Previously: WOW 1999.
“Hey, uh, Mallory, this seems to be the second power-ranking of a decades-old compilation album of Christian Contemporary hits you’ve written up in the same week. How many of these are you planning on doing?” Well, the only other one I had besides these two was WOW 1998, so don’t worry overmuch.
2000 was an intense year for CCM, and it’s largely because that’s the year (well; technically it was 1999, but it was late 1999) DC Talk released their last studio album, Supernatural. There was a Greatest Hits album or two down the road, but this was the beginning of the end of something. It’s hard to overstate the hugeness of DC Talk on the CCM landscape at the time. They were U2 and Nirvana all rolled into one.
There are plenty of cases to be made for why CCM declined so precipitously after the boom years of the 90s: the end of the worship wars, the rise of streaming, the sale of most Christian labels to secular groups. And although you can still find a Christian rock station in almost every town, there’s not the same widespread cultural impact. There was a time in the late 90s when Switchfoot was on secular radio, P.O.D. videos were running on TRL, Sixpence None the Richer had a hit single attached to one of the most successful teen movies of the decade, and Jars of Clay made albums that went gold. It was inarguably, a different time!
One final thing to consider; namely, that most Christian rock is bad music. It…probably is? Music written for ideological reasons is often inferior to music written for the purpose of creative expression for, well, obvious reasons. The explosion of CCM in the late 1970s started a tradition of generally copying secular trends and pasting devout lyrics into them that has rightly given CCM a lousy name. But is it worse than, say, Sublime?
I don’t know, guys. All I know is that when I rewatched the video for Audio Adrenaline’s “Get Down” to prepare for arranging this list, I wanted to get down. And I did.
Discs one and two
1. “No One Loves Me Like You” – Jars of Clay
2. “Thankful” – Caedmon’s Call
3. “Gravity” – Delirious?
4. “I Want To Know You (In The Secret)” – Sonicflood
5. “One Of These Days” – FFH
6. “Get Down” – Audio Adrenaline
7. “New Way To Be Human” – Switchfoot
8. “Stranded” – Plumb (this was prominently featured in the trailer for Jason Bigg’s Loser! Can you imagine that kind of broad cultural reach for a Christian band now?)
9. “A Little More” – Jennifer Knapp
10. “Love Liberty Disco” – Newsboys
It feels very weird to knock DC Talk out of the top ten. But Consume Me, while period-appropriately shot like a short-film version of The Matrix is simultaneously creepier and more forgettable than most of their more enduring hits. I also feel very confident – although I have no idea why – in declaring “I’ve Always Loved You” by Third Day to be the “Wonderwall” of the Christian world. I have a great deal of affection for Steven Curtis Chapman’s “Speechless,” but it belongs to a squarer, mid-90s tradition than the heavily eyelinered pop-punk Christian rockers of the late 90s.
11. “I’ve Always Loved You” – Third Day
12. “Speechless” – Steven Curtis Chapman
13. “Consume Me” – dc Talk
14. “River” – Out of Eden
15. “Always And Forever” – Raze (Think S Club Seven or rave kids for Jesus)
16. “Show You Love” – Jaci Velasquez
17. “Waiting Room” – LaRue (Imagine if Jimmy Eat World were a pair of Christian siblings)
18. “It’s Alright (Send Me)” – Winans Phase 2
19. “Revive Us” – Anointed
20. “Takes A Little Time” – Amy Grant
“Basic Instructions” is borderline unlistenable. It’s an O.A.R.-style jam session about the Rapture. Most of the rest of these (“I Will Be Your Friend” is a notable exception) aren’t bad, exactly, so much as forgettable; the kind of song you would expect to hear at the funeral of someone you didn’t think much of.
21. “Omega” – Rebecca St. James (Starts with wind chimes, pauses for a spoken word interlude. It’s not awful, but those realities cannot be denied.)
