I spoke yesterday for a while with a very creative artist who mentioned having to get outside of the Christian music scene for a while to create music that fully expressed his vision. And by “Christian music scene” he meant of course, Nashville. The present epicenter of the Christian music industry. He spoke of an abundance of rules, regulations, and gatekeepers that he felt choked the soul of creativity among the believers making music today. It got me wondering about our human tendency to get stuck in ruts of reproduction.

An industry, by its nature, of course exists for profit. Humans, also apparently by nature, tend to repeat that which has proven previously successful, and by successful I mean, in this case, pleasing, well-received, captivating, and/or entertaining. So yes, the combination of these two trends can make for some repetitive, formulaic musical trends. That alone creates a need for mavericks, those that would buck the system and shake things up. These artists are not always appreciated for the vital service they provide, but they should be. I’m not in the creative loop that he is, so I have no idea how stringent the regulations of these gatekeepers might be. I am, however, fairly close to the human loop, so my guess would be that his representation was pretty accurate.

Old wineskins tend to crack, don’t they? We need those who are willing to shake things up so the new wine can be received. Viva la creators.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 9:09 am and is filed under Staff Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.