Chrindie '95
December 23, 2015 1:29 PM   Subscribe

Chrindie '95: A collection of essays about a seminal year in Christian indie rock. [via mefi projects].
1995 was also an incredibly important year for the scene we've come to call “Chrindie,” for Christian indie rock. Much has been written about the weird world of contemporary Christian music, but whatever you think it is ,  you’d be surprised by how many genuinely great Chrindie records were released twenty years ago. During the course of the year, we’ve been writing about brilliant, beautiful, challenging, difficult, weird albums that went mostly unnoticed by mainstream radio and the music press and MTV, in part because they were released on tiny labels with no budgets and marketed primarily to evangelical teenagers in the suburbs.
posted by naju (28 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Just published in The Stranger: How Christianity Infiltrated the Seattle Music... a well-researched article by Kathleen Tarrant.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 1:39 PM on December 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


Oh man. I went to Cornerstone in both... 94 & 95 (or 95 & 96). Argyle pPark was so fucking great. There really was a lot happening then. I remember hearing Buka in the group showers talking about how he pretty much couldn't stand organized religion and didn't go to church himself. I remember arguing with online friends (who I met in person for the first time) that America wasn't some "Christian Nation".

Starflyer 59 was great. I really love Fluffy & Breakfast with Amy, too. I had an LSU album (I think it was LSU) and it had a song called Elvis, but I can't seem to find it anywhere online so now I wonder if it was some other band. Mostly I was more into like The Blamed, CoD/Brainchild, Argyle Park, Klank, Crucified, Believer, Tourniquet & Vengeance (Rising)... But I did dig some of that Tooth and Nail shit. Before MxPx and pop-punk and ska took over everything (and I stopped being a Christian the following few years).

Good times...
posted by symbioid at 1:43 PM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]




I will read all of these because I want to know.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:50 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


Wow, from that Stranger article:
The Seattle city government proved an invaluable ally in this effort: The Teen Dance Ordinance, in effect from 1985 to 2002, made cost-prohibitive demands on venues trying to host music events for underage audiences ($1,000,000 in liability insurance, two off-duty police officers at every show), thus severely limiting independent promoters' ability to present entertainment to people under the age of 21. All-ages-friendly clubs like the OK Hotel, RKCNDY, and Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge were smothered out of existence by the ordinance.
For a city with such a strong association with music, this seems ridiculously draconian.
posted by Existential Dread at 1:50 PM on December 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


That seems about the time I was hearing a little and thinking hey, maybe this isn't automatically crap. I periodically go on a tear digging into different genres like christian, MPB, chinese pop. I legitimately liked this album and played the crap out of it. Suspending my dislike of the message, the music was appealing.

Unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law wore me out on the christian music and I haven't been putting in the effort to find good stuff.
posted by ctmf at 1:57 PM on December 23, 2015


Always loved Five Iron Frenzy, and I still respect them. So much of what they did and were about came down to "hey Christians, let's not be assholes", and being at a Christian festival in Kentucky and hearing their singer denounce homophobia as a sin and a cancer in the church in front of thousands of people was pretty solid for 1999.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:09 PM on December 23, 2015 [9 favorites]


> > The Seattle city government proved an invaluable ally in this effort: The Teen Dance Ordinance, in effect from 1985 to 2002, made cost-prohibitive demands on venues trying to host music events for underage audiences ($1,000,000 in liability insurance, two off-duty police officers at every show), thus severely limiting independent promoters' ability to present entertainment to people under the age of 21. All-ages-friendly clubs like the OK Hotel, RKCNDY, and Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge were smothered out of existence by the ordinance.

> For a city with such a strong association with music, this seems ridiculously draconian.
posted by Existential Dread at 1:50 PM on December 23 [+] [!]


I wish I could get 16 year old me in here to tell you about this, because man that kid had a lot to say about the Teen Dance Ordinance. Like as he told it the Teen Dance Ordinance was both the chief injustice in the entire world and also a synecdoche for all injustice as a whole.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:15 PM on December 23, 2015 [13 favorites]


Know, all ye capitalist running dogs, who lit the first spark of revolution in my heart. Through her perfidious acts, Jan Drago lit that spark.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 2:24 PM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]


Jars of Clay were big in my neck of the woods that year. Loved by parents and their kids alike.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:40 PM on December 23, 2015


"I suspect that on some level—say, the conscious one—I didn't want to be noticing what I noticed as we went. But I've been to a lot of huge public events in this country during the past five years, writing about sports or whatever, and one thing they all had in common was this weird implicit enmity that American males, in particular, seem to carry around with them much of the time. Call it a laughable generalization, fine, but if you spend enough late afternoons in stadium concourses, you feel it, something darker than machismo. Something a little wounded, and a little sneering, and just plain ready for bad things to happen. It wasn't here. It was just…not. I looked for it, and I couldn't find it. In the three days I spent at Creation, I saw not one fight, heard not one word spoken in anger, felt at no time even mildly harassed, and in fact met many people who were exceptionally kind. I realize they were all of the same race, all believed the same stuff, and weren't drinking, but there were also 100,000 of them. What's that about."