22.”Away From You” – The O.C. Supertones (A YouTube commenter said it best: “it has a reggae flavor twisted up in a Holy spiritual epitaph”)
23. “Breathe” – Sixpence None the Richer
24. “For The Glory Of Your Name” – Michelle Tumes
24. “Can’t Live A Day” – Avalon
25. “Saving Grace” – Point of Grace (Point of Grace is the statistically average Christian band; the musical equivalent of 7th Heaven)
26. “Run To You” – Twila Paris
27. “The Rumor Weed Song” – The W’s (Look, I love the W’s perhaps more than a single person should, but even I’m not going to try to defend this as anything more than a song about an evil plant for a children’s cartoon series)
28. “I Am” – Jill Phillips
29. “Cartoons” – Chris Rice (THE VERY DEFINITION OF INSIDE BASEBALL)
30. “Friend Of Mine (Columbine)” – Jonathan & Stephen Cohen (Yes, it is a song about Columbine High School)
31. “I Will Follow Christ” – Clay Crosse
32. “I Will Be Your Friend” – Michael W. Smith
33. “Basic Instructions” – Burlap To Cashmere
Tags: christian music, music, ranking things, wow 2000
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The W’s!!! How could I have forgotten about the W’s for the past 15 years? Bless you.
I would mostly agree with the ranking except Love Liberty Disco should be at least a few notches higher on the list, it is cheesy as hell, but in a good way.
Also, Speechless is quite catchy, so it is definitely in the top 10 for me…
On a separate note, can we organize something so we send all the WOW CDs ever to Mallory so this AMAZING series will never end on The Toast?
Please. I was super into WOW 2001, so I really want to see her do that one.
I dug up the track list, let’s see. Gonna skip the tracks I don’t know/care, put them into (parenthesis)
Disc One
“Dive” – Steven Curtis Chapman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXqXIicm8uU
Ooooh this is a strong start. It’s catchy, it’s dynamic, I think it is one of the best songs of Steven Curtis Chapman.
I’M DIVING IN / I’M GOING DEEP / IN OVER MY HEAD I WANNA BE
CAUGHT IN THE RUSH / TOSSED IN THE FLOW / IN OVER MY HEAD I WANNA GO
THE RIVER’S DEEP / THE RIVER’S WIDE / THE RIVER’S WATER IS ALIVE
SO SINK OR SWIM / I’M DIVING IN (I’M DIVING IN)
I unashamedly love this song. I mean, all my non-Christian friends would make fun of me for it but I’m a Jesus Freak.
*ba-dum-psssh*
Mmkay what else do we have here…
(“Live For You” – Rachael Lampa)
(“Written On My Heart” – Plus One)
“This Is Your Time” – Michael W. Smith
Holy crap the start of the music video is I do not even have the words wow, just watch it NOW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgX0tghvz4A
This song is not nearly as good as I remembered. I think this the time period where I pretty much stop liking MWS’s songs.
(“Alabaster Box” – Cece Winans)
“Gather at the River” (Remix) – Point of Grace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYu-y_BSC1g
Hey, look, a Spice Girls song! Except, of course, with Jesus. This may be 2001 but this is straight from the 90s. A solid tune, B- would listen again when nobody else is around.
“Always Have, Always Will” – Avalon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdYrwyjP-ZQ
I don’t remember this, listening to it now… extremely bland. I do not really know what to write about this song, it’s like, just, nothing.
(“Crystal Clear” – Jaci Velasquez)
(“Every Season” – Nichole Nordeman)
“I Am The Way” – Mark Schultz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmWRqymOwnQ
Oh, I didn’t recognize this by the artist/title but once I turned it on it rings some vague bells. It kind of reminds me Dive (see above), only not nearly as good.
(“Free” – Ginny Owens)
(“More Than You’ll Ever Know” – Watermark)
“When I Praise” – FFH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDBjfx_4FiE
“And I throw my hands up in the air / Here’s my heart ’cause I don’t care / What they say about me, I gotta praise”
Nothing to see here, moving on…
(“This Good Day” – Fernando Ortega)
“Redeemer” – Nicole C. Mullen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC6RXAJpPjo
Rings some bells. I am falling asleep mid-song.
“Lord, I Come Before You” – Salvador https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=droG_cX5ogg
This could be a good cover… except it is not. The idea is not half bad, the execution is terrible.
Disc two coming up…
Disc two
“Set Your Eyes to Zion” – P.O.D. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZwlj-dLKOQ
Oh I kind of sort of remember this. Nothing to write home about, unfortunately.
