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Comment by Noos | Hacker News Reader

I don't like articles like this. "Oh, he never really showed much of any adherence to Catholicism in his work or his public life, but he was REALLY a crypto-Catholic who had 'hidden piety.'" Meanwhile people who actually live their beliefs and try to express them explicitly in art get ignored, because Warhol was famous and they are not.

I saw this in evangelism, too. There were many artists in the 1980s trying their best to make Christian pop music, but all you could hear was endless attempts by the intelligentsia to make Bono from U2 into some neo-Christian because he was famous and his works might be intepreted in a vaguely Christian-friendly manner. This is one of the ways Christian culture stomps on its artists, and the rather naked fame-chasing disgruntled me once I realized how pervasive it was.

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Related to music and art within Christianity, earlier today my wife had some old saved K-LOVE songs on and I just had to leave the room because it was so.. generic. Like not even vanilla but actually unflavored ice cream. So I’ve been listening to Gungor’s older stuff since then because it actually has creativity and originality to it and I wish Christian music could embrace that. Heck I think if I was in the mood for Christian music I would listen to Schism by Tool sooner than anything ever played on K-LOVE. It seems mainstream Christian music is designed purely to give people semi happy feelings and rake in as much money as possible, and because of that there’s no real art to almost any of it.

I think Hank Hill hit it on the head with his take on Christian Rock.

"Can't you see you're not making Christianity better, you're just making rock-n-roll worse."

Eh, I think a lot of it is that sturgeon's law dominates all. most pop is bad in that generic way, and Christian pop is a small subset of all pop. If you really go deep into any niche genre, there's a lot of bad music that you won't hear unless you really search for music within that obscure genre.

I mean, I think that's part of why so much classical music is so good; we only hear what people thought was worth preserving and replaying for hundreds of years. I mean, one of my favorite pieces of music overall could be classified as christian music... Beethoven's 9th.

But mostly, I think it's the 'small genre' issue. I mean, I went through a period where I only listened to punk, and then only to certain obscure sub genres of punk, and you get to a point where there's one good band... then sometimes only one good song, and the rest, well, you've filtered on genre rather than quality, so most of it is crap.

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