the McKeehan-Tait duo. As the mostcited co-writer on all albums and co-lead vocalist on most tracks, especially on Nu Thang and Jesus Freak, Tait’s presence combats what might otherwise be an active forgetting of black authorship, or a vampirism, to borrow Lott’s term. On “Colored People,” however, both Tait and Max take a backseat to McKeehan; in fact, they seem almost expendable, were it not for the harmonizing they bring to the repeating chorus of “we’re colored people.” Here, Tait sings the higher, more 80

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difficult harmony, full of challenging minor riffs. Typical of white-black “collaborations” immediately preceding this era— such as Madonna and Prince or Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson—Tait, like Max, is vocally subjugated to McKeehan. But what makes Tait’s musical contribution more politically charged than Max’s is the image and sound of his black self singing beside white men of their shared “coloredness.” The lyric discourages the audience from perceiving any significant difference between Tait, McKeehan, and Max. It encourages the audience to perceive all three men as both white and black, to consider whiteness as itself a color, and therefore to recognize, even if only tacitly, McKeehan’s claim to black artistic and cultural forms. The question of who rightfully performs blackness is further complicated by the question of who consumes blackness. The early 1990s child in me spent years, it seems, riding in my sister’s Geo Tracker listening to Michael Jackson. How cool I thought we were—my sister and I, singing “The Way You Make Me Feel”—even though I was only five, and she, seventeen. We reveled in a surprisingly black canon of sonic cool, brimming with powerhouses of popular music from the mid-1980s to early 1990s: Michael Jackson, his sister Janet, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey. I say surprising, but my sister and I did not actively think about race on the radio. To us, race was already irrelevant. Perhaps we anticipated dc Talk’s erasure of culturally meaningful racial differences, or, better said, the neoliberal white claim to coloredness. Perhaps we were also filling our roles as white consumers of black music. The simultaneous irrelevance of race to and fascination with Otherness by white audiences was well known to black 81

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artists by the time I turned eleven in 1995. In her study of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous, Susan Fast explains how by the early 1990s, mainstream black signers knew they largely served to “entertain for the pleasure of their white audiences, tempering their artistry, or shaping it to please the [white purchasing] audience” (2014: 93). Black artists, especially hiphop artists, monetarily benefited from the purchasing power of young white audiences, and subsequently, not to mention quite successfully, balanced a desire to remain true to often radical black politics while selling their music to whites.13 As my sister and I became increasingly religious, we consumed dc Talk’s music alongside that of other, “whiter” crossover CCM acts, such as Jars of Clay and Audio Adrenaline. But the special attraction of dc Talk was their rap—their safe and accessible conveyance of a “hard” black form into the white Christian suburb in which we lived. Given dc Talk’s missional focus to “go and make disciples of all nations”—or here, to expand the church beyond the white middle class—we might instead think of McKeehan’s rapping as an act of what Gilbert B. Rodman labels “reverential cultural borrowing” (2006: 95). The phrase denotes the taking up of another culture’s idioms without threat to the originating culture’s ownership of the Writing for Mic magazine, Tom Barnes points out that “white men— specifically young, suburban white men—consume around 80% of hip-hop music. This became a recognized industry fact in 1991, and since then, the music industry has crafted mainstream hip-hop culture to appeal to that demographic” (“How Music Executives Created ‘Black’ Hip Hop for White Suburban Kids,” January 9, 2014). 13

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processes of material and artistic production. As a borrower, McKeehan neither displaces, nor questions, the black origins of hip-hop or the influence of black cultural forms on his evolution as an artist. Indeed, he and the other members of dc Talk frequently acknowledge the origins of their art in the tradition of the black church. dc Talk and McKeehan do not appropriate black hip-hop with little to no historical awareness. They are clearly more knowledgeable of their art’s racial origins than white Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, who mocked black rapper Azealia Banks for her critique of Azalea’s ripping off of black cultural production. Azalea tweeted, “Now! rant, Make it racial! make it political! Make it whatever but I guarantee it won’t make you likable & THATS why ur crying on the radio” [sic]. Sigh. Within CCM at least, dc Talk and McKeehan are more like Eminem, whom Rodman credits with skillfully negotiating the position of a white man working in a traditionally black medium (2006). To dismiss McKeehan, Tait, and Max on the grounds that they lack the authentic black experience of N.W.A.’s “street knowledge” would, in this light, risk the construction of racially essentialist boundaries around art. It would restrict who may produce and who may borrow. It would also sever racial identity from geography, making rap purely an expression of a particular form of blackness rather than a more racially heterogeneous culture. Like Eminem, from the ghettos of Detroit, McKeehan grew up in a majority black area of the Washington, D.C., metro during the mid1980s, a time when hip-hop, funk, and go-go coalesced to musically dominate the region. When he moved to southern Virginia to attend Liberty University, McKeehan was forced 83

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to navigate his simultaneous love of and experience with hip-hop and the evangelical church that largely admonished the genre. (Not to mention, he left largely black Fairfax County near D.C. to live in an uber-white region of southern Virginia.) What results in dc Talk’s early foray into hip-hop on a track like “I Luv Rap Music” is not necessarily a negative form of appropriation, but perhaps instead an exemplary illustration of love both cultural and Christian—an ethical love that aims for the utopian ideal of dissolving racial barriers around art and life itself. III  Color-blind Utopia “I don’t care what ya heard,” dc Talk raps on their 1992 album Free at Last, “the word luv, luv is a verb.” To be sure, an active and theoretical love is at the center of both the evangelical project of dc Talk and the progressive project of contemporary cultural activism. If love is a verb, love is also an ethic of thoughtful action. “Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations,” bell hooks writes, “we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination—imperialism, sexism, racism, classism” (2006: 243). The failure of radicalism, hooks explains, has been “the absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles .  .  . a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit” (2006: 243). More progressive forms of modern Christianity share hook’s “ethic of love,” calling it “agape,” a Greek term denoting the highest, unconditional form 84

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of ethical love. In a 1957 sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King, Jr., told worshipers that agape “is a love that seeks nothing in return . . . . You look at every man, and you love him because you know God loves him.” If the ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism underwriting dc Talk’s “Colored People” erases race while simultaneously facilitating white identification with the marginalized other, might the song nevertheless encourage a more radical form of ethical love? Not a politics of racial obfuscation, but a way of looking to whatever utopia lies beyond our social construction of color? We think so. As dc Talk sings of skin in “Colored People,” “a piece of canvas is only the beginning, for it takes on character with every loving stroke.” The separation of skin color from character is, in a word, sound: it echoes Dr. King’s famous hope that one day people will be judged by the latter, rather than the former. Dr. King’s hope is for what many people call a “post-racial society,” where race no longer signifies greater or lesser because the structural barriers to equality have been dissolved. We hope it’s not too hopeful to hear “Colored People,” despite its neoliberal moorings, aspiring to this utopia as well. The music video for “Colored People” aptly illustrates both the problems of neoliberal multiculturalism and its potential for post-racial utopianism. In particular, it typifies neoliberalism’s arguably benevolent aspirations toward color blindness and race erasure, attempting to render race of no significance (and thus no barrier) to either market or cultural mobility. The video makes this attempt, in part, through its evangelical revision of one of the 1990s’ 85

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most famous music videos, R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” (1991), which also centralizes white male able-bodiedness within not only what would quickly become the niché market of Generation X grunge and alternative music. Like the video for “Losing My Religion,” set in a dimly lit cabin where Michael Stipe sings what became anthemic of that generation’s felt hopelessness, “Colored People” opens in a gritty room with a lone, older man sitting at a desk, the word “ignorance” spray painted on the dirty wall behind him. In much the same way they responded to Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” with the claim that Christ heals both personal and collective pain, dc Talk answered R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” with the hopeful message of salvation through Jesus Christ, shrink-wrapped and available for purchase in both churches and music stores across the United States and around the world. In both “Colored People” and “Losing My Religion,” lead singers Toby McKeehan and Michael Stipe perform while surrounded by people of various races, genders, abilities, and sexualities. These people serve to obfuscate the privilege of McKeehan’s and Stipe’s own white able bodies by forming a multicultural collective: they become a kaleidoscope (to borrow dc Talk’s admittedly cliché  descriptor) of progressive individuals with potentially shared goals. One might most easily see the centrality of McKeehan and Stipe within each collective as reinforcing the desirability of their “strong” masculinity. But how strong are each of these men, really? As Stipe pleads, “that’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight losing my religion,” he looks first to a fallen black angel with high-glam gold wings, and eventually to 86

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an androgynous Asian reimagination of St. Sebastian, the patron saint of male homoeroticism. In this way, one either reads Stipe as thrusting his white masculine insecurities—by 1990, his sexuality and gender expression were repeatedly called into question—onto the racialized and gendered Other, incorporating these people into the music video only insofar as they serve to reinforce his own oppositional white hetero-masculinity; or, one reads him as joining his oppressed queer spirit in love with other oppressed spirits in an act of generative, collective love. We desire the latter reading, however much we grant the more skeptical one. Fred Maus gestures toward this restorative reading by arguing that the “Losing My Religion” video visualizes “an intensely heightened awareness of speech acts, a faltering attempt at moment-by-moment control of verbal disclosure. It expresses the self-consciousness and uncertainty of the protagonist. .  .  . [It] dramatizes the conflict between his desire to communicate something huge and his fear of doing so” (2006: 204). Stipe seems to desire “coming out” to us (about what specifically, is unclear), to Other himself, but at this point in his career falls just short of claiming such a non-hetero identity.14 A similar fear and slippery control of verbal disclosure haunt McKeehan’s performance in the video for “Colored People.” While singing “We’re colored people, and they call us the human race,” McKeehan looks, at various points, visibly Stipe did come out in a 1998 interview with Time magazine, where he selfidentified as a “queer artist” and spoke of his three-year relationship with a man. 14