“Shackles (Praise You)” – Mary Mary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7eZD3TKn_M
“I just wanna praise You / I just wanna praise You”
Oh this is a good one. I mean, it is your average R&B, but hey, the bar is really low.
“King of Glory” – Third Day
We do not talk about Third Day.
“Beautiful Sound” – Newsboys
Meh. This is one of the weakest Newsboys songs from that era.
(“Into You” – Jennifer Knapp)
“Red Letters” – dc Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ0MmoLm-W0
Now this one, this one I love. A great ballad from the Supernatural CD. THERE IS LIIIIIFE IN THE RED LETTEEERS
“Unforgetful You” – Jars of Clay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdlWGGxBUZA
It’s Jars of Clay. It’s a decent song, but there are just so many JoC songs out there that are better. A bummer.
(“The Only One” – Caedmon’s Call)
“Reborn” – Rebecca St. James https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abawV9m_9lU
Oh this is good early 2000s dance. And that’s about it, I guess.
“God You Are My God” – Delirious?
BOOOORING
(“Follow Your Dreams” – Raze)
(“Don’t Look at Me” – Stacie Orrico)
“God of Wonders” – City on a Hill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZexhyjptgnQ
Oh this is an instant classic worship song which I have heard a few too many times and now I am mostly sick of it.
(“America” – Passion)
“Hands and Feet” – Audio Adrenaline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFHyVdugFEM
And this songs easily wins the CD. One of the best AA songs, hands down. Good tunes, good times.
(“Whitehorse” – Earthsuit)
“Where I Wanna Be” – V*Enna https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BllK5liNR98
V*Enna!! I LOVED THEM. Listening to them in 2015, it kind of sounds like Spice Girls, but more of an early 00s Spice Girls with a touch of ABBA.
///
Well, this was a nice round of nostalgia for me, and turned out not nearly as entertaining as I wanted it to be. Another reason why Mallory should do these.
V*Enna oh my gosh I had completely forgotten
eta: listening to Where I Wanna Be now and it’s causing me physical pain. I thought it was such a cool song at the time and now I’m like… ah. Aaah.
Oh mannnnnn this taking me way back. I used to listen to that Plumb track and… cry in my car because I was 16 and high school was hard.
me too.
Oh God, please don’t tell my mother that Sixpence None The Richer is a Christian band. She will figure out a way to break the time-space continuum and ban “Kiss Me” from our house.
I had no idea! I suspect my mother would also strongly disapprove.
Haha, I was only allowed to listen to CCM, but I still wanted my friends to think I was cool. So, my 13th birthday party playlist was literally “Kiss Me” on repeat because there were zero other options.
It did not have the intended effect of making people think I was cool.
Who knew about Sixpence None the Richer!! I knew about POD, but I tend to pretend they are not Christian and that I didn’t use to listen to them as much as I did.
You’re right about the heydays. You’re so right. I never really thought about it before! Huh. I want to see at least a Masters’ thesis on this someday.
Plumb and Sixpence None The Richer were CCM?
I had no idea how much my Catholic upbringing was missing. The only music really sponsored by the Mother Church was Contemporary from around Caesar to Bach.
Our parish had “contemporary liturgical music,” which is really only contemporary insofar as you don’t have to pronounce any words in Latin. I’d like to see this hymnal ranked: http://www.amazon.com/Praise-National-Conference-…
YES
Fellow product of Catholic upbringing here. When I’m visiting my parents and go with them to Mass, it’s only taken, like, a decade or more, but usually there will be some CCM songs during the liturgy I recognize that came out around the late 90s/early 00s period. On the other hand, there are still some….well, I’ll call maybe one or two of them actual friends, and the rest just fb friends I went to Catholic college with….who devote some non-Mass time on their Sundays and holy days of obligation to get on facebook and rant about how the sanctity of liturgical music is UTTERLY RUINED, because their church choir’s been hijacked by a dude who plays a guitar and opts for all that hippie folk liturgical nonsense from the ’70s like “On Eagle’s Wings,” and, see everyone, look what Vatican II hath wrought. I’m pretty sure anything post-Bach at church would in fact raise those people’s ire.
