Rock and Roll Stops the Traffic: Spiritual Reflections on the Music of U2 (IV)

I almost never listen to Contemporary Christian Music. This sometimes comes as a surprise to those who know me, since as a pastor, I am very passionate both about my faith and about music. But the truth is, I mostly feel frustrated and alienated whenever I listen to CCM, as a genre. I find it musically redundant, theologically simplistic, spiritually superficial, and lyrically unsophisticated. To clarify: we do sing a lot of contemporary Christian music in our church, and I do appreciate the genre (at least some of it) in that corporate setting, but outside of that context, most contemporary Christian music leaves me bone dry and spiritually dissatisfied. Musically it almost never strays from one of about five variations of the classic I-V-vi-V chord progression, played over plaintively strummed guitars, surreally chorused synths, and a standard 4/4 rock beat. And lyrically, it almost never varies the formula of talking about how Jesus meets my individual felt-needs. It's the spiritualized version of the worst kind of formulaic corporate country music—another genre that I can’t hardly bear.

But this is not a rant. It’s actually a blog post about the music of U2.

The reason I’m talking about CCM is only because I believe that no other musical force had more influence on the evolution of contemporary Christian music than the musical force that is U2. I don’t have hard evidence for this, except for many times I’ve listened to a popular CCM tune and reached the end thinking either “U2 did it better,” or “U2 did it first.” They were one of the first bands to popularize the I-V-vi-V chord progression, for instance, which they used with great success on their chart-topping hit, 1987's “With or Without You.” Although this musical pattern is so ubiquitous in pop music today that it’s almost become white noise, it was not actually that common the 50s, 60s, or 70s. Songwriters used it from time to time (e.g. “Let it Be,” by the Beatles, “Africa,” by Toto, or “Beast of Burden,” by The Stones), but it did not become the staple of songwriting that it is today until the late 90s and early 2000s.

This fascinating video by David Bennett helpfully lays out the history of this chord progression. According to his analysis, the I-V-vi-V pattern doesn’t show up in earnest until the early 90s. The bar graph showing its frequency in pop music shoots up suddenly in 1991, four years after the release of “With or Without You.” Notably, in the years prior to the mid-80s, the progression was almost always worked in with other chords, and almost no songs were based entirely on a looping progression of those 4 chords, the way “With or Without You” was. By the 2000s the form was so common that it had almost become a musical cliché.

David Bennett does not attribute this development in pop music to U2’s use of the chord progression on “With or Without You.” He traces it, instead, back punk bands like The Clash, that used it from time to time in the early 80s. However, in their early days, U2 styled themselves as an artsy expression of the punk genre, and have identified The Clash as one of their earliest inspirations, so perhaps there was some cross-pollination in this regard.

At any rate, I’m not saying U2 invented the progression, or single-handedly popularized it. My point, rather, is to explore U2’s influence on contemporary Christian music, and it’s fascinating for me to notice how the evolution of CCM unfolded in the Christian world around the same time, and roughly at the same pace, as U2’s star was rising in the world of pop music. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Contemporary Christian Music today defaults so consistently to the I-V-vi-V pattern in its songwriting, given how common this overly-simplistic approach to songwriting was for U2, one of the only “safe” rock bands that Christian kids could listen to back in the 80s. (I’ve already shared how the ambiguity about U2’s status as a “Christian group” made them standard listening in the youth group I grew up in).

I don’t have hard evidence of this, either, but I’m willing to bet that The Joshua Tree was played on regular rotation in the musically-formative years of most of the biggest worship music songwriters of the early 2000s—guys like Matt Redman, Chris Tomlin, and Paul Baloche. And their legacy as CCM pioneers still lives on today in the music of CCM juggernauts like Hillsong and Elevation.

There’s an irony here, that a musical genre I find mostly uninspiring has its roots intertwined with the musical legacy of a band that was, in my youth, one of the most inspiring acts I’d ever heard. I can still remember hearing The Joshua Tree album for the first time, and feeling like I was touching the tip of something archetypal, music I’d always known but never heard before.

I sometimes wonder what Bono and the lads think of contemporary Christian music. I once heard Bono say in an interview that when rock music ceased to rebel against established forms, it will devolve into folk music. I think he said it shortly after Achtung Baby had come out, and fans everywhere were so shocked by the sudden left turn, musically speaking, that the band had taken with that album. His point was that rebellion is woven into the DNA of rock music, and when the genre ceases to startle our musical sensibilities, it will fossilize.