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confident and uncomfortable. During these moments of discomfort, he turns to, often physically touching, bodies that lay claim to visually legible coloredness, from his bandmate Tait, whom at one point McKeehan appears about to kiss, to an unnamed black man who holds a placard reading simply, “I AM A MAN.”15 Like Bill Clinton speaking about his friendships with African Americans, or Michael Stipe placing himself next to queer figures from art, McKeehan draws on his proximity to Other-ed people in ways that visualize neoliberal multiculturalism. McKeehan and Stipe allow these adjacent bodies to perform the labor of desirable Otherness, which also serves to build a cultural cachet for white audiences who wanted to purchase their progressivism. Paired with the lyrics of “Colored People,” McKeehan seems to be turning to these Other-ed people and saying, “We are no different,” and thus equal under the gaze of neoliberal economics, politics, and culture. It is this false equality politic that, in part, marks neoliberalism as problematic and makes “Colored People” an exemplary text of that deceptively equitable specter. Such lyrics delivered by a band with a complicated relationship to hip-hop, turning now to a mellowed-out, acoustic guitar driven adult contemporary pop—harkening back itself, perhaps, to folk music, the music “of the people”—paints an even more blatant attempt at unraced universality. But again, what about the love motivating the song? The sign references placards used during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike, during which Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated and an event President Bill Clinton directly recalls in his aforementioned address on race relations at the University of Texas on October 16, 1995. 15

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However much it evinces a consumer-friendly whitesavior project, “Colored People” also encourages an ethic of love that wants to conquer racial divisions. For all the social perils of neoliberal race erasure, this ethic of love is worth recognizing as one goal on which both progressives and religious conservatives might agree. To accept dc Talk’s claim that “we are all colored people” is not necessarily or simply to erase race as a determinant in present structural inequalities. Nor is it to deny the history of slavery and Jim Crow in America—sins to which dc Talk repeatedly point in the videos for “Colored People” and “Jesus Freak” alike. To allow that “we are all colored people” might instead be to emphasize a public togetherness in—or, despite—our difference in epidermal shades. This shift in emphasis is at least as generative as it is dangerous, in part because it develops for Christian purposes a radical politics of love, and because cultural productions like “Colored People” and “Jesus Freak” help flip the script of what is marketable. dc Talk sells anti-racism to an evangelical church community that once was, and very possibly still is, racist. In “Colored People,” communal coloredness—the expansion of the previously defined disposed (black) and disposer (white) to reach across the color line—resignifies as a desirable trait. This shift is quite a feat considering that even many African Americans often eschewed colored identity when possible. In his memoir Colored People, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explains that “one of the more painful things about being colored was being colored in public around other colored people, who were embarrassed to be colored and embarrassed that we both were colored and in public together” (1995: 42). Could 89

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coloredness’s violent power, both physical and psychic, be combated by a collective taking up of the identity? Do we, as dc Talk asks, “gotta come together?” By “owning” the moniker “colored people,” dc Talk brings to light the Christian (specifically Southern Baptist) church’s involvement in abhorrent racist practices, from slavery to mass incarnation, further questioning why racism still exists in supposedly post-racial institutions like the church and the United States. “By God’s design,” they sing, “we are a skin kaleidoscope,” provoking the question that if we are implored to love our brother as we love ourselves, why would God segregate us by race? dc Talk also challenges the presumption that “color” is unmarketable and unwanted, and that colored people thus cannot speak to largely white Christian purchasing audiences. As Tricia Rose explains of rap more generally, “attacks on institutional power rendered in these contexts have a special capacity to destabilize the appearance of unanimity among power holders by .  .  . cultivating the contradictions between commodity interests (‘Does it sell? Well, sell it, then.’) and the desire for social control (‘We can’t let them say that.’)” (1994: 101). While acts like N.W.A. and Public Enemy broke apart the politics of respectability and opened the marketplace of rap to bourgeois white audiences using the “vulgarity” McKeehan criticizes, dc Talk attempted to open up mainstream music to religious artists by figuring the Christian (whether black or white) as a member of the undercaste. dc Talk’s claim on coloredness was borne out of not only such a desire for relevance, but also a well-meaning ethic of love. Conservative critics (those in the church) might admonish such attempts at progressive lyricism and 90

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secular  artistry; liberal critics might likewise dismiss the band’s methods as simply a road to hell paved with good intentions. The truth is decidedly more complex; or, as dc Talk would have it, “we live in a tainted place.” “They call us the human race,” dc Talk quietly pleads, more vocally contemplative here than elsewhere, adding softly, “we’ve got a history so full of mistakes.” In the song’s video, McKeehan especially looks bothered, apologetic even. Potentially lost in an easy condemnation of “Colored People” as the soundtrack of nefarious neoliberalism is dc Talk’s larger, generative, and personal critique of racism within the Christian church, a church that is at the center of their identity, individually and as a band. Lyrically, visually, and sonically, “Colored People” condemns the longstanding tradition of both overt and covert discrimination within white evangelicalism. In the music video, for instance, the victims of this Christian racism—from Jewish concentration camp prisoners to black Memphis sanitation workers—are portrayed as the narrative’s heroes, in direct opposition to typical CCM music video production, which at the time tended to heroicize mostly CCM artists themselves or those in Christian ministry. “What Have We Become?,” another of Jesus Freak’s tracks, directly condemns a white Christian minister for his support of racial segregation. IV  What Have We Become? From its opening lyrics—“A preacher shuns his brother ’cause his bride’s a different color, and this is not acceptable, his 91

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papa taught him so”—“What Have We Become?” calls out racism within the church. This racism bars people of color from the upward social mobility mainstream evangelical traditions afford lower-class whites, like Bill Clinton, or middle-class whites, like the majority of the student body comprising Liberty University, where McKeehan, Tait, and Max first met. Instead of dismissing “What Have We Become” as regressive, we might think of these three Liberty alums as offering an especially potent criticism of racism in the church at large, and more specifically, in the psyche of their fundamentalist university. Founded by Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell in 1971, Liberty University initially did not admit non-white students. An institution created to train the largely white evangelical block of the 1960s and early 1970s, Liberty University was implicitly energized around combatting the civil rights movement. Yet two things happened soon thereafter that changed the university’s tacit mission. First, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of fellow ultra-right Bob Jones University, threatening the segregationist wing of conservative Christianity, of which Liberty University was a central institution. Second, Falwell and his cohorts realized the Christian right could better organize around opposition to the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, and to the sexual revolution more broadly, than the civil rights movement. Falwell quickly moved to align his white brethren with conservative black churches (Blumenthal 2007). Yet the racist past of white evangelicalism, and specifically the immediate racist past of Liberty University, could not so quickly fade from 92

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evangelical memory. McKeehan, Tait, and Max were keenly aware of this past when they formed dc Talk on the campus of Liberty in 1987. And when they plead “What have we become?” it might not be too much of a stretch of the imagination to hear them posing the question to their own church-ed community, which continued to condemn black forms of cultural expression (such as hip-hop), if not also black people themselves. dc Talk wasn’t down with this recent (and still persistent) racism within the church. “What Have We Become?” demonstrates their ethic of tough love. Active rebuke, or talk back, has been fundamental to the Christian church since the beginning. What are many of Paul’s epistles, after all, if not Paul calling out Eurasian churches for their shortcomings? What are these letters if not Paul of Tarsus prophesying RuPaul, who signs off, “And don’t fuck it up?” The Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew bids early Christians, “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault. . . [because] whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (18:15-18). This small section of the Gospel of Matthew has become the basis of a proverbial cottage industry within modern Christianity: dealing with other members of Christ’s body. No less than Dr. King opens his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” with a coy rebuke: “While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities ‘unwise and untimely.’ Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the 93

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course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work” (1963). King is rightfully frustrated, but doesn’t give up on his church and its leaders: “But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms” (1963). In the lullaby-like “What Have We Become?,” dc Talk attempts such to rebuke in “patient and reasonable terms” a racist church that was becoming less racist and increasingly consumed by the neoliberal drive to individual wealth.16 The ethic of love that permeates “What Have We Become?” builds upon the rebuke of racial inequality raised by “Colored People.” Lyrically, “What Have We Become?” moves from critiquing Christian racism to talking back to Christians choosing silence in times of both economic and racial inequality: Speak your mind, look out for yourself The answer to it all is a life of wealth Grab all you can cause you live just once You got the right to do whatever you want Don’t worry about others or where you came from It ain’t what you were, it’s what you have become. The coy second line here—“the answer to it all is a life of wealth”—is especially potent. We read this verse as critiquing The fruits of this transition—the so-called prosperity gospel, which predicates wealth on devotion to God—can be seen in such “celebrated” ministries as Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, which has a weekly attendance topping 52,000, plus an international television audience. 16