My Catholic church in the 1990s had two modes:
1)Average organ or piano hymns of mostly respectable older origins, very occasionally borrowed from Protestants (sometimes just the tunes though)
2)”Contemporary” worship services involving the same hymns, but with 70s folkie guitar accompaniment by a guy with a slightly out-of-tune voice. Fortunately he almost never frequented Saturday Mass (and neither did crying children!), which was my family’s customary service.
I should say here that my best friend went to a different, more conservative church with a more intense youth group, and they passed around a lot of CCM stuff, including Reliant K, DC Talk, and Audio Adrenaline. I bought us tickets to an Audio Adrenaline concert in my town in the hopes of understanding the appeal, but instead felt left out and less Christian for not feeling the urge to put my Jesus antennas up.
GET DOWN
HEY, I LISTEN TO OPRAH
GET DOWN
HEY, I LISTEN TO OPRAH
GET DOWN
HEY, I LISTEN TO OPRAH
GET DOWN
or was that just me and my little sister?
In 2003 I went to a show with the how-did-this-even-happen lineup of Switchfoot, Brand New, and Rancid.
The Rancid fanbase did not enjoy the first two acts very much.
I am so upset with you for putting “In the Secret” as NUMBER FOUR!
My hatred of that song runs so deep.
My Christian high school sang that song every damn week at chapel for my entire high school career. That and “Open the Eyes of My Heart.” I still can’t listen to either one.
Those two songs, as well as that “I’m diving in” song still haunt me from my middle school youth group days. I get the jibblies just thinking about it.
I had finally exorcised “Open the Eyes of My Heart” from my mind. thanks a lot!
see also: “Shout to the Lord” and “The Days of Elijah”.
I kinda still love “Days of Elijah.”
But “Shout to the Lord”…no.
Aw man I liked Shout to the Lord, mostly because of the key change. If our praise & worship band couldn’t hack the key change on any given week, I hated it.
They are in my head now. Did anyone else learn “Days of Elijah” from a Messianic Jewish group called Kol Simcha? My church and parents where really big on them, and of us in the youth group had to listen to them. We were Pentecostals so that was one of the quirkier things we did.
We learned ours from “Revival in Belfast” (some worship album) and from this super wingnutty group called Morningstar that was all about those sweet sweet end time prophecies.
Oh, god, “Days of Elijah”. I spent ~16 years in a worship band, and that song featured in the songlist often during the 2000s. “Open the Eyes of My Heart” still features in services on occasion. Meh to that one.
I don’t have the hatred for “Shout to the Lord”, though.
Oh god. Church Camp days mean I never actually forgot those songs.
My brother cannot stand Days of Elijah because it’s Biblically inaccurate – David didn’t rebuild any temple at all! This is probably not the issue you have with it, but I find his indignation about it endearing.
I want to seeeee youuuuuuu
I want to seeeee youuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
THAT’S NOT SONICFLOOD’S FAULT
I’m just relieved that “In the Secret” (which sucks, don’t get me wrong) is not, as I thought at first, “Your Love Is Extravagant,” aka the “apparently having sex with Jesus in a blanket fort” song.
College-age Canard, while being miserable at InterVarsity events, discovered that “Open the Eyes of My Heart” makes a really nice medley, musically and thematically, with “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” (Also, that “Trading My Sorrows” is the same song as “She Drives Me Crazy.”)
I don’t know what I expected when I looked up the lyrics to “Your Love Is Extravagant”. Proof of hyperbole, maybe?
NOPE.
You weren’t exaggerating in the slightest and I feel rather like I just read someone’s sad closeted teen poetry with “Jesus” swapped in for An Unfortunately Heteroinflexible Friend.
I JUST REMEMBERED MY FAVORITE PART OF THIS CD:
When I put it into my computer, the first thing that loaded was an autoplay video for internet filtering software that was loaded onto the CD. It was *nuts*. 9-year-old me got to learn that whitehouse.com was (at the time) a porn site, and that the software included on WOW 2000’s solution to the problem was to block “anything that isn’t mainstream media”.
I had a couple of other CCM CDs that year, so I might be conflating this with another one, but I’m like 99% sure it was this CD that had the software on it. Either way, *one* of the CCM albums I had circa 2000 had that on there, and it confused the living hell out of me.
