Review: 'The Jesus Music' explores the secular side of Christian music, focusing on performers and the industry's human side
For a movie made by believers about believers, the documentary “The Jesus Music” is a surprisingly secular look at the growth of the contemporary Christian music industry — and that’s the best part about it.
Directed by brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin — who have become moguls of faith-based movies, with such titles as “I Can Only Imagine” and “I Still Believe” — begin their survey of the genre in the early 1970s in Costa Mesa, Calif.. That’s where a young preacher named Lonnie Frisbee began attracting followers to his charismatic evangelism.
Frisbee wasn’t your typical button-down preacher. He had long hair and a beard, and looked a bit like the person his flock came to talk about: Jesus. For young people — the hippies — who had become disillusioned by the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll that the ‘60s provided, Frisbee’s type of church was just what they needed.
Part of Frisbee’s appeal was the music, and allowing people to adapt rock music to a liturgical setting. Not everyone in mainline Christianity was a fan, but one prominent person was: Billy Graham, who organized a landmark event in Dallas, Explo ’72, dubbed a “Christian Woodstock” that brought thousands of young converts to Christ into Graham’s orbit.
The Erwins move briskly from there, highlighting some of the artists who popularized Christian music over the last half century. In the ‘70s, there was Larry Norman, “the father of Christian rock,” who once released a song called “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” The ‘80s brought Stryper, who brought glam-rock sensibilities and savvy marketing, to the Christian genre — even as preachers like Jimmy Swaggart railed against them.
The game-changer for the CCM genre, the experts here say, was Amy Grant, an unassuming college student who made leather pants and a leopard-print jacket seem wholesome.
Grant, one of the film’s producers, sums up the difference between her music and standard church hymns. Those hymns, Grant says, are sung up to God, with the singer’s eyes closed. “I wanted to sing songs with my eyes wide open, singing to each other,” she says.
From Grant and her friend Michael W. Smith, who have become the elder statespeople of the genre, the movie spreads out to highlight a few other big names, including DC Talk — the closest thing Christian music had to a boy band — and the multi-talented Kirk Franklin, who talks honestly about the difficulties crossing the racial divide within America’s Christian community.
Some of the most touching moments of “The Jesus Music” come when the Erwins show performers at their low points. Grant talks about the blowback she received from so-called Christian fans when she divorced her first husband, and shortly thereafter married country singer Vince Gill. And Russ Taff, a superstar in the ‘80s, describes how alcoholism wrecked his career. The superstar TobyMac describes the pain when his 21-year-old son died from an overdose — and how, at the funeral, he had a tearful reunion with his former DC Talk bandmate, Michael Tait.
The documentary wraps up with some of the up-and-comers in the genre, such as LaCrae and Lauren Daigle, and talking about the growing subgenre of “worship music,” propelled by groups like Hillsong United, whose concerts are more like a church service.
“The Jesus Music” suffers from being a bit too narrowly focused on the marketers’ view of the contemporary Christian music genre. People forget that U2 was, in its earliest days, pitched as a Christian band. And any movie about Christian music from the late ‘60s to now that doesn’t at least mention Aretha Franklin’s “Amazing Grace” sessions has a gaping hole in its narrative.
But the Erwins do bring the movie around to the way faith propels the music, and vice versa. The message is summed up best by TobyMac, when he notes that “God uses people that are broken to write music to reach out to the broken.”
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‘The Jesus Music’
★★★
Opens Friday, October 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some drug material and thematic elements. Running time: 109 minutes.