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not merely the silence of many white Christians, but more specifically, the contemporary church’s “turning the other cheek” to the policies of neoliberal capitalism, which build wealth on the backs of people of color. In other words, most interesting here is not the reading that presents itself as readily evident: simply that all greed is evil. Instead, dc Talk imagines a world of spiritual and material abundance—a world here that more closely resembles their Father’s house (in heaven), for all. Indeed, this verse suggests that upward mobility—the accumulation of wealth under neoliberal capitalism—might constitute a generative reclamation of power for traditionally marginalized groups, such as nonwhite racial minorities. If the church is going to acquiesce to capitalism, it should seek a capitalism of equality. The band members crooning that “the answer to it all is a life of wealth” does not seem so much a critique of wealth itself, but instead a call for working toward economic self-sustainability and a more compassionate, equitable capitalism. Perhaps the softest sounding track on Jesus Freak, “What Have We Become?” finds dc Talk questioning their own mainstream musical—and thus financial—successes. The boys do not leave behind their wealth; they uncomfortably revel in it. As Beyoncé  Knowles (alongside her superstar rapper husband Jay-Z) has argued more contemporarily on her hit “Formation,” for the marginalized body, “your best revenge is your paper.” In this way, dc Talk joins a now long history of black musicians, from N.W.A. to Beyoncé  and Jay-Z, in praising the personal accumulation of wealth through selling one’s coloredness—an approach that uncomfortably abuts the critique of capital accumulation 95

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under neoliberalism. While dc Talk critiques a racist church, a violent musical community, and a greedy nation, they also imagine a utopia where we all are, indeed, the human race, and color does not hinder the individual’s ability to thrive (or to be saved). In the next chapter, we look to another surprising element of their music: dc Talk’s ability to queer Christian evangelicalism.

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3 Between You and Me Will Stockton and D. Gilson At Liberty University, Michael and I were inseparable. I mean, literally. —Toby McKeehan In a late 1990s interview with JCTV (an evangelical version of MTV), Toby McKeehan and Michael Tait recall the early days of dc Talk—their first performance at a BBQ in Jerry Falwell’s backyard, the recording of their first single “Heavenbound” soon thereafter, and the intimacy of their relationship from the very beginning. As freshmen at Liberty University, McKeehan and Tait were fast friends. Tait recalls that as roommates, he and McKeehan disassembled their bunk beds and laid them on the floor so the two friends could sleep side by side: “We wanted to, you know, just be pals, and just know that, okay, my buddy’s asleep, and everything’s cool” (JCTV 2011). At any secular university, this room arrangement—two men sleeping together in a makeshift queen—would likely signal a gay relationship. Yet Tait tells the story with no apparent self-awareness about its potential queerness. Nor does McKeehan suggest any

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consciousness of homoerotic valence when he describes Tait as his “brother,” and his friendship with Tait as “probably the most intense relationship, until my wife, that I’ve ever had” (JCTV 2011). For many queers who were once evangelicals, the terms in which Tait and McKeehan describe their friendship might sound familiar. The evangelical male subject accommodates a surprising amount of queerness—desire, forms of expression, and affection, aloud or internalized, that would register as gay were gayness not strictly forbidden by the evangelical code of male conduct and the evangelical model of the godly heterosexual subject.1 In this chapter, we situate Tait and McKeehan’s friendship in the context of mid-1990s evangelical youth culture and the Christian men’s movements that often informed it. In doing so, we hope to elucidate the historical and theological conditions within which “intense” male friendship register publicly as both special and normative. With respect to evangelical youth culture in particular, we return to our discussion of the “freak” in Chapter 1 via stories of our own past as evangelicals. As two former God-fearing teens who enjoyed and agonized over intense relationships with other men, we cite ourselves to demonstrate that mid-1990s evangelicals often experienced their own queer desires as freakish—not as defiantly homosexual or homoerotic, but as a rebellion against the secular constraints on masculinity that would foreclose love between men by categorizing that love as gay. Fostered by movements like Promise Keepers, which sought to As Robert McRuer explains, even “the more flexible heterosexual body tolerates a certain amount of queerness” (2006: 12). 1

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instruct men in the way of godly masculinity, evangelical men refashioned intense male friendships as complements, rather than threats, to heterosexual marriage and love. For both of us, dc Talk’s Jesus Freak provided the soundtrack to this refashioning. Unsettled in its genre, the album’s songs span in a style akin to a queer teenager’s emotions, from hiphop to grunge, adult contemporary to classic gospel. The three boys of dc Talk played out their passions publicly on Christian television, radio, and magazines—performing a love that we, too, felt for our friends. Relentlessly, the boys of dc Talk sing about God but to each other, and they do so with such intensity that it is hard now to look back and not become sweetly nostalgic, if not also a bit aroused. On the video for “What If I Stumble,” for instance, McKeehan leans into Tait’s ear, sweetly crooning, “I hear you whispering my name. My love for you will never change.” In this chapter we reminisce, albeit analytically, about our evangelical adolescence and the queer relationships we had with boys and the God who united us. We turn finally to consider the album’s second single, the crossover hit with which this chapter is titled, “Between You and Me,” as a song that helped pattern the generic use of a “you” queerly audible as both God and a human lover. I  David and Jonathan Will Stockton and D. Gilson It would be too easy to say that we always knew we were gay. Growing up as evangelical Christians, we knew that gay and homosexual were troublesome words in the vocabulary 99

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of godly self-definition. The terms chiefly applied to others, to non-Christians, or only to Christians as the result of an error in self-understanding. To be actively gay under the Christian rubric of our youths was to choose to fall away from Christ. God did not create straight people and gay people. He created straight people, some of whom “struggled” with same-sex attractions as a result of original sin, the corruption of which extended to the depths of our DNA.2 We believed that one chose to be gay much like one chose to be an alcoholic, a sex addict, or a drug user— by indulging, rather than resisting, sinful temptations. The homosexual chose to draw his understanding of self from the fallen, secular world—the culture—rather than from scripture.3 That God created man for woman and woman for man was a plain fact taught to us from a young age. As we So as not to cede to the secular world the notion of homosexuality as a discrete category of sexual orientation, homosexual desire was commonly called “same-sex attraction” or “SSA” in Christian psychological literature. 3 We summarize here the theological position of numerous “ex-gay” ministries. See, for example, Alan Chambers, Leaving Homosexuality: A Practical Guide for Men and Women Looking for a Way Out (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2009). Broadly speaking, evangelical attitudes regarding homosexuality have moderated somewhat since the mid-1990s, as conversion therapy—which purports to either transform homosexuals into heterosexuals or to decrease same-sex attraction through a combination of pastoral counseling and psychoanalysis—has been widely condemned by mainstream mental health professionals. In 2013, Exodus International, the world’s largest ex-gay ministry, officially shut down operations, with Alan Chambers (the organization’s president) issuing an apology to all those whom his organization had hurt (2009). 2

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learned in Sunday school and church sermons and weekly prayer services, the Bible both assumed the heterosexual attractions of most of its characters and preached the terrible punishments awaiting those who gave into homoerotic temptation. The flannel cutouts of Bible figures in our Sunday school classes were always heterosexually coupled—or if single, heterosexually masculine. Here was Adam in Eden with Eve, Noah on the ark with his wife, and a slingshot-wielding young David on the battlefield facing down Goliath. We knew that fire consumed the town of Sodom, whose depraved inhabitants had not merely been inhospitable to their angelic guests, but gayly inhospitable: the male Sodomites demanded to fuck the male angels (Gen. 19:4). We were told that Mosaic law accounted gay sex an abomination for reasons still relevant, unlike the mixing of fabrics and the eating of shellfish (Lev. 18:22), and that today, gay sex resulted in the contraction of HIV and AIDS. The apostle Paul, primary among our biblical heroes as evangelicals, knew what he was talking about when he condemned men and women who exchanged “natural relations” with each other for “unnatural” ones with members of the same sex (Rom. 1:26-27, 1 Cor. 6:9). Marriage was a union between one man and one woman—a coupling, instituted in the perfection of Eden, of two different but complementary sexes. And while some heroic men like Paul might be able to forgo marriage in order to keep their focus on God (1 Cor. 7:8-9), most of us would not be so strong. Children of God and hormones, we were taught to channel our sexual desires into the heterosexual routine of chaste courtship, eventual marriage, and responsible parenthood. 101

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This path was laid before us as inevitable. The latter years of our evangelical youth groups, in fact, seemed akin to sanctified dating services. Formally, Christian churches tended to treat samesex attraction (SAA) as one of many temptations to which fallen humans were susceptible. In the modern world, it was generally understood that people struggled with drinking, gambling, lying, profanity, stealing, jealousy, greed, pornography, and, yes, SAA. At the same time, these struggles were implicitly arranged into a hierarchy, especially among young people. Better for a teenage boy to have a drinking problem than a boyfriend. What awaited the evangelical teen publicly admitting to his own same-sex struggles was abandonment by his friends, especially male peers, and most likely a new struggle through conversion therapy aimed at making him straight.4 Better to admit to nothing and struggle in secret—to rely on Christ alone to help one sort through these unwanted emotions. For as much as it relegated homosexuality to the status of the sinful, the evangelical culture in which we grew up also afforded queer boys like us the ability to try and make sense of our desires under the rubric of biblically bound friendship. These friendships did not lack for queerness, but we were willfully blind to that fact then. Consider the relationship between our David, Israel’s second king, and King Saul’s son, Jonathan. Were they not models of godly commitment? For a characteristic account of one young man’s experience with conversion therapy, see Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016). 4