Apparently 2000 was the year I left the church. I knew all the songs from WOW 1999 and none of the songs from WOW 2000.
I love this so much, never stop. (Okay…you can stop after you complete the set with WOW 1998.)
I guess I owned this one, or some other compilation that contained a lot of this, because I know the whole top ten, and I thought my CCM days stopped about a year earlier. But this is bringing alllllll the memories back. Did my church camp boyfriend refer to Audio Adrenaline as “Audio A,” and will I ever stop immediately calling them that in my mind? He did and I will not. Did I go to a Plumb CD signing at my local Christian bookstore with church camp friends? I did, and I admit that I still feel a little proud of Plumb when I see them pop up here and there. A song of theirs featured very prominently in a sex scene with a vampire on The Vampire Diaries! Whoa, that is like a trifecta of non-Christian things right there. I also had Switchfoot’s first album, where the lead singer still went Full Kermit Voice, and it was kinda crazy when they got so mainstream in the aughts.
I feel nostalgic affection for most of this music, but Jennifer Knapp’s Kansas is the only album from that time that I still actually like. Quality is subjective and all that, but I think it’s pretty good. Maybe it’s also because it’s mostly about the struggle with faith, not about how Awesome Life Is With Jesus, so I still identify with the feelings.
My dad worked for Sparrow Records from 1984 until 2007. Plus One, Stacie Orrico, and Rachel Lampa were my first concert. These pieces are speaking to a very specific part of my heart.
I think I actually still own a Stacie Orrico CD. I haven’t listened to it in years. I wonder how well/badly it would age if I listened to it tonight.
Stacie Orrico’s second cd actually holds up reasonably well….
It holds up, I think, because she switched from Christian to pop really quickly in her career. A lot of people I knew at church gave her a lot of side-eye because it’s fairly common (and supposedly fairly easy) to get into the Christian music industry, gain a reasonable foothold, then switch over to mainstream/secular radio and leave the CCM roots behind, and that’s more or less what she did.
I also think “Dear Friend” from her first album has held up pretty well.
Plus One was also my very first concert! I won tickets from the local Christian music radio station (106.7 The Fish!) and oh man I fangirled so hard.
I was mildly into Plus One at one point in middle school/early high school. Obviously my family gave me their music because that was my BSB and NSYNC phase.
Every time you post one something about religion in the 90s it is just so foreign and alien to me, I love it. This was happening??? People were listening to these songs??? I HAD NO IDEA. I didn’t even hear about dc talk or whatever until I was well into college and an internet friend namedropped them and I was like “lol who are they?”
See also: those weird religious shirts where logos of popular products would be replaced with some vaguely Christian terminology (I very distinctly remember seeing one of the Yoo-Hoo logo reinterpreted as Yah-Weh and was SO CONFUSED)
LORD’S GYM
HIS PAIN, YOUR GAIN
I NEED THIS T-SHIRT
Oh man, they still make them. My very Baptist friend keeps finding new ones and it’s weird. The one that comes to mind is something like “Lord of the Kings.”
The Books-a-Million here displays them next to all the shirts with the regular logos. Just in case you want to confuse yourself while shopping for pop culture t-shirts.
I had a Survivor one. Here is another great example:
I had the Old Navy one (a perfect storm of late 90s/ early 00s)
Next on Mallory’s list after these music reviews: some sort of very academic essay that evaluates these logo shirts, discusses consumerism, Christianity, serious repression of unclean urges, etc. It could be fantastic!
I am too slothful/theoretically-doing-work to find it right now, but I’m pretty sure Fred Clark at Slacktivist wrote something along those lines a while back.
Same! It is all so new to me.
Suddenly feeling the urge to find my copy of WOW 2001, which I probably still have in a box somewhere because I never throw anything out.
Burlap To Cashmere in the last place in any ranking is the right place for them. My brother tried to get me into them and just . . . no. Steven Delopoulos sings like a sheep.
WOW 2000 is still considered one of the great albums of all time in my family, and I was so disappointed when you did 1999 instead of 2000. This is a gift.
