Episode Details

Oh, how the worm has turned. 

I remember a time—let’s call it 1985—when certain young music leaders (perhaps like me) could get a little frustrated with the tastes and sentiments of an older musical generation. 

Couldn’t they see that the rah-rah, British Empire vibe of ‘At the name of Jesus’ belonged to another time? Or that the ponderous, stately hymns of our heritage, with their neatly resolving cadences, and their third-rate Victorian poetry, were just not a suitable musical language for 1980s Australia?

Couldn’t we have some music that at least nodded in the general direction of contemporary conventions, even if they were the musical conventions of ten years ago—since that was about as close to contemporary that we Christians ever managed to get?

There was a gospel note to all of this. We wanted songs in church that weren’t musical stumbling blocks to the outsider and newcomer; songs that said to them, “We’re not an antiquated culture club; in fact, we quite like Culture Club”. 

In particular, we wanted to express our gospel joy in songs that had some drive and energy and tempo. Loud, enthusiastic Sunday nights come back to the memory. I can hear the rafters shaking as we belted out ‘Ancient of Days’, and ‘This, this is the day’ and a rocked-up version of ‘O for a thousand tongues’. 

It’s not as if we didn’t also sing slower, more contemplative songs, ones where the tempo notation on the sheet music said ‘Worshipfully’. 

But we were a generation raised on rock ’n’ roll, and for us joy and emotional authenticity in music almost always had a driving beat. Emotionally uplifting music was often fast.

(In fact, I still have a compilation playlist called ‘Happy songs’ that I whack on when I’m needing some emotional pepping up at the end of a long week, and they are all like this: Mr Blue Sky and Livin’ Thing (ELO), The Boys are Back in Town (Thin Lizzy), What is Life? (George Harrison), No Secrets (The Angels), The Power of Love  (Huey Lewis), and so on. All of them fast, with a driving beat.)

But the worm has turned. The biter has been bit. Now I’m the older generation with the outdated musical tastes. 

For the generation coming up, the energetic, upbeat songs I love are cheesy and lame. Their songs are slower, more contemplative, more intense. A song you can build and build, a song to close your eyes to. 

The slow, earnest power ballad is now king. 

Why has this happened? Lots of reasons (10,000 of them possibly). 

Is it a broader musical culture thing? Has music slowed down more generally over the past 30 years? Perhaps, but not decisively. The last three decades have seen an incredible proliferation of musical genres and sub-cultures. (I remember having a deep conversation with one of my teenage son’s friends about the differences between death metal, doom metal and thrash metal, all of which he’d left behind in favour of prog metal.)

In other words, it’s not as if the earnest power ballad is now the dominant musical genre of our society—because there is no one dominant genre. Certainly rock is not the factor that it once was. (“Rock is just not a thing”, says my very musically aware 26-year-old son.) And this could well have influenced a shift away from energetic, uptempo music. 

Perhaps it’s also a cultural mood thing. Is the generation coming through more bruised, more sensitive, more ironic, more emotionally expressive, or any or all of the above? Is life for them more in a minor key? Perhaps. (I find it hard to say, especially since I’m part of that generation that puts no trust in sweeping generational cliches.)

Whatever complex cultural and musical reasons lie behind it, there’s no avoiding generational changes in sensibility and vibe. And for the sake of the gospel, music in church wil