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In his grief over Jonathan’s death on Mount Gilboa, David declares that his friend’s love felt “more wonderful than that of women” (NIV) or, in another translation, “deeper than the love of women” (NLT, 2 Sam. 1:26). As we understood it, the prophet Samuel meant that the love between David and Jonathan was more profound than erotic love—“more wonderful” precisely because it was not sexual. David and Jonathan shared a love between brothers, a love both men even formalized in a “covenant” in which the two became “one spirit” (1 Sam. 18:1-3). Before Jesus and his favorite disciple John (at least according to the author of Jn 13:23), the Bible presented David and Jonathan as brothers in Christ, bound together by a love that transcended the flesh, the body, curly hair, and cute dimples. In hindsight, our interpretation of the story of David and Jonathan was strategically ahistorical—transparently motivated by our prior conclusion that homoerotic relationships were incommensurate with godly ones.5 Much as we would have insisted that there was nothing untoward going on between Jesus and John when the savior laid his head on the disciple’s chest and later ordered his mother to adopt John as her son (Jn 19:26), we offered a defensive reading of David’s relationship with Jonathan—a reading produced and nurtured by churches that assumed most young men struggled first and foremost with lust for women, For a more sophisticated exposition of possible readings of Jonathan and David’s relationship, see Andrew Heacock, Jonathan Loved David: Manly Love in the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Sex (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011). 5

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and that they needed strong male friends who could help hold them accountable for their actions. (Jonathan unfortunately died before David spied the roof-bathing Bathsheba, and subsequently had her husband murdered [2 Samuel 11].) These churches missed the point that for many teen boys, strong male friends were themselves often the stumbling block of lustful temptation, of natural hormones exercising their demons. In our strategically ahistorical reading, Jonathan and David functioned as what we called “accountability partners,” each boy keeping his spiritual brother in check as they navigated the minefield of supposedly heterosexual temptation. They had to spend all that time together, confiding in one another, loving each other, because the fallen world was a perilous place. Perhaps John even did the same for Jesus, whom we believed knew every temptation experienced by man. This Davidic model of friendship and brotherly love created a place for queer feeling within Christian relationships between men even as it would deny that feeling’s queerness. Put more simply, it helped accommodate male homoerotic attachment in Christian praxis through the denial that such an attachment was sexual. When Michael Tait describes the sense of security that comes with sleeping next to his buddy Toby McKeehan, we hear ourselves asking to sleep in the bed next to our friends. We hear ourselves likening ourselves to David and Jonathan, huddled, maybe snuggled, together in caves. We hear ourselves thinking, sometimes aloud, that this relationship must be the most intense relationship we will ever have, until we meet our wives. 104

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II  In the Light Will Stockton dc Talk’s cover of “In the Light,” track nine on Jesus Freak, featured regularly in the set of our youth group’s worship band. Originally written and recorded by Charlie Peacock for his 1991 album Love Life, dc Talk ran Peacock’s synthdriven South African rhythm through the grinder of Pearl Jam’s “Daughter” to produce an acoustic grunge song about the fallen human’s need for God. Led by Pastor Kurt on guitar, we teenage members of the worship band at Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, played a tepid cover that betrayed our overall lack of musical chops. Yet what we lacked in instrumental talent, the whole of the youth group made up for in lyric earnestness. In the song’s soft verses, we confessed our impotence before the Almighty. Suffering from a “disease of self,” we asked, “What’s going on inside of me?” The question was not rhetorical. In the louder choruses, we proclaimed our desire to “be in the light, as You are in the light.” To recall the Sunday school hymn with which I opened Chapter 1, we wanted to be His sunbeams. Typical of mid-1990s CCM seeking crossover appeal, the “you” of “In the Light” is not explicitly identified. The lyrics in the liner notes capitalize the “Y,” suggesting that the “you” is Jesus, basking in the light of the Father with whom he is also one according to Trinitarian orthodoxy. This interpretation makes sense, as the speaker in the first verse laments trying to “find a life on my own, apart from you.” In youth group, Pastor Kurt taught that nothing in this life would bring us life except Jesus. Nothing would bring us both 105

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present contentment and eternal salvation except the gospel of Christ. But then again, the first “you” mentioned in the liner note lyrics of “In the Light” is not capitalized, allowing the pronoun to float free of holy moorings: “I keep trying to find a life on my own, apart from you.” Who is this first you, and what relation does it have to You? Only someone who studied the liner notes and fretted over things like capitalization would note the discrepancy. A senior in high school, I was not yet such a person. But the typographical difference between You and you compliments my adolescent, imaginative play with those pronouns—play that would then and now relate to my own performative queerness. In the context of our youth group cover, played almost every Wednesday night after several slices of Papa John’s pizza and a half-dozen breadsticks dipped in garlic butter, my sense of the song’s “you” shifted rather promiscuously between Jesus and our worship group’s bassist, Nathan, the only one to have any grasp on the song’s rhythm. I was in love with him—with his wild mass of black, curly hair, with the oversized khakis that flopped over his skinny butt, and with his genuine, if relative, musical talent. Most of the time, I would not have used that particular prepositional phrase, “in love.” As dc Talk taught me on Free at Last, love (“luv”) was a verb, and I worked hard to justify my affections for Nathan as the type of ethical love, or agape, discussed in the previous chapter. This love was unconditional and entirely unrelated to the particulars of the body. What did this love care if he was white or black, male or female, gorgeously curly headed or bald? I loved Nathan. I was not in love with him. The grammatical distinction cordoned off perversity, 106

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insisting on a categorical distinction where, emotionally, there was none to be found. Yet my intellectual labors were not always successful. Freak that I sometimes knew myself to be, I smelled the boy’s bedsheets. I fantasized tasting his cock on my lips. Playing keyboards on the opposite side of stage, I transformed dc Talk’s supposedly godly question—“What’s going on inside of me”—into one about my own sexuality. While I don’t make any claim about the erotic content of Michael Tait and Toby McKeehan’s attachment, or even of their bed-sharing, I note that I often described my own attachment to Nathan in a language similar to that which the two members of dc Talk use. For men like D. and me, such language was ubiquitous. Nathan and I had an intimate, intense relationship. We were inseparable—together almost every weekend, whether plopped down on the couch at one of our houses, or at the bowling alley where we smoked cheap cigars (a shared, secret, and in adult hindsight, disgusting vice) and consistently failed to break 150. When we could not hang out, I felt lonely. And when he hung out with other people, I felt a jealousy I did my best to conceal by hanging out with friends I could never seem to like as much as I did Nathan. To justify the intensity of my feeling, I told myself that I was helping to save him. To my horror and fear, Nathan was an unbeliever, and relatively open about it. He attended the church because his mother worked there. He had grown up going to church but did not believe that Christ died for his sins. Because he was affable and funny and terrifically smart, I told him that he would make a great Christian, a wonderful evangelist for the gospel. Pastor Kurt had taught us that some of the best evangelists simply planted a seed or helped 107

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water the garden. There was no need to beat the nonbeliever over the head with the message of the gospel. It was better, I believed, to just spend time with him, and to model decent Christian behavior. I thought of myself as Nathan’s gardener, helping him grow toward the light of Christ. What’s more, I envisioned us living together—graduating high school, attending a local college, and sharing an apartment. Who knew how long the seed would take to flower? The question of what other possibilities adult life held for me, for both us, was one this fantasy of cohabitation purposefully bracketed. I knew that my prospects of having a girlfriend were slim. One of the youth group’s singers and I tried to date, but I was a bored, inattentive boyfriend. Friends though we were, I was always happy to take her home, the pressure of expectation alleviated with the closing of the car door. Over the course of the year I played in our youth group band, I tried not to think too much about the implications of this dull dating relationship for my own sexuality. Instead, I imagined Nathan and me sharing a two-bedroom. Maybe a one-bedroom, even a bed, if we did not have enough money. Eating pizza and watching TV and mountain biking and going to concerts and making sure the other got up in time for work. Adult accountability partners for the routine business of life. III  What If I Stumble? D. Gilson Today Will and I regard ourselves as brothers, and it is a brotherhood borne out of the biblical lineage of Jonathan 108

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and David. This brotherhood encompasses both the deep love we have for one another and the rivalry that sometimes sets us at each other’s throats. Bed-sharing is allowed. But before Will, I attempted to make sense of such queer friendship through a boy with whom I often shared a night’s sleep, Patrick. Not surprisingly, I viewed my budding and by-then undeniable homosexuality as a stumbling block to my devout Christianity. The fourth track from Jesus Freak, “What If I Stumble?” posed the questions I was beginning to ask myself. In particular, the song’s repeating chorus—“What if I stumble? What if I fall? What if I lose my step and I make fools of us all?”—resonated with the spiritual-sexual drama playing out in my head, heart, and boxerbriefs. Patrick was everything I was not: athletic, popular, a natural-born leader. He was the David of our youth group at James River Assembly of God, a megachurch on a plateau of the Missouri Ozarks. I was the Jonathan, well-liked, but not chosen, and thus often distrustful and jealous, especially of the girls who doted on Patrick. One night after youth choir practice, Patrick and I drove his girlfriend Rachel home. On a backroad in our Ozarks town, he pulled over to make out with her, me alone in the backseat with a book. Romeo and Juliet, in fact. (Years later I would meet Will at a lecture he was giving on the play.) Windows fogged, bitter best friend, forty-five minutes of heavy petting as I drummed iambs in the back. The scene was a Christianized John Hughes teen flick come to life. When we dropped Rachel at her house and I crawled into the front seat, Patrick complained to me, “She gave me the worst blue balls ever, dude.” 109

