Success of the Christian Music Industry

Music is definitly one of my favorite texts of media. A speciffic genre of music that I enjoy is Christian music. This is an interesting genre, because within it there are so many other genres. It is a messy web of overlapping, twisting, and intertwining of musical styles and themes. For the purpose of looking at how artists within the genre of Christian music view the genre differently, I would like to tell you about two of my favorite Christian Music Artists.

The first is Family Force Five


This group presents a dramatically different type of Chrstian music than most people are used to. If this isn't evident enough in the style of their music, the names of the band members may also be clues to their counter christian music culture movement. The members of family force five are:Soul Glow Activatur, Crouton, Phatty, Nadaddy, and Chap Stique. While they do keep their lyrics clean, and most of their songs send a positive message, they are by no means serious or theological. The reason I enjoy lisetning to Family Force 5 is because it's just plain fun!

The Second is Chris Rice
I really love Chris Rice's music, but it is drastically differnet than family force 5. While family force 5 would be considered Christian rock, Chris rice sticks to mainly acoustic music. He has written many original songs, and also has an album out that is all traditional hymns. As far as musical style goes, Chris Rice and Family Force 5 are about as differnet as you can get. This goes to show the wide range of media that a particular genre can have, and how broad a genre can be.


While these two Christian music artists are drastically different, there are certain qualitites they each posess which make them a part of the same genre. They both profess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and therefore maintain certain moral and ethical standards with the music they produce. At the same time they each push the paramiters of this Genre in different ways. Family Force 5 does it through dressing crazy and bringing high energy concerts into the sphere of Christian music. One way Chris Rice does it by trying to bring back older styles of music like Hymns to the Contemporary Christian Music scene.