Today’s Christian Music

I keep trying to like modern Christian music, but they keep making it more and more difficult. When I first “got in church,” I found out that my best friend loved Rush (the Canadian band) as much as I did, but he threw away all of his CD’s because, as a Christian, he felt he shouldn’t have been listening to it. Well, as a “babe in Christ,” I thought that’s what I should have done as well. Conveniently, in 1991, there was a healthy used CD market, so I sold all of my CD’s, and started buying new Christian music. I found a lot of solid stuff. I especially liked DC Talk at the time. (What can I say? I’m a fan of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and it seemed similar.) I still love the early-90′s-era CLC Youth Choir material, and I know I’m not alone in that. The various Winans were popular then as well, even though I thought them a little generic. Music was still important to me. I didn’t give it up; I “replaced.”

But then “Christian” music really took off and started becoming a big business, which meant that it drew the same sort of attention that other pop music got. Which means that the same sort of people producing the likes of Britney Spears started producing the likes of The David Crowder Band, and bringing their same techniques and equipment over. Christian Music got their own awards show. Verizon sponsors a choir competition, and the winners sing in the Superbowl. It’s big business. So now, almost all Christian music sounds just as indistinguishable as pop music. It’s just as horribly overproduced. In particular, I hate the compression of the dynamic range, but all of the techniques referenced in that Wikipedia article get on my nerves. It works for house music; not for spiritual music. It drives me crazy, and it’s making me turn off K-LOVE these days.

To get a away from it, you have to go back to the 80′s and early 90′s, but the worst part of this problem is that “oldies” stations have lost their minds. Most of the stuff they’re playing these days qualify as “oldies,” but it’s the crap that young DJ’s think that people think they ought to hear from the 80′s, and which is actually the worst stuff from those days. I mean, really. Seriously. Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant was one of the worst songs of all the 80′s, but you’ll hear it play every day. I was flipping stations in the car a couple weeks ago, and a local station was playing Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley… non-ironically. I Wear My Sunglasses At Night by Corey Haim?! Utter rubbish! Yet, again, that’s what you’ll hear. Every. single. day. from a 80′s-format station. It’s intolerable, and, again, makes me change the channel.

Did my dad think that 60′s stations played all the crap from those days when I was a kid? No! It got me listening to the Beach Boys. I listened to Duran Duran’s latest release on Grooveshark. I liked it. Except for their album of covers, I like everything they’ve ever done. I still like most Rush, almost all Pink Floyd, and, dang it, but Led Zeppelin is still awesome, and I don’t even mean IV. Physical Graffiti and Houses of the Holy were way better. I liked the early 90′s Christian music, too, so I guess my condemnation of modern Christian music is an indictment of all music these days. There are some bright spots, like finding Brian Culbertson, but they are rare. It simply depresses me that there is so little quality to be found in music today, either in subject matter or in production values, especially where it’s supposed to count.

Anyway, all of this music that K-LOVE is airing these days sounds so similar to me, I started to wonder if they were just playing music from one production company. Perhaps it was selection bias? Perhaps K-LOVE is just a front for a record company? I decided to find out. As any self-respecting programmer would do, I wrote software! Specifically, I wrote a simple screen scraper in Ruby to grab the recently played song list from K-LOVE’s web site. Each song on the list has a link to Amazon where you can buy it. I followed that to Amazon, scraped the information they gave me, and saved the result. After about a week of this, I imported all the data into a spreadsheet, and used a pivot table to summarize what they were playing. (There was a step in there about importing it all into a database, but as I made various ad-hoc queries against the data, it became clear that I just wanted what a spreadsheet would give me.)

Surprisingly, I found no obvious bias. Of course, what I didn’t do is follow up on how these various record labels are connected, or who the engineer was on the recording or mastering. That might still prove enlightening.

catalog.rb:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open("http://www.klove.com/music/songs/recent-songs.aspx"))

links = doc.css('a[id$="Amazon"]')
links.each do |l|
    url = l.attributes['href'].value
    info = open(url).read
  m = info.match(/<title>Amazon.com: ([^:]*): ([^:]*): .*<\/title>/)
    title, artist = m[1], m[2]
    date = info.match(/>Original Release Date:[^>]*> ([^<]*)</)[1]
    label = info.match(/>Label:[^>]*> ([^<]*)</)[1]
    asin = info.match(/>ASIN:[^>]*> ([^<]*)</)[1]
    printf("%s|%s|%s|%s|%s\n", asin, label, artist, title, date)
end        

# This is returned by Amazon
#<title>Amazon.com: Christ Is Risen: Matt Maher: MP3 Downloads</title>
#<li><strong>Original Release Date:</strong> September 18, 2009</li>
#<li><strong>Label:</strong> Essential Records</li>
#<li><b>Duration:</b>  4:54 minutes</li>
#<li><b>ASIN:</b> B002OGMXL2</li>

And the results are here: K-LOVE Music List. Note that you’ll need a Open Document Specification-capable spreadsheet program to open it. I suppose, if I really thought it through, I should post these to GitHub and Google Docs, respectively.