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That night I went home with Patrick. We stripped to our boxerbriefs and crawled into his single bed, laid side by side, our hairy legs and arms touching. “Turn over,” he told me, and when I did, he pretended to crack an egg on the crown of my head, lightly spindling his fingers down my bare spine, from neck to underwear line. “Now do me,” he said, and I did. When we rolled over, we were both visibly hard in our underwear, my first set of blue balls for the night, his second. But being the king here, Patrick bid me, “Goodnight, man,” rolled over, and went to sleep. How many nights did I spend with Patrick like this? Countless. Although I sang backup vocals in our youth group worship band, Patrick was the star. He sang and played lead guitar. How many nights did I spend with Patrick, just the two of us in the rec room above his garage, its walls covered with Seattle Mariners pennants and its carpet sticky from our spilled Mt. Dew, him playing the acoustic guitar, seemingly just for me? In memory now, Patrick becomes the unknown second person “you” of dc Talk’s “What If I Stumble?” Like Will with Nathan, I imagined Patrick and me spending our lives together, our college apartment and then our future jobs—his as a recording artist, mine in the State Department—and then, I hoped, a baby we’d adopt from Africa on a missions trip. But what I wanted—what any queer evangelical teen wants—was a contradiction in terms. A Christian boyfriend. A male lover in Christ. I wanted to come out to him, but more than that, I wanted to confess my love. John’s Gospel records Christ as commanding his disciples, “Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s 110

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life for one’s friends” (15:12-13). This was the era of school shootings and global terrorism coming to America’s shores— of fears I translated into a willingness to lay down my life for Patrick. As freshmen, Patrick and I took part in a strange youth group drama for a community outreach. Our miniplay attempted to reenact the library scene from Columbine High School, where most of the students who died that day were shot. In the scene, I volunteered to lie atop Patrick, blocking him from gunfire. I protected him by pressing my body against his, and took a bullet for him. At the end of the play, Patrick pushed my corpse away, walked center stage, and proclaimed for the audience how God wanted to save high school students in this country like never before, despite the work of the devil at unprecedented rates. Every night of our performance I watched Patrick as he preached this soliloquy, proud I had saved him. Proud I had protected his body. But if the stumbling block to my walk with Christ was my queerness, and my queerness was mainly fixated on Patrick, what would he do if my love became public? Doubtless, he loved me, too. As dc Talk wonders, however, “Will the love continue, when my walk becomes a crawl”—if I stumbled through a dramatic and public display of my very homosexual, but also Christ-like, affection for this beautiful boy with bright blue eyes and thick, curly blonde locks that smelled always, and inexplicably, of salt water? The Ozarks are prone to tornados. One weekend, his family out of town and Patrick and I alone, the sirens began to blare. He grabbed his guitar, I grabbed pillows and blankets, and we crawled into the jetted soaking tub that anchored his parents’ bathroom. I was terrified of tornados, 111

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and Patrick knew his guitar comforted me. He strummed through Dave Matthews and the Goo Goo Dolls, Jars of Clay, and an acoustic version of Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me,” a cover that always made me laugh. When Patrick got to dc Talk’s “What If I Stumble?” the verse about fear—“Father please forgive me, for I cannot compose, the fear that lives within me, or the rate at which it grows”—held now a double meaning: the fear of the literal storm blaring outside and the sexual feelings I held for Patrick. Should I tell Patrick, I wondered? Later I’d read Foucault pontificate that “freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism” (1988: 352). I didn’t tell Patrick, didn’t lay bare my conscience for the risk of the dangers it raised. The storm outside passed over. The next morning, I woke first and went to the bathroom beside Patrick’s bedroom. Seeing a pair of his black boxerbriefs, sticky with what I knew to be cum or precum or piss, I sat on the toilet, brought the fabric crotch to my nose, and began to masturbate. But I hadn’t locked the door. Patrick walked in and started yelling. I had made fools of us both. IV  Girlish Masculinity Will Stockton Among the first symptoms of my lifelong crisis of masculinity was my performance, at age eleven, in a New Kids on the Block “concert.” In the summer of 1991, my younger sister, two neighbor kids, and I lip-synched and danced for our parents in a stable that the neighbors had outfitted with a 112

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stage and sound system. Each of us “sang” lead on one song from the New Kids’ albums: their 1986 self-titled debut, 1988’s Hangin’ Tough, and 1990’s Step by Step. That made for a twelve-song main set, followed by a three-song encore in which we all teamed up for a Christmas-in-July dip into NKOTB’s 1989 album Merry, Merry Christmas. We rehearsed for weeks, arguing over who would sing which song, and working to perfect our dance moves. Yet when the date of our afternoon concert arrived, our performance fell apart. In front of an adult audience, our dancing dulled into gentle swaying. Acutely feeling each second of the show, we regretted our decision to perform so many songs. We survived for only thirty minutes before we walked off stage in embarrassment. My embarrassment—which only intensified in subsequent home viewings of the video my mother recorded—derived in large part from my performance of what Gayle Wald calls “girlish masculinity” (2002). Writing about the Backstreet Boys, who along with N’Sync, launched a new pop and youth culture craze for boy bands in the early 2000s, Wald contrasts girlish masculinity with the more heterosexually and often homophobically aggressive forms of masculinity on display in a punk-pop group like Blink-182. “Whitening” the acts of black pop groups like Boyz II Men and New Edition, boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and New Kids on the Block sold an audience of young girls on the spectacle of their hoped-for boyfriends. Teenybopper magazines contained foldout posters of boy band members, as well as interviews and profiles that helped their presumptively female reader to imagine themselves dating their idols. What turns Donnie 113

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Wahlberg on? What is Jordan Knight’s ideal night out? In the early 1990s, I, too, sought answers to these questions, lingering in the magazine aisle while my mother went about the weekly grocery shopping. Actually, D. and I recently took a quiz to find out which One Direction boy we are. He is Harry, and I am Zayn. Even as a tween, I knew, if not in so many words, that this carefully commoditized image of accessible heterosexual boyhood made the boy band members themselves—and their male fans—vulnerable to homophobic suspicion. NKOTB’s Jonathan Knight would later come out as gay, in fact; but the strongest suspicion of New Kid queerness usually befell the group’s youngest and most “girlish” member, Joey MacIntyre. What did doctors remove from Joey MacIntyre’s stomach? Semen. Why do the New Kids have cuts on their dicks? Joey got braces. Performing classic Joey-led songs like “Please Don’t Go Girl,” I felt, in a vocabulary only available to me now, my own masculine failing in the articulation of heterosexual longing. (“Girl, you’re my best friend . .  .  . Tell me you’ll stay, never ever go away”). On video, I witnessed again and again the truth of my shy and vulnerable girlishness, devoid of sincere erotic feeling for girls. I witnessed my own heterosexuality as a performance that my same performance as the queerly suspect Joey MacIntyre undermined. The fact that my mother effusively praised my performance hardly helped. Before they became an alt-rock band, dc Talk was a boy band—a multiracial trio whose cornerstone friendship features a black rock-n-roll fan and a white rapper. Creating “accessible” rap music for a largely white evangelical 114

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audience, the three members of dc Talk also performed a girlish masculinity that differed from that of other boy bands in its emphasis on sexual restraint and abstinence. Whereas the Backstreet Boys took off their shirts to sing in the rain (see the video for “Quit Playing Game [With My Heart]”), dc Talk always kept their clothes on. Attractive men all, they both cultivated and tempered their sex appeal by presenting themselves as “safe” spectacles for teenagers taught to “save themselves” until marriage. The members of dc Talk made it clear that they were looking to marry women with a similar sense of chastity. Until then, they could just hang with the guys. On “That Kinda Girl,” from Free at Last, McKeehan raps of his search for that rare woman marked out by the purity of her speech and her commitment to abstinence. This girl knows that “charm is deceitful and beauty is vain,” and refrains from making a spectacle of herself. The “kinda girl” McKeehan seeks is not the one that the New Kids would idolize as a “Cover Girl” (from Hangin’ Tough). Safe from the prurient public eye, this “kinda girl” is one you only meet “behind the doors of a church.” Behind the doors of my own church, Pastor Kurt sometimes separated the boys from the girls. On these occasional Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, small group leaders instructed us in the ways of godly gender roles. We covered the basics: that men and women were physically and emotionally distinct, created by God as complements to one another, especially in the operation of a home. Women were nurturers and naturally empathetic. Men were more assertive and courageous, more prone to risk-taking and confrontation. Men’s bodies equipped them to perform 115