The rebellious nature of rock, of course, is one of the aspects that made it so threatening to most Christian leaders in the early days, especially because that rebellious spirit so often found its expression in obscenity, licentiousness, and hedonism. In U2’s music, though, the spirit of rebellion was channeled in the direction of social justice and world peace (more on that in a later post). This made it risky in a different way, perhaps, but because these themes were often couched in spiritual terms, the risk was never fully felt.

And so, whether intentionally or simply by osmosis, contemporary Christian musicians started absorbing and reiterating the musical sentiments of what would become one of the biggest bands in the world. For better or for worse, U2 loaned their paired-down, atmospheric approach to music making to the contemporary Christian genre. I’m sure there have been some ways in which this has made it better, but given the state of Christian music today, my sense is that there are a lot of ways, too, that it’s made it worse.

Very, very few popular Christian songs today do anything original musically; they all seem sadly unwilling to rebel against the paste-pudding repetition of tonic, dominant, relative minor and sub-dominant chords. And I can’t think of many that come close lyrically to matching the yearning brilliance of a song like “One Tree Hill” or “Ultraviolet.” Contemporary Christian Music adopted the forms that a band like U2 was popularizing, back when it was still rebellious to do so, but then, unlike U2 itself, CCM simply stopped rebelling.

There is something rebellious in the Christian message, of course. Not for nothing did the early Romans fear and despise the Christians the way they did. In Roman eyes, Christians were antisocials and misfits of the worst kind. Perhaps the lack of innovation that we see in CCM speaks to a deeper malaise in contemporary evangelicalism, that it has lost its prophetic role, indeed, its prophetic ability to speak against the status quo. If so, perhaps more than adopting the musical style of a band like U2, contemporary Christianity might do better to learn from the rebellious spirit they embodied.

I Believe in Kingdom Come: Christian Thoughts on the Music of U2 (III)

The other day I was talking with a friend of mine who is in his early twenties about the Christian metal I used to listen to when I was a kid. I don’t remember exactly how we got on the topic, but I started telling him about one of the bands that got regular play time on my cassette player, a Christianized version of Motley Crue called Stryper.

One of Stryper’s greatest hits was a tune called “To Hell With the Devil,” a song it sang with as much unironically literalism as you can achieve, belting out the phrase against crunching guitars, wearing skin-tight spandex and teased out hair. (I remember my father finding my To Hell With the Devil album in my cassette collection and preparing to give me a good talking-to about it, until he realized that they meant the song sincerely, and, after all (he said) there’s probably no better place for the Devil than that.)

So I was reliving the oldies with my Gen-Z friend, like I say, and a half hour later we’d covered any number of Stryper tunes. It was a bit embarrassing for me, to realize how bad my musical taste was at sixteen, though in those days I thought Stryper were virtuosos at their craft (and, to their credit, if you can see past all the corny costumes and glammy make-up, they were actually pretty talented musicians as far as the hair-metal genre goes).

But what stood out to me on this 40th-year reunion with the music of Stryper was how theologically clunky their songwriting was. It never occurred to me, at sixteen, that a line like “Speak of the Devil, he’s no friend of mine / to turn from him is what we’ve got in mind” was not exactly elegant poetry.

Here’s the opening verse of another Stryper classic, “Soldiers Under Command.”

We are the soldiers under God's command
We hold His two-edged sword within our hands
We're not ashamed to stand up for what's right
We win without sin, it's not by our might
And we're fighting all the sin
And the good book -- it says we'll win

It’s not exactly subtle. But neither was the theological impulse of a band like Stryper. Essentially, the group—and the Christian metal genre more generally—was attempting a kind of Christian coup of utterly secular cultural expressions, baptizing all the hedonism and pseudo-occultism of the heavy metal genre with a veneer of religion, so that Christian metal fans could eat their cake and have it to.

I say this with a good deal of fondness for Stryper. As a yearning sixteen-year-old raised in a devoutly Christian home and trying to find his way in a decidedly un-Christian world, music that had all the energy and urgency of the stuff my friends were listening to, without any of the guilt I got when I listened to Iron Maiden, was, quite literally, a God-send.

