How to be a Christian Artist

I  like music that makes other people uncomfortable. I like Pere Ubu a lot, for example, and my favorite Pere Ubu album is New Picnic Time, an album that has sent many listeners screaming from the room. Captain Beefheart is another favorite, in which case I like Lick My Decals Off, Baby, an album of great rhythmic complexity and impressionistic lyrics. Rhys Chatham’s out-of-tune guitar pieces. Tony Conrad’s violin pieces for just intonation, LaMonte Young’s minimalisms, free jazz from the mid-sixties, the Sun City Girls, the Slits, Daniel Johnston, the Shaggs, Wesley Willis, Syd Barrett’s most ominous solo work, the most experimental David Grubbs, etc. It’s not that I think this music is interesting simply because it’s unusual. This music brings me genuine pleasure. I like pop songs, too, of course, in reasonable doses. But often the work that makes an indelible impression on me comes from a place of singularity. This work doesn’t give up its secrets easily. It makes demands. In the process of reckoning with it, you feel as though you’ve helped make it what it is.

An example: a few years ago I was invited to a record club in Lower Manhattan by a painter friend. The record club worked this way: each of the twelve attendants brought two songs that they were in love with at the moment, and, according to a sequence generated by randomly dealt playing cards, we circled the room in two rounds with everyone playing his or her songs in turn. Though I’ve never really been a book club sort of guy, I was taken with the spirit of this gathering right away.

On the Friday night in question, the record club was marching along, doing what it does, glancing off of jazz, electronica, Britpop, early rock and roll, Old Time, when suddenly there emerged from the speakers the most strangled, desperate racket I had heard in ages.

The first problem was the singer’s voice. The singer sang in a tortured falsetto, or most of the time he did. Sometimes he hovered just above and below the line that separated his chest voice from his falsetto. In the tenor range, he had a boyish drawl, sort of like Kurt Cobain, if Kurt had been raised in the Ozarks. But then there was his boy soprano, into which he lurched for various pitches, where he was silly and ghostly and a little bit shrill all at the same time.

Having noted the singer, I shifted my focus to the accompanying ensemble: acoustic guitar, organ, celeste, two rather primitive drummers. The band would probably have sounded adorable, like the soundtrack to the tugboat...