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physical labor that women could not, while women’s bodies equipped them to bear and raise children. What marked men and women as godly was not merely the acceptance of these natural and obvious differences. It was the embrace of these differences with a posture of humility—the recognition of oneself, whether male or female, as a servant of God. For us boys, that meant learning how to be leaders who were also followers. It meant predicating one’s “headship” in the family and community on one’s subservience to God. What church leaders encouraged us to embrace was a delicate, and I would now say queer, posture of domination and subordination—a decidedly Christian form of girlish masculinity that befit devoted men of God. Of course, the suggestion there was anything girlish about this masculinity was one we would have rejected out of hand. Making strange bedfellows with feminists and queer critics, we worked to disconnect subjection and service from the “feminine.” What mattered was who one subjected oneself to. One’s spouse? Money? Fame? Godly men subjected themselves to the Lord. The leading Christian men’s movement at the time, Promise Keepers, founded in 1990 by University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, dubbed this form of male subjection to God “servant leadership.” A man led his family, including his wife and his children, while being led by the Almighty. There was nothing feminine about it. Quite the opposite, Christ modeled this form of servant leadership during the three years of his ministry—tending to his flock with both gentle direction and stern rebuke, but always in subjection to the Father. When the time came for Christ to die, he fell down on his face and asked God if there was a way 116

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to spare him “this cup”—this horrible obligation of torture and death. But as a servant leader, Jesus could take no for an answer. He acknowledged God’s ultimate authority: “Not as I will, but as you will” (Mt. 26:39). Christian men were to emulate Jesus. And as far as we knew, no one ever accused Jesus of being ladylike. In my own teenage practice, learning how to become a godly man meant learning how to change a tire. (Martyrdom, as already mentioned, was a dream deferred.) One spring Sunday, Nathan and I stood over Pastor Kurt as he removed the rear passenger tire from his car, covering himself in black grime as he hoisted the spare from the trunk. Pastor Kurt’s Christianity was a muscular Christianity—a form of male godliness that knew how to do things with sports balls and machines, that did not fear to change a tire even if the work might dirty his Sunday best.6 “All athletes are disciplined in their training,” we were taught, “They do it to win a prize that will fade away, but we do it for an eternal prize” (1 Cor. 9:25). In his tightly fitted white button-down shirt and plain-front khakis, Pastor Kurt was a spectacle of godly masculinity who, I would learn later, also worked part-time as an ex-gay counselor. Although I was never to be a master of industrial “Muscular Christianity” is a form of Christianity with roots in gender norms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Studies include Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Donald E. Hall, ed., Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For a queer take on the Bible’s own fascination with muscular men, see Stephen D. Moore, God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible (New York: Routledge, 1996). 6

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machines, I learned from Pastor Kurt how to change a tire. On the way home from church one Wednesday night soon after, Nathan had even helped me put our knowledge into action. Two skinny teenage boys. Brothers, working on my car in a parking lot off Roswell Road, we took pride in the display of our manhood, and me in the knowledge that I was acting like Christ, the masculine king. V  Promise Keepers D. Gilson As teenagers, we were taught to be manly warriors for Christ, keepers of his promise to save a fallen and depraved world. The Promise Keepers took up this mission, existing to “ignite and unite men to become warriors who will change their world” (2017). They carried this mission to stadiums across the country, where thousands of men gathered for worship, fellowship, and teaching, learning how, together, with each other’s help, they could become better servant leaders. When I was thirteen, I was supposed to pile onto a bus with my dad, Patrick and his father, and with other father-son duos from our church. We were supposed to be Washington-bound for a rally on the National Mall. Called “Stand in the Gap: A Sacred Assembly of Men,” the Promise Keepers billed this as an event of epic proportions, an evangelical and whitewashed carbon copy of MLK’s infamous 1963 March on Washington and Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March. Evoking God’s call to Ezekiel—“I looked for a man among them who would build up the wall 118

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and stand before me in the gap” (Ezek. 22:30)—the Promise Keepers report that on October 4, 1997, “an estimated one million men participated in ‘Stand in the Gap,’ a day of personal repentance and prayer . . . six hours of standing and kneeling in prayer, worship, confession, repentance, and declarations” (2017). But as fate would have it, Patrick got the chicken pox just before our departure. I somehow—memory betrays me—convinced my mother to convince my father that he and Patrick’s dad would have more fun if I stayed home, too. My weekend plans changed suddenly. No longer bound for a gathering of Christian men on the Mall, I spent hours on the phone with Patrick, quarantined in his bedroom and in his words, “bored to freakin’ death, dude.” With my mother, I also watched a lot of Designing Women, which had recently gone into syndication on the cable network Lifetime: Television for Women. When the men returned from Washington, my father told my mother and me about the trip over a dinner of Shake-NBake®  chicken. What do I remember of his account of the rally itself? Nothing. But I do remember him telling us of the night he and Patrick’s dad went to dinner, by accident, in Washington’s gay neighborhood (where I would live during graduate school). He told us about the video stores with nothing but smut in the windows and, sighing, the men walking down every street hand-in-hand. Implicit here was not only his own disapproval of queer life, but also, within that heavy sigh, the evangelical church’s. This disapproval, even disgust, undergirded Christ’s mandate for men to be strong, to protect their women and children, and to become warriors 119

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in the culture. Well after my parents went to bed that night, I snuck into our family’s den, where a giant Gateway computer dialed up to AOL. I searched for “gay DC” and found out about Dupont Circle. I joined a chat room and chatted with a man who lived there. When he asked if I wanted to come visit him, I said yes. When he asked me to send him pictures, I told him our dial-up internet was too slow, faked a disruption in service, and shut the computer off. Promise Keepers’ emphasis on domestic heterosexuality aided mid-1990s’ evangelicals in protecting the male servant leader and his Christian family from the queer and feminist “deconstruction” of conservative gender roles. These roles were regarded as especially precarious following the post-industrialization (and neoliberalization) of the US economy, factors which led to the emergence of conservative men’s movements (often called “men’s rights groups”) more broadly.7 The breakdown of the traditional family, as evidenced by a rate of divorce that hovered around 50 percent, the prevalence of single motherhood (especially among the poor), and the phenomenon of “deadbeat dads” who refused to support their children financially if not also emotionally, had led to numerous social problems, including high levels of teen pregnancy, drug use, homelessness, crime, and imprisonment. To combat these ills, Promise Keepers argued that men needed male friends and male mentors, and On Promise Keepers as a response to the America’s transition from an industrial to a service economy, see Susan Faludi, “Where Am I in the Kingdom?: A Christian Quest for Manhood,” in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 224–88. 7

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male mentors who were male friends. It encouraged men to fellowship with other men. It called on men to relinquish the assumption that “real men” are all “macho men,” cast “in the mold of John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone” (Wagner 1999: 42). Many men were tough and rugged, self-reliant and competitive. But true male strength was spiritual. And no man should aspire to be unemotional and detached from the people who love him. Promise Keepers called on the Christian man to find his desire for fellowship underneath layers of muscle and grit, and to “enjoy and deep and meaningful, nonsexual relationship with another man” (Wagner 1999: 42). Occupying many of the same stadiums and arenas as New Kids on the Block had several years earlier, Promise Keepers called on men to share their struggles with other men—the shared struggles of husbands, fathers, and bread-winners. It called on men to hold each other accountable for their sins, and, conversely, to celebrate other men’s successes and joys. It called on men, at times, to hold each other as they cried. And it called on men to call on other men for help—to let down their guard, to express emotion, and experience their “sensitive side.” As easy as it would be (and has been) to cast Promise Keepers into the category of the retrograde men’s rights groups that permeated the 1980s and 1990s, we hesitate to pass such swift judgment. As Melanie Heath explains, we can view the Promise Keepers “movement paradoxically as both an antifeminist backlash and a movement producing sensitive husbands and fathers” (2003: 424). Furthermore, for all they did to reinforce traditional gender roles through the stadium-sport of men bonding with other men, 121

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Promise Keepers was a remarkably egalitarian movement, increasingly encouraging fellowships across both class and race.8 This racial and class diversity might be surprising, especially given the visibly white wealth that made up the movement’s leaders, and particularly its multi-millionaire founder, Bill McCartney. But as Rhys H. Williams concludes, “no matter what the hyperbole of either apologists or critics, PK [was] overwhelmingly made up of ordinary men trying to figure out their place in a changing society, where work roles, family relations, and personal identity [were] all in flux” (2000: 9).9 The Promise Keepers complicated conservative conceptions of men as stoic stalwarts of industry even as they also cast alternative forms of sexuality and bonding outside of the contemporary framework of Christian manhood. Indeed, whatever particular queer threat that may have arisen within fellowships of emotive men, the Promise Keepers worked to neutralize through the discourse of the traditional family. Promise Keepers referred to one another as “brothers”—a term that, as John Bartkowski notes, “desexualized the intimate bonds within the PK fraternity” (2004: 104). Promise Keepers loved one another as “brothers”—a love, like that Faludi suggests, however, that the organization’s increased emphasis on “healing” racial divisions also accounts for its decreasing popularity in the late 1990s (2000: 285). For Faludi, the movement was always principally about the family. When Promise Keepers turned their focus toward race, and even “interfaith unity,” many of the men involved wandered off. 9 For more on the complex nature of conservatism and progressivism in the Promise Keepers movement, see the Spring 2000 issue of Sociology of Religion (Volume 61, Issue 1). 8

