Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?

Documentary film (2004, 95 mins.)

Directed by Vicki Hunter and Heather Whinna

Reviewed by Brendan Boyle

By the time we got to Cornerstock

When a drummer stops the set, something has usually gone wrong. When Mark Nicks, drummer of Nashville three-piece Cool Hand Luke, brings the music to a halt, something is going entirely right. In the days leading up to the 2003 Cornerstone Music Festival in Bushnell, Illinois, Nicks had a minor revelation and now onstage, half hidden behind two snares and a high-hat, he wants to confess it. The crowd, teenaged and feverish, quiets as he begins. “There’s so much about this festival, this music scene, that isn’t about Jesus and it’s breakin’ his heart. We walk around with our friends…and Jesus’ name isn’t even mentioned. And it’s breakin’ my heart too.”

Nicks, sweating and stammering, apologizes for his lack of polish and regroups. “I’ve made a commitment to be a man of truth, and I wanna stand for the name of Jesus Christ and not be ashamed of it, and not substitute ‘he’s’ and ‘him’s’ but stand in the name of Jesus Christ.” At this last declaration the crowd delivers a burst of applause. Nicks, buoyed by the response, finds his rhythm. “God has told me to call you to be people of truth. Because Luke 10:16 says, if we reject Jesus we reject God. There’s power in that name and he’s the reason that we’re here. Everything exists for the glory of God.” With that, the drummer gets back to work.

Nicks’s show stopping-story of his epiphany is captured on Vicki Hunter and Heather Whinna’s raffish, high-spirited documentary Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?Hunter and Whinna visited the festival — now over twenty years old and boasting a roster of over one hundred bands and attendance of nearly thirty thousand — in 2001 and 2003 and the documentary, composed almost exclusively of concert footage and interviews, is itself a minor epiphany. Neither woman is a filmmaker by trade, and their movie lacks the ease of experience. The lighting is poor, the sound muffled, the camerawork tipsy. The film tends to lunge about. But these are minor blemishes and, as the movie gathers itself, they cause no bother. In the Cornerstone Music Festival, Hunter and Whinna have stumbled onto something strange and gripping. They have wisely chosen to stay out of its way.

Instead, Hunter and Whinna let the musicians themselves talk about their music and their faith. The varieties of religious experience on offer are numerous. Cool Hand Luke’s “verse-faith-verse” model marks one way of bringing Jesus into the devil’s music. Others take a more leisured approach. Pedro the Lion frontman Dave Bazan logs much time on-screen. This is partly because he is long-winded, but mostly because his more complicated expression of faith takes a while to unfold. He starts and stops, hesitates, leaves sentences unfinished and looks, at times, genuinely unconvinced by what he’s saying. By the time the credits roll, it’s not really clear what Bazan believes. This makes for great watching — set against the confident visions of other musicians, it gives the documentary dramatic weight and shape.

Bruce Fitzhugh

The documentary is admirably even-handed. Hunter and Whinna might have stalked only the most exotic religious animals. Cornerstone is not short on the kind of religious spectacle that tends to hypnotize secularists, for whom such intensity belongs only in endzones or opera. Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? has its scenes of teenagers, arms upraised, calling upon the Holy Spirit. But these scenes don’t do any more work than the others. They aren’t even very memorable. Far better are the moments of authentic intimacy. In the middle of an interview, Bruce Fitzhugh, lead singer of the Christian sludge-metal actLiving Sacrifice, reaches down and scoops up his mischievous, red-headed daughter. As she playfully mugs for the camera, flashing a toothy smile much too large for such a small girl, he asks her “Can you sing like Daddy?,” “Jeeeesssuuus,” she croaks back in a Gothic growl, sounding like a woman seriously in need of an exorcism.

If the exotic religious animal poses one hazard for the filmmakers, the domesticated breed poses one still greater. Pedro the Lion’s Bazan has no roar to speak of, only a milky purr. His skeptical sensibility rests more snuggly in secularists’ laps than the prickly dogma of his evangelical peers. The only time the Lion shows his teeth is toward other believers. “It bothers me to be around Christians all the time,” Bazan snaps with more aggression than we might expect at a gathering of the faithful. In less steady hands, this could have been played for laughs. But Hunter and Whinna wisely recognize that the route leading through Bazan is the path of both least resistance and least reward.

