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Apostles of Rock. The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music Jay R. Howard and John M. Streck The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1999 viii + 299 pp. (paperback), ISBN 0-813-12105-1, $29.95
Howard and Streck offer a study of contemporary Christian music (CCM as it is labeled in the book) and offer explanatory models for the popularity and the divisions of this musical genre. It could be said that CCM emerged as a development of the Jesus movement of the 1960s. Second, it came into being as a specific reaction by listeners toward most of the popular music production that they could not support because of its emphasis on treating women as objects of desire or focusing on behavior at odds with the ideals of the Evangelical churches.
The authors begin with a definition of contemporary Christian music; it is a popular style that stands in the gap between evangelical Christianity on the one side and youth culture on the other. It is a popular style that cannot be totally separated from the business of selling musical productions to young listeners. Howard and Streck underline the fact that the history of contemporary Christian music is closely tied to the history of rock and roll and to the history of church music in the field of American popular culture. The need to justify the religious aspect of their music has led artists playing Christian music to offer explanations for their set of personal productions. The authors identify three definitional types and present the characterizations of each of them.
The first is what they call "separational CCM," that is to say a musical style that clearly puts the artists' productions in the religious perspective and underlines three rationales. First, it emphasizes evangelism. Barry...