Also, “Columbine” is a dreadful song and it gets stuck in my head on the regular when I see any columbine flowers.
Mallory, you have just brought back all of my Point of Grace talent show performance memories! We got everybody clapping with our rendition of “Keep the Candle Burning.”
Wait, it was “Life, Love & Other Mysteries” that REALLY got people on their feet.
I’m sort of morbidly fascinated by how awful or bland most CCM is. Religion has literally inspired some of the greatest works of art in the human canon! What whiplash to go from, like, Handel’s Messiah to POD. I want to blame capitalism for this, can I blame capitalism?
Anyway, I’m not Christian, but I love Sufjan Stevens’ more explicitly Christian music, and I absolutely adore all his Christmas music, especially the stuff that’s super religious. It’s not exactly the kind of music that will bring a youth group to their feet, I suppose, but it’s fascinating and emotional and nothing about Sufjan Stevens’ faith seems like it comes easy.
Sufjan’s “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” just… moves something in me. I can’t explain it, as I don’t love HIM and I don’t particularly love that SONG (in its original hymn form) but he just transforms it.
YEAH. I joke and tell people I became an atheist because of CCM, but — I was a music major and I love me some ritual; somewhat embarrasingly, if my parents had gone to a stodgier, more traditional church I’d probably at least be a Christmas and Easter Christian.
(I used to occasionally attend services at a local church because I like traditional hymns and four-part harmony; the last time I went to one, though, they took communion and everyone filtered up to the front of the church. I would rather chew off my own arm than be so disrespectful as to take communion as a non-believer tbh; I was the only person left sitting in the whole church :’) and I’ve been too freaked out to go back since)
I really love traditional hymns and those where the things that got me through my times in church after I officially stopped going. To this day, I’ll only listen to Christmas songs if they’re hymns and literally nothing else (except my NSync Christmas album, bc fuck it, I still love that shit).
I still love hymns. They speak to that beauty in ritual that I’ve missed.
I love hymns too. I hate hate hate CCM. Not that there aren’t bad hymns (there are), but hymns had lyrics that were far more poetic and seemed to actually reflect familiarity with life’s struggles like death and illness and loneliness, or familiarity with actual church doctrine and seasonal rhythms (rather than just Jesus is my buddy/boyfriend). Plus the melodies and harmonies were richer.
/theologically progressive, liturgically conservative
“Saving Grace” was my absolute favorite song in 2000, I think. I remember playing it on an endless loop in my room every afternoon, and to this day, can recall the lyrics with 100% accuracy.
Y’ALL. WOW has a profile on Spotify and it has SO MANY ALBUMS. It looks like it has all the WOW albums ever created (including “WOW Hits Party Mix Deluxe Edition,” which, ????!!!!!???) … the username is wowilovechristianmusic” … this has been your afternoon CCM PSA.
WOW Hits Party Mix Deluxe Edition has a techno remix of Casting Crowns, which is a sign of the apocalypse if I ever saw one.
I have a Swedish version of “Shout to the Lord” remixed to Dance/Techno from a CD called “Space Praise”, trust me, this is a lot crazier.
Aaaaaaand now here I am at work, listening to late-90s/early-00s CCM.
Basic Instuctions was so awful, it deserves to be given a special 50th place or something. Also, I really only know half of WOW 2000, because I had it on two audiocassettes and one of them overheated.
Oh hai, soundtrack to my first year at Christian college. At least the first half of the list. And then I took the spiritually-infused indie rock exit ramp and haven’t listened to CCM since.
THAT CARTOONS SONG MAKES ME WANT TO STAB EVERYBODY DO NOT CLICK
yaba-daba-lujah
Oh heck no, now I remember that one!
Oh, how this takes me back to my year at Adventist boarding school (1999-2000). My roommate’s Jaci Velasquez CD was confiscated for reasons that remain unclear to this day, whereas my Sunday in the Park with George and City of Angels (musical, not movie) cast albums got to stay, because the folks who write books about the questionable content in music never got around to reviewing musical theater.
I saw LaRue in concert around 2001 and they had some weird sibling vibes. Really touchy feelly with each other on stage.
Also I’m very angry that Clear never made it and Caedmon’s call did.
