CCM

AJ

The Longform Wrap #3

A few of the more interesting pieces I stumbled on on the web during March… Enjoy

1. On Spock – Gukira: Leonard Nimoy died, and amidst the outpouring of grief and the eulogies, I found I related most with this piece by Gukira who said it better than I ever could

I do not have a single Spock moment—an image or narrative that stays with me. Unlike those who know how to write about TV and movies, I cannot recall a single episode, at least not by name. When I was younger, when I first encountered Spock in Nairobi, in reruns from the 80s, I encountered him as gesture: as the arched eyebrow, as the grip that caused others to faint, as the Vulcan mind meld.

2. Marissa Mayer has completed Step One – Stephen Levy (Medium): On the Marissa Mayer effect at Yahoo;

She found Yahoo, despite its persistently huge audience, a sclerotic artifact of the desktop era, overly dependent on fading display ads, short of engineering talent and absolutely nowhere in mobile. And now the company is back on track. There are hundreds of new engineers, and an energized culture. Last year it reaped over a billion dollars of revenue in mobile ads — a business that didn’t exist at Yahoo when Mayer arrived. It bought Tumblr, which has 460 million users and is growing faster than Instagram. Yahoo has also built a system that allows app developers — the royalty of the new mobile age — to popularize and monetize their products. Meanwhile, Yahoo apps have won Apple Design Awards for two years running, and the company boasts over 500 million mobile users.

3.Valentine (Why There Would Be No Quiet Revolution Without My Husband) – Susan Cain (LinkedIn): From the Author of Quiet, a moving tribute in our post modern world of how much difference a supportive partner can still make.

I, in contrast, had written a poem. OK, a few poems. They were mostly about my love life, and they were clearly insignificant compared to Ken’s work in the world. Still, one evening I gathered my courage and handed him a sheaf of them, biting my nails as I anticipated his response. It came the next day, in an e-mail with big, 48 point letters: “Holy Shit. Keep writing. Drop Everything. Write. WRITE WOMAN, WRITE.” He wasn’t kidding about the “drop everything” part. This was not the bland encouragement of the experienced guy with a big book being kind to the young girlfriend and her poems. He wanted me to sacrifice for the craft of writing – and he, as my supportive partner, was prepared to do the same. He meant every word of that e-mail. I would find out just how deeply he meant it in the years to come.

4. As migrants we leave home in search of a future, but we lose the past – Gary Younge (The Guardian): Another emotive piece on the immigrant life (other pertinent reads – Finding a home in the apocalypse; Always Returning).

Migration involves loss. Even when you’re privileged, as I am, and move of your own free will, as I did, you feel it. Migrants, almost by definition, move with the future in mind. But their journeys inevitably involve excising part of their past. It’s not workers who emigrate but people. And whenever they move they leave part of themselves behind. Efforts to reclaim that which has been lost result in something more than nostalgia but, if you’re lucky, less than exile. And the losses keep coming. Funerals, christenings, graduations and weddings missed – milestones you couldn’t make because your life is elsewhere.

5: DC Talk and the influence of faith fortifying songs – Trevin Wax (The Gospel Coalition): Fascinating trip down memory lane to growing up in CCM in the 90’s and the pervasive influence of DC Talk which continues to this day in the solo career of TobyMac and the ‘takeovers’; Kevin Max as frontman for Audio Adrenaline and Michael Tait for the Newsboys, other iconic CCM players from that time.

1990’s CCM, for all the faults of its corny creativity (many of which are even more glaring and obvious as time goes by), was successful in one key sense. It gave me and my generation a different narrative. It was a sub-culture, yes, but no matter much some may sneer, it was a culture, and cultures are formative. Twenty years later, it’s the element of “fortifying faith” in so many dcTalk songs that has stuck with me. And for that, I’m grateful.

AJ

The Story Behind The Song: I Could Sing of Your Love Forever – Delirious?

Back in ’94 when Delirious was still the house band for The Cutting Edge, a local youth event run by the Arun Community Church in Littlehampton, doing music full time didn’t look feasible, nor was the possibility of multiple Dove Awards and a Grammy nomination. In fact between leading worship at the cutting edge events and keeping up with a hectic schedule of gigs across the UK, the group that would become arguably the UK’s greatest Christian contemporary music exports had to hold down day jobs to keep things ticking.

Song writer Martin Smith recalls being inspired by the seaside of Devon during a family holiday:

We were on holiday as a family. We were in Devon, staying in an old farmhouse. It overlooked the sea and the hills and the mountains. It really was, sit on the edge of a hill, pre-kids, being able to dream a bit more, I grabbed an acoustic guitar. That song just wrote itself in about five minutes.

Almost twenty years since then (seventeen since it made the cut on 1997’s Cutting Edge), it is a song that has consistently ranked amongst the most influential, and widely sung, praise and worship songs, been covered multiple times by artistes as diverse as Mercy Me, Sonic Flood and Hillsong United. Smith, now a solo artist since the disbandment of the band in 2009 still continues to be surprised by how much a simple song, cobbled together in five minutes continues to bless lives around the world. That is perhaps one of the more compelling themes of the Gospel, God’s Providence and Sovereignty in choosing to use things which are not the greatest or brightest and which do not have the greatest back stories to great effect.