Popular music in the twenty-first century is increasingly divided into niche markets. How do fans, musicians, and music industry executives define their markets’ boundaries? What happens when musicians cross those boundaries? What can Christian music teach us about commercial popular music? In God Rock, Inc., Andrew Mall considers the aesthetic, commercial, ethical, and social boundaries of Christian popular music, from the late 1960s, when it emerged, through the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic research, historical archives, interviews with music industry executives, and critical analyses of recordings, concerts, and music festival performances, Mall explores the tensions that have shaped this evolving market and frames broader questions about commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover in music that defines itself as outside the mainstream.
Andrew Mall is Assistant Professor of Music at Northeastern University and a coeditor of Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives.
"An entirely original book that provides great insight into this often-overlooked wing of popular music. Andrew Mall's valuable scholarship reveals Christian music to be complex and hardly the monolithic entity that the marketing category might imply."––Theo Cateforis, author of Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s
"Clear and engaging. Andrew Mall's book does two things at once: it provides insight into the Christian pop-rock world as it navigated and navigates tensions between religious goals, musical goals, and commercial goals, and it adds to the broader conversation about how markets and subcultures, scenes, and mainstreams interact with one another."––Eric Weisbard, author of Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music
322 pp.6 x 9Illus: 18 b/w photographs
9780520343429$29.95|£25.00Paper
Dec 2020