Plus every song Burlap to Cashmere did was great, except “Basic Instructions”.
Now Wow compilation would be complete without Point of Grace, Steven Curtis Chapman, or Michael W. Smith.
This is fantastic and also making me want to re-watch that South Park episode in which Cartman ropes Butters and Token into forming a Christian band. It was made all the more awesome by the fact that Cartman names the band Faith + One — I HAVE to imagine that was Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s less than subtle nod to Plus One.
Some thoughts after reading this article: “MAN I loved Jennifer Knapp.” “Jennifer Knapp was probably gay, huh?” [Googling] “Jennifer Knapp came out in 2010…” MAN I loved Jennifer Knapp.
I have yet to listen to her newer stuff, but I, too, loved Jennifer Knapp.
this is so late, but I came here to yell at Mallory that Jennifer Knapp came out. She (and the first Jars of Clay) was my favorite, and I will actually still defend her music as transcending the genre.
Random fact about me that I forgot until reading this list: As a young’un, I used to confuse the Winans and the Wayans. Really, I just thought that Bebe Winans was another Wayans brother and that he left the world of comedy to become a Gospel/CCM singer while the other brothers created In Living Color.
Point of Grace! I was losing my faith and lonely for pretty ladies, so I spent good money on a Point of Grace CD, having no idea what the music was like, just because they looked like dream versions of my mom’s friends when I was a kid. I blame the bland music for pushing me the rest of the way out of the Christian circle.
Oh the late 1990s and early 2000s, mainstream music was at a nadir and it looks like CCM was at a zenith.
It’s always neat to get these little glimpses into the lives of strangers, kind of like popping into a really dull version of Narnia
Me too! I am a total lunatic about that song.
As a church director of music, I am here to tell you that, yes, lots of CCM is, objectively, bad music. SO BAD. Also, lots of it is not. It was just played and styled in a very bad, very 90s, way. Of course, the CCM genre is no more full of bad music than most any other popular genre, nor is it more full of bad music than other sacred music. Good old fashioned hymns? Oh, dear LORD IN HEAVEN THERE ARE SOME HORRIBLE ONES THERE. (Although my favorite objectively bad hymn, which I will hold dear to my heart until my dying day is called “If Men Go to Hell, Who Cares?” Google that shit. It’s AMAZING.)
Point of interest: The CCM movement grew out of the evangelical movement, which started much longer ago than people think. The evangelical movement stressed personal relationship with God and Jesus, and this was reflected in the hymns. Think “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and “In the Garden.” CCM songs tend to have this same kind of stress on very personal, intimate relationships with God and with Jesus. This is all well and good, until you start adding in contemporary pop stylings, which tend to be very breathy and sexy, and just imagine Amy Grant singing, slowly and breathily, while many a meaningful, emotion-filled pause “and the joy we share as we tarry there/ none other shall ever know.” Yeah. Eric Cartman was not wrong. So not wrong, in fact, that at the last Hymn Society Annual Conference I attended, we were referring to a huge block of these personal relationship CCM songs as “Jesus is my boyfriend songs.” (A turn of phrase I still use because it’s far too perfect.) But, just to piss off everyone’s grandmother, these songs are DIRECT DESCENDANTS of, and ideologically basically the same as, all of those good ol’ gospel hymns about being held in Jesus’ arms that she loves so much.
Does anyone else remember when Jaci Valasquez went on tour with Plus One and there were rumors abound about her dating one of them? Okay, I’ll back up, does anyone else remember Plus One?
I’ll never forget seeing them at Night of Joy (a classic Florida CCM event) and being pissed that they sang their song from the Left Behind soundtrack but not the one they did for Pokemon.
Oh my god I forgot about their pokemon song thank you so much
Random late night thoughs (Because ccm nostalgia):
– 40 Acres is one of my favorite albums, secular or no.
– I went to a Jennifer Knapp concert wearing a Canucks jersey, which she responded to when she signed my ticket. She’s a Red Wings fan.
“Steady On” is the superior Point Of Grace song. Why it’s not on any of the WOW cd’s is a mystery to me.
THE RUMOR WEED SONG oh man, memories.
Veggie Tales, though. What was society ever like before Veggie Tales.