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between David and Jonathan, as devoid of sexual feeling as the love one feels for one’s sibling. The history of men’s movements in general, and Promise Keepers in particular, has been well documented. For our purposes, it is worth highlighting how Promise Keepers nurtured male friendships in an effort to respond to what they perceived as the problem of male isolationism in a changing world, a world suffering from the breakdown of the traditional family.10 In coming together as Christ-like men, evangelicals fought to combat the sorrow dc Talk points to in their song “Between You and Me” when they sing, “I’ve been wrestling with my conscience and I found myself to blame.” VI  Between You and Me Will Stockton and D. Gilson Sonically, “Between You and Me” is a rather banal track, perhaps the most banal on Jesus Freak. It sounds somewhere between P.M. Dawn and Savage Garden—safely more adult contemporary than grunge or hip-hop. Like “Jesus Freak,” it was written with its radio competition in mind. But for

Fidelma Ashe explains that conservative men of this era agreed “feminists have undermined functional gender roles eroding the institutional supports of patriarchy and have attacked men and masculinity” (2007: 59). These anxieties played out in the evangelical church of the 1990s in oddly queer groups like the Promise Keepers and cultural producers like dc Talk, both hell-bent on reinventing male friendship as a bond that subsequently protected masculinity, even as it queered it. 10

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all it lacks in sonic innovation, the song abounds in queer lyricism, a queerness bound mostly to an undistinguished “you” repeated throughout, a “you” rendered full of queer potential. The song centralizes a feminized theme that permeated 1990s evangelicalism in particular: the idea that one’s relationship with Christ, even if one is a man, is both deeply romantic and boundless in its constitution. (The TV show South Park would mock this CCM trend in the episode “Christian Rock Hard,” where the boys form a CCM band called Faith +1. Song titles include “Body of Christ,” “A Night with the Lord,” “Touch Me Jesus,” and “I Found Jesus [With Someone Else].”) Rival Christian pop group Jars of Clay illustrated this worshipful romanticizing most explicitly in their 1994 hit single “Love Song for a Savior.” Sonically typical of pop love ballads from the era, Jars of Clay explains that Christ is “more than the laughter or the stars in the heavens. As close as a heartbeat or a song on her lips.” The chorus constitutes a simple repetition of the lyric “I want to fall in love with you” backed by a strumming acoustic guitar. One might, on the basis of this lyric alone, assume that lead singer Dan Haseltine, is singing to his girlfriend. Yet given the title and the overall narrative of the song, Jars of Clay’s “Love Song for a Savior” is decidedly a love song written from Christian to Christ, bride to bridegroom, sinner to savior. Comparatively, dc Talk’s “Between You and Me” turns on a more ambiguous “you,” a “you” that is typically understood as Christ but is also audible as a queer “you”—the brother to brother to brother—of the group itself. In the JCTV interview with which we opened this chapter, Tait describes his relationship with his bandmates “like 124

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almost a husband and wife, an intimate relationship.” In this relationship, “you know what that person is thinking at that very moment.” These relationships are close, but given that closeness, also fractious. Recalling the stress placed on the band by their exhaustive tour schedule and his emerging role as “leader,” McKeehan confesses that the trio fought. One backstage argument was so bad that McKeehan and Tate took the stage alone, without their third brother, Kevin Max. Max only emerged in time for the group’s performance of “Between You and Me,” a song that McKeehan glosses as one about “reconciling our differences . . . a reminder that you guys made an agreement.” If the “you” of “Between You and Me” is unclear, this interview makes transparent the “you” that is actually one’s fellow dc Talker, each of whom made an agreement with the other—in Christ, but a personal commitment nonetheless—to protect their bond, to work together, and to love one another as Christ loved the church. The author of Ephesians, who purports to be but is likely not the apostle Paul, contends that all Christians are married to one another in Christ. “For we are members of his body,” he tells us. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Eph. 5:30-31). The three boys in the band function as a band of spouses, explaining there’s a “love that’s worth preserving and a bond I will defend.” This is the bond of brothers in Christ. Of husbands. The music video serves to reinforce such a queer reading. Michael Tate sings, “Sorrow is a lonely feeling, unsettled is a painful place. I’ve lived with both for far too long now since we’ve parted ways.” As he does, the video opens on all three dc Talk-ers in a laundromat, purposefully separated to 125

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their own respective corners. But seemingly not the same laundromat. Tate, Max, and McKeehan are lost in the urban jungle of three separate facilities, removed from and yet so near to one other, “wrestling” with something vague— something love oriented that plagues their individual and collective consciences. It is clear from the outset: they miss each other. Even if the song works to address the loneliness one feels living in alienation from Christ or the church, the video serves to visually illustrate the trio’s love for one another. A brotherly love lost, but eventually refound. For the stoic, friendless Christian men that movements like Promise Keepers sought to convert, it’s all a bit freaky. Renate Lorenz contends that “the term ‘freak’ has been used to collect the most diverse ways of taking on or producing a certain distance to dominant norms” like hetero-masculinity, adding that she’d like to think of the freak performance as one of “radical drag” (2012: 166). McKeehan, Tait, and Max perform this kind of radical drag in the video as downtrodden men yetto-find Christ or perhaps, each other. The video for “Between You and Me” additionally conjures a child’s out-of-placeness in an adult-oriented world. Washed in pale pastels reminiscent of a nursery, though the setting is an urban laundromat, the men of dc Talk appear as lost boys, alienated and unhappily alone. Kevin Max even spends the majority of the video slumped against the space’s back wall, writing in his diary. Thinking of these band members as mere boys may in and of itself constitute queering. As Kathryn Bond Stockton posits, “What a child ‘is’ is a darkening question. The question of the child makes us climb inside a cloud . . . leading us, in moments, to cloudiness and ghostliness surrounding 126

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children as figures in time” (2009: 2). These is no world in which children are not always and already out of place, transitioning between nonexistence and adulthood; but this children’s world is inevitably one of secrets shared between them. As the boys plead, “Just between you and me, I’ve got something to say. Wanna get it straight before the sun goes down,” they, too, become ghostly figures fallen out of time, childlike in their naivety about friendship and love in flux. They want their problems, their loneliness, to be resolved “before the sun goes down,” before the song ends. Luckily, the video offers them this swift, sweet, if still queer resolve. The video oscillates between scenes in the playset-like laundromat, where dc Talk’s members sit separated, and an unknown man being chased down a series of city streets while carrying an unmarked brown paper package. Eventually, this man loses his pursuers by coming into the laundromat and sitting down in the empty seat between Tait and McKeehan. They stare, in obviously curious longing, at his package, until the man gets up and the song bares forth: “Just between you and me, confession needs to be made. Recompense is my way to freedom.” On his way out the door, the mystery man throws his package into a big, black trash can. The dc Talk trio walks to the trashcan, the three men finally reunited. They stare down into it as Max picks up the package, opening it slowly. Before we can find out what is inside, however, the video fades to black. If the videos for “Jesus Freak” and “Colored People” recall a suffering masculinity also conjured in videos by groups like Nine Inch Nails and R.E.M., the video for “Between You and Me” is decidedly softer, feminized, and reminiscent of Wald’s “girlish masculinity.” It shares much in 127

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common with the professional versions of the innumerable videos our mothers recorded of us singing as children and girlish teen boys. The curiosity of the unmarked box at the end of “Between You and Me” is a coincidentally campy performance in and of itself, even if the boys of dc Talk are not aware of this. As Susan Sontag might remind us, for such camp to be genuine, its performers must come to their art naively. The boys are, naturally, opening Pandora’s box, having spent the video and the song longing for each other—“I’ve got something to say. Confession needs to be made” and “Just between you and me. . .” I’m broken and sad. Succinctly: I’m alone without you. The you is never, or at least not obviously, Christ; it is more plausibly one another: McKeehan, Tait, and Max themselves. And it is this unknown yet coded you that bespeaks dc Talk working out their own masculine sexuality in crisis, alongside other feminized boy bands and Promise Keepers. Even though Solomon (the presumptive author) claims in Prov. 19:20 that God is “a friend who sticks closer than a brother,” he later explains in Eccl. 4:12 that “though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” It is doubtful the Old Testament king imagined his credo played out in a late twentieth-century musical band of brothers quite literally loving on each other, but indeed his advice found resonance among the trio. Do McKeehan, Tait, and Max want to have sex with each other? Maybe, but probably not. Do they want to reconcile their differences, love each other deeply, as Jonathan loved David, or David loved Jonathan? As Will loved Nathan, or D. loved Patrick, or Will and D. love each other? Yes, unequivocally, yes. 128

Outro: Queer Shame Will Stockton and D. Gilson D. has just left a class he’s teaching on writing and popular music. He asked his students to write about a song that had affected them, for better or for worse or for both. The conversation quickly turned to the question, Why do we look back? It’s a good question, if not also a bit cliché d, and perhaps the essential question for those of us who write about culture. Why do we look back, and, just as importantly, how do we look back? Critically? Nostalgically? The danger of nostalgia is, of course, the danger of an easy, sanitized romanticization—a memory of the past purged of any downsides or sins, rendered “innocent,” and accordingly trivialized in relationship to a present that seems so much more complex. Nostalgia is pleasurable, if not also a false representation. As Chuck Klosterman has argued, musical nostalgia is also inevitable, especially for those of us who experienced music before the age of the MP3 and streaming music (2017). Our limited budgets for CDs and tapes compelled us to listen to the same songs over and over again in our cars and our bedrooms, to take in whole albums that