Steve Albini — producer and part-time provocateur — and Dan Sinker — editor of Chicago-based zine Punk Planet — are the film’s two talking heads. They take quite seriously the job of defending the devil’s musical estate against religious poachers. Albini breathes fire on Christendom generally but particularly on its “perky,” “spiky-haired” choir. “Christian rockers think that if they just say all the same things [Christians] have been saying for two thousand years but say it with a spiky hairdo, they’ll get all the kids to listen” -— and believe. Albini’s orderly rage has an old-timey feel that no hip coif will win over. Sinker is a bit more of a prankster, but his good humor doesn’t extend to Christianity. “Part of me wants a big warning label on records…I wanna tell people,

‘Hey, you might like this [record], this might sound like a lot of bands you like…but don’t forget, this is Christian rock.'” The idea of a religious advisory label —- Warning: God Explicitly Inside —- is funny, but not as funny as Sinker thinks. Had he spent less time on his routine and more time on the music itself, he might have been more convincing and the documentary better served.

The case Albini and Sinker make against Christian rock is remarkably unmusical and almost exclusively political. Christian musicians are guilty by virtue of their association with the right-wing Leviathan. All this huffing-and-puffing about American conservatism ends up blowing the music right away. Doesn’t it matter how these bands actually sound? Are any adventurous enough to sneak into the record collection of these avowed secularists? Can music this devotional even be adventurous? The musicians themselves keep claiming it can, and it is disappointing that Albini and Sinker, both of whom evaluate music for a living, have little to say in reply.

The Devil’s Own

To be fair, it isn’t clear that there’s much to say. With one or two exceptions, these are state-fair-quality acts -— wispy Sarah MacLachlan clones; goofy rock-ska hybrids; start-stop-scream metal. But neither Albini nor Sinker is ever at a loss for words. And what they have to say can surprise. When I asked Albini what he thought of Cool Hand Luke, he paused. “Is that the band with the drummer who freaks-out?” “Yes, that’s them,” I answered, ready for his corrosive bile. “Oh, they’re not that bad.”

But they do write awful lyrics. How could they not? Refusing to allow the pronouns “he” or “him” to stand-in for the name Jesus Christ is bound to generate seriously inelegant verse. And that is precisely the problem. Cool Hand Luke and other bands that have taken the no-pronoun pledge aren’t after elegance. They’re after converts. To be sure, Cool Hand Luke’s commitment to the name of Jesus Christ is, in part, a demonstration of the intensity and magnitude of their belief. But what the ecstatic embrace of Jesus’ name really demonstrates is a sensibility so earnest that it cannot brook the slightest indirection. Even the most innocuous substitution might cause us to miss the message. Lyrics like this, then, have no afterlife for unbelievers. They make a crass take-it or leave-it pitch. Once the offer is refused, the lyrics vanish. As well they should. Are pronouns really that confusing? Is there really any question who’s doing the resurrecting in the phrase “And he will rise again on the third day”?

There was a time when this declaratory style got you sainted and indirection got you burned. Setting the Gospels to music and calling it a day made sense when bishops had all the concert-hall’s box seats. A no-pronoun rule might even have been tolerable, if no more grammatically sound than it is today. Today, much of Cornerstone’s roster is willful atavism. They might lament that the only people willing to book them are men of the cloth, but they have themselves to blame. By contrast, artists like Dave Bazan, Daniel Smith, and Sufjan Stevens have broken out of the steeple-circuit and onto the club-circuit. And they did so not by selling watered-down Christianity but by composing songs that aren’t exhausted in their religiosity. “At my show there [are] some Christian kids, and some kids who think Christianity is the most ignorant thing they ever encountered,” says Bazan. “But if I really believe that God is true…this will be made known to everybody, not by me trying to persuade anybody. ..Fuck all that.”

The Cornerstock Cross

The one time Daniel Smith appears on-stage in the documentary he leads his revelers in the chorus “I love my Lord, I love my Lord.” This refrain, about as subtle as an asteroid, should be unlistenable. That it is absolutely wonderful leaves me scratching my head. But this is precisely the point — the wonder isn’t exhaustively religious. When Neutral Milk Hotel’sJeff Mangum begins “King of Carrot-Flowers, Part II” with no smaller a lyrical asteroid than “I love you Jesus Christ,” the song doesn’t stall. It can’t stall — the wheezing bray of the trombone and the heady-fuzz of the guitar won’t let it. Similarly, Smith’s guitar-xylophone-guitar-drum folk drone launches “I love my Lord” into its own perfectly weird orbit. “I simply don’t ask anything about his prayer-life,” says Albini about his experience recording the Daniel Smith. “I treat his religion the same way I treat his sex life. I just don’t care.” Albini is partly right. But why worry that Smith is singing about God? Better to admit that some songs —- Smith’s is one of them, although Albini has had a few of his own — simply grab us by the lapels, shake us, and don’t let go until the secularists cry “uncle” and the Christians shout out “I love my Lord.”

Brendan Boyle is a writer living in Chicago. His last review for The Revealer was “The Secular Experiment.”