But I also say it by way of contrast to the music of U2, the band that this series is actually about. One of the huge questions swirling around U2 when I was a teen, and this was especially asked by the same youth group leaders that recommended the music of Stryper to me—the most important thing to know about the band—was: Is U2 a Christian band?

The jury never returned a verdict on that one. Certainly, much of their music, especially the earliest outings, were replete with spiritual references, Christian allusions, and religious subtexts. And even without these more direct nods to the stuff of faith, their music never offered any pagan peons to Satan, or celebrated debauchery and dissipation the way so many of their contemporaries did. If they weren’t overtly Christian, then at least they were “Christian friendly.”

That said, they were also very evasive about their religious convictions. They never openly declared allegiance to any church or creed, never explicitly stated their faith, never tossed Bibles into the crowds at their concerts (a staple at Stryper concerts). Yes, Bono sang passionately in his belief in “Kingdom Come, when all the colors bleed into one,” but that’s a far cry from announcing that he was going to “fight all the sin,” because the “good book says we’ll win.”

As one music critic put it, U2 is “the greatest Christian band that never was.”

When held up against a band that is so brashly “Christian” as Stryper, U2’s ambiguity about their Faith raises some profound questions about the role of Christian artists, the relationship between faith and culture, and, especially, what makes Christian art “Christian” anyway.

In his book, Christ and Culture the renowned Christian theologian Richard Niebuhr offered a succinct framework for understanding the different postures different Christians take when it comes to the relationship between faith and culture. He described 5 distinct positions: 1. Christ against Culture (standing opposed to culture as irredeemably secular), 2. Christ of Culture (uncritically embracing developments in culture as being of Christ), 3. Christ above Culture (seeing your Christian faith as something separate from culture, with no conflict and very little contact between them), 4. Christ and Culture in paradox (seeing culture and faith as irreconcilably in tension with one another, but participating faithfully in both without resolving the difference), and 5. Christ as the Transformer of Culture (believing that culture is redeemable, and working faithfully to transform it in a way that brings glory to God).

Using Neibuhr’s framework, I would argue that, although a band like Stryper was attempting to adopt the fifth posture—Christ as the Transformer of Culture—what actually happened when it tried to Christianize the tropes of Heavy Metal was closer to the first posture: Christ against Culture. I say this because of the view implied by a song like “Soldiers Under Command,” that the only thing that can make a musical genre like heavy metal acceptable is if it is “co-opted” for the purposes of the Gospel. This explains the blunt-force with which the message is delivered in Stryper’s music. The whole approach suggests that the only acceptable musical expressions are those that are explicitly, unambiguously, even aggressively clear about the faith that has motivated it.

By contrast, U2 tends to adopt Posture Four in their music: holding Christ and Culture in tension, somewhat reveling in the paradox, and refusing to resolve the ambiguity. Christ is certainly present in their art, but not in its entirety, nor are they willing to pull back the veil and show where he is or is not standing. The deep irony—and it’s an irony we will explore more in coming posts—is that while adopting a “Christ and Culture in Paradox” posture, U2 has had a far more profound and far-reaching impact on culture than Stryper ever did. In adopting Posture Four, that is to say, they found themselves standing in Posture Five.

In her beautiful book, Walking on Water, Madeline L’Engle shares thoughts on being a Christian and an artist, arguing that we do a disservice to faith and art both when we assume that the thing that makes Christian art “Christian” is the number of times it refers to Jesus, and/or the clarity with which it makes those references. When we do this, she says, we end up both exploiting Jesus and corrupting art. What makes Christian art truly Christian, she argues, is the faithful lens through which the artists views the world, the mercy and love with which they engage what they see, and the freedom and the honesty with which they attempt to convey that in their art.

Whatever else the music of U2 offers us, it is an intriguing object lesson in L’Engle’s claims on this point. Consider, for instance, a song that attempts compassionately and mercifully to step into the agony of a heroin addict—like their poignant “Running to a Standstill”—or a tune urging us to acknowledge the difference that divides us and carry each other all the same—like their achingly beautiful “One”—or a lyric playfully celebrating the mystery of grace—like their tongue-in-cheek “Daddy’s gonna pay for your crashed car.” Perhaps tunes like these bring far more glory to God, despite the fact they never mention the name of Jesus, than four spandex-clad metalheads ever could, belting out at the top of their lungs that “In God we trust, in him we must believe, In God we trust, His Son we must receive.”