John Jeremiah Sullivan visits a Christian Rock festival.
posted by four panels at 2:50 PM on December 23, 2015 [6 favorites]


The Teen Dance Ordinance ruined my late teen years, I can tell you that. Going to shows followed by late nights at the Hurricane (or any given Denny's, if we had to go to Tacoma or Olympia for a show) was, like, the cornerstone of my social life and it was just absolutely fucking galling to watch that scene dwindle away with the closing of any and all clubs that held all ages events. As bare-bones and gross as the RCKCNDY was, I legit wept when it closed in 1999. And now I work a block away from where it used to be. There's a SpringHills Suites hotel in its place.
posted by palomar at 3:09 PM on December 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


All-ages-friendly clubs like the OK Hotel, RKCNDY, and Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge were smothered out of existence by the ordinance.

Hah. There were many, many reasons these places went out of business, but an ordinance wasn't one of them. You may recall this thing called the Internet were music and games were suddenly free?
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:16 PM on December 23, 2015


Dude, if that theory held water, it wouldn't have been only the all-ages clubs that were shutting down en masse.
posted by palomar at 3:17 PM on December 23, 2015 [5 favorites]


All ages clubs couldn't serve booze the same way a regular club could, which is why other clubs still exist. That's what killed them. The ordinance did nothing. The teen audience just moved on to other stuff. As teen audiences have done since forever.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:20 PM on December 23, 2015


Right. Of course. All the teenagers in Seattle that were younger than me just up and quit going to shows as soon as I turned 21 and didn't need all ages clubs anymore, because as everyone knows, teenagers hate music and socializing with their peers. A notoriously draconian law targeting those businesses and the audiences that patronized them had nothing to do with it.
posted by palomar at 3:22 PM on December 23, 2015 [12 favorites]


CPB, you're spouting off about stuff that you really don't know anything about, and that's my job thank you very much.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:50 PM on December 23, 2015 [8 favorites]


There was a Kickstarter for a documentary about Luxury not long ago. I'd never heard of them before that, but they're pretty interesting. Most interesting, of course, is the fact that three of them are now Orthodox priests.
posted by kevinbelt at 3:52 PM on December 23, 2015 [3 favorites]


That Luxury documentary is in the works, and it looks like it will be super good. kickstarter trailer
posted by naju at 4:16 PM on December 23, 2015


There was also an interesting-looking book about the history of Christian rock, titled Body Piercing Saved My Life. It included the likes of Pedro The Lion and Christian Hardcore Punk labels like Tooth & Nail.
posted by acb at 4:42 PM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


SF59 is great. In......oh, '01 or so I got to see them in some random small town church in the middle of nowhere. 5 of us that drove from NYC and maybe a dozen young teens dropped off by their folks.
posted by jpe at 5:31 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


I really identified with Ryan Ruppe, although for me this all happened about 10 years earlier.
posted by friendsip at 6:29 PM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


I looked up Starflyer 59 recently. They (he?) are still making pretty good music!
posted by bullitt 5 at 7:59 PM on December 23, 2015


Seems like Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary from May of '94 is of a piece with this.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:51 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


Interesting find. I was expecting Jars of Clay or Over the Rhine or the Choir. All of which I liked.
posted by persona au gratin at 9:45 PM on December 23, 2015


There was a brief time when, under the influence of the "Alternative" wave, the best genuinely artistic and -- within certain boundaries -- iconoclastic Christian rock bands could stand toe to toe with secular music. But as the essay on The Prayer Chain's Mercury* says, that sort of fresh artistic statement, or really much of any sort of lyrics that cross into sexual themes (Bendy Line) or doubts about one's faith (much of the rest of the album) were simply not tolerated by most of the Christian market.


*Mercury being an album that I can still listen, and more importantly relate to, despite being atheist nowadays
posted by chimaera at 10:50 PM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


This from sleeping bear's article:
But the seed of [the MxPx album] Teenage Politics bloomed about eight years later when I finally took a hard look at my faith and realized that the “Christian media” I had immersed myself in was a separate entity from Christianity as a system of beliefs.
In the context of the whole article that's more specific about what that means - I can't really recap as I'm new to theology, relatively speaking. But he talks about the way the Church never questions its own authoritarianism while the rock scene (I think?) makes something different from the scriptural roots, and then putting them together they don't match up. This really chimes with me as someone who came to Christian practice recently through radical pacifism and is at home only in a very small, very radical bubble of LGBT+-inclusive Anglicans. The perennial problem with big social structures.
posted by lokta at 2:42 AM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


I played at, and loved, the Velvet Elvis. My band played there the day the Mariners beat the Yankees in a playoff game and people were going bananas.
posted by josher71 at 8:07 AM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


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