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became the score for our adolescence. Nostalgia is an effect of both technology and lived experience. In our case, the sexual anxieties of our youth and concerns about the eternal damnation of our souls have long ceded to complex memories of desires, attachments, gestures, scents, and, most importantly here, sounds. These anxieties and concerns have given way to memories of love for our friends and the music through which we learned to love them. Nostalgia need not be trivializing, in this way. Tempered with criticism, nostalgia can become productive, leading to a complicated analysis of easily scorned, even shameful, phenomena like 1990s CCM. Perhaps in queering Jesus Freak, we have shattered nostalgia for our Christian youths into some useful force of shame. Neither of us takes seriously anymore the claim that homosexuals cannot be Christian, or the corollary claim that homosexuals are going to hell. Neither of us, in fact, believes in hell. We no longer believe in the most basic tenet of evangelical Christian theology—that God sent his only begotten son to die for us so that whosoever believes in him might be redeemed and live life everlasting in heaven. We remember, at least partially, what believing was like, but we no longer retain that desire for God’s saving grace in the way we retain our queer desires for other men. In our look backwards, that stubborn queer desire colors what we see. It minimizes the angsty memory of salvational anxiety, but it also encourages us to probe the queer faultiness of the very theology that sustained us as young Christian men. All of this—our Christian past, our queer past, present, 130

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and future—is moored in the generative shame of listening, thinking, writing, desiring. Regarding the inevitable shame of nostalgia, we wonder: must shame (like nostalgia) be pejorative? Could shame, David Halperin and Valerie Traub ask, “be an organizing principle of queer politics, or is it mainly a vehicle for the articulation of personal issues by stigmatized individuals?” (2010: 22). We hope the former, but even if our nostalgia skews to the latter, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing for the cultural critic or memoirist. Maybe such a mooring in the queer shame of Christendom puts aside normative gay politics as usual. Maybe returning to, desiring even, our Christian youth helps us understand our queer present and future more optimistically. After all, as Alison Bechdel posits, “if it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body” (2013: 28). Desire and body: it is clear now we are presently formed as much by our station in a Christian past as we are in the heritage of our gay history. The day we began thinking about this book, we were sitting at the oak piano Will inherited from his grandparents. We were looking up chords to songs about which we waxed nostalgic, songs from Third Eye Blind and Tori Amos and Billy Joel. We filmed ourselves doing ironically bad covers and uploaded these to Facebook. Friends told us not to quit our day jobs. And not surprisingly, our Christian pasts quickly crept in, like a thief in the night. “Separated, I cut myself clean,’” Will began to sing, and we recorded “Jesus Freak,” shirtless and in gym shorts in the South Carolina heat, sitting on a piano bench, hairy leg to hairy leg. It was not unlike a 131

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moment we might have shared once with Nathan or Patrick, although now, our queerness in the open, our nostalgia was both sweet and begging us to look back at this band. As Will began to play the chorus, D. placed his head on Will’s bare shoulder, queering the lyrics, “What will people do when they’re hear that we’re still Jesus Freaks?”

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Daphne Brooks, Leah BabbRosenfeld, and the Bloomsbury editorial team for having faith in this 33 1/3 project. And though they are not likely to read our book, we thank dc Talk for writing some good music that helped us feel cooler in our awkward teenage years. D. thanks Gayle Wald, mentor and friend, for first showing me how to critically think and write about music. Also, Maia Gil’Adi and Justin Mann are thoughtful, encouraging members of a cultural studies incubator of which I’m lucky to take part. Michael Warner says, “For us who once were found and now are lost—and we are legion—our other lives pose some curious problems”; Will Stockton, thank you for being a patient, intelligent writing partner and brother: we are legion, and I have a helluva lot of fun creating things with you. Finally, thanks Satan, Ave Satanas. Will thanks D. Gilson for persuading him to collaborate on a book about their shared shameful pleasure, for supplying him with chocolate and chicken art throughout the process, and more generally for teaching him how to critically think and write about music. May I one day be in the light, as you

Acknowledgments

are in the light. Thanks to my husband Howard Anderson and my son Hunter Anderson-Stockton for their patient tolerance of my many loud spins of “Colored People.” All credit, finally, to my former Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I’m sorry things didn’t work out between us.

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Chapter One Allman, Kevin. “Nirvana’s Front Man Shoots from the Hip.” The Advocate (February 1, 1993): 34–43. Atwood, Brett. “Maxwell Brews Righteous ‘Freak’.” Billboard (November 11, 1995): 85. Boehlert, Eric. “Holy Rock & Rollers.” Rolling Stone (October 3, 1996), 23–26. Cross, Charles. Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain (New York: Hachette Books, 2001), 154. Crowe, Cameron. “Pearl Jam: Five Against the World.” Rolling Stone (October 28, 1993): 50–60.

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Chapter Two Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindess (New York: The New Press, 2012), 56, 57. Barnes, Tom. “How Music Executives Created ‘Black’ Hip Hop for White Suburban Kids.” Mic (January 9, 2014). Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 3. Blumenthal, Max. “Agent of Intolerance.” The Nation (May 6, 2007). Burdon, Eric. “An ‘Animal’ Views America: Young British Rhythmand-blueser Talks on Music and Race.” Ebony (December 1966). Clinton, Bill. “Interview with Arsenio Hall.” The Arsenio Hall Show (June 3, 1992), television. Clinton, Bill. “Racism in the United States” (University of Texas at Austin, October 16, 1995), speech. Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 3. Dyson, Michael Eric. Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Farley, Christopher John. “Michael Stipe and the Ageless Boys of R.E.M.” Time (May 14, 2001). Fast, Susan. Dangerous (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 93. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. Colored People: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 1995), 42. Gillespie, Natalie Nichols. “Gospel Is Fastest-Growing Genre.” CCM Update (March 17, 1997). Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1, 285.

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Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 19. hooks, bell. “Love as the Practice of Freedom.” In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 2006), 243–50. JCTV. “dc Talk Movie (Part 1).” YouTube (October 1, 2011). King, Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham City Jail (1963).” In A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr, edited by James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 289–302. King, Jr., Martin Luther. “The Power of Nonviolence: A Sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (1957).” In A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr, edited by James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 12–15. Lindsay, D. Michael. Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 42. Lott, Eric. “All the King’s Men: Elvis Impersonators and White Working-Class Masculinity.” In Race and the Subject of Masculinities, edited by Harry Stecopoulous and Michael Uebel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 192–228. Maus, Fred. “Intimacy and Distance: On Stipe’s Queerness.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 18, no. 2 (August 2006): 191–214. Morrison, Toni. “Comment.” The New Yorker (October 5, 1998). Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). Riley, Alexander. “The Rebirth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Hip Hop: A Cultural Sociology of Gangsta Rap Music.” Journal of Youth Studies 8, no. 3 (2005): 297–311. Rodman, Gilbert B. “Race and Other Four Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authenticity.” Popular Communication 4, no. 2 (2006): 95–121.

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Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), xvi, 2, 101. Venugopal, Arun. “The Shift in Black Views of the War on Drugs.” NPR (August 16, 2013). Wald, Gayle. Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

Chapter Three Ashe, Fidelma. The New Politics of Masculinity: Men, Power and Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2007), 59. Bartkowski, John. The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 104. Chambers, Alan. Leaving Homosexuality: A Practical Guide for Men and Women Looking for a Way Out (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2009). Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: Harper, 2000), 285. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1988), 352. JCTV. “dc Talk Movie (Part 1).” YouTube (October 1, 2011). Heath, Melanie. “Soft-Boiled Masculinity: Renegotiating Gender and Racial Ideologies in the Promise Keepers Movement.” Gender & Society 17, no. 3 (June 2003): 423–44. Lorenz, Renate. Queer Art: A Freak Theory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 166. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 12.

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“Promise Keepers.” promisekeepers.org (2017). Reynolds, Daniel. “SNL’s ‘Wells for Boys’ Nails the Loneliness of Queer Kids.” The Advocate, December 5, 2016. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 2. Wagner, E. Glenn. “Strong Brotherly Relationships.” In Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, edited by Jack W. Hayford et al. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 42. Wald, Gayle. “‘I Want It That Way’: Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands.” Genders 35 (2002): 20. Williams, Rhys H. “Promise Keepers: A Comment on Religion and Social Movements.” Sociology of Religion 61, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–10.

Outro Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (New York: Mariner, 2013), 28. Klosterman, Chuck. “That’s Not How It Happened.” In X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century (New York: Blue Rider, 2017), 31–42. Halperin, David and Valerie Traub. “Beyond Gay Pride.” In Gay Shame, edited by David Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 22.

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Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’s Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 1.

12. The Beatles’s Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’s Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’s Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… by Eliot Wilder

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42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’s The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris

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58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’s Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’s Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’s Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’s Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’s Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer

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89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J. H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’s Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’s Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

105. Dead Kennedys’s Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’s The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

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119. The Modern Lovers’s The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants’s Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton

126. The Raincoats’s The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin 129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman 132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett 133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel

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