I can only be confused

On New Year's Eve, my church showed a recent movie about Mercy Me's Bart Millard, I can only imagine, in which his journey from being an abused child to CCM stardom is profiled--if perhaps fictionalized a bit.  One thing which really stuck out for me is the movie's notion that there is a group of "godfathers" in Nashville more or less policing the industry, weeding out groups which are technically proficient but not "genuine." 


As someone who has heard a fair amount of CCM that can only be charitably described as "mumblin' and moanin' with a metronome", this surprised me to a great degree.  We have this Politburo of quality control, and the result is "Jesus is my boyfriend" dreck?   The suggestion is as if Deming's work resulted in not Toyota, but Yugo.


So I started thinking about musical greats outside of CCM and what they do.  Put gently, pretty much all of classical music and opera is, per the movie's objection to Millard's early work, "singing someone else's song", and nobody seems to have been bothered.  In the same way,  Van Halen's album Diver Down is mostly covers as well, and a large number of songs you'll hear on the radio are written by someone else.


That brings me back to the question of exactly what those "godfathers", which in the movie include Michael W. Smith among their number, are doing with a prescription of "singing your own songs".   Now perhaps my esteem for Mr. Smith is affected by his nauseating song "Breathe", but it strikes me that perhaps the problem with CCM is that, indeed, they are singing their own songs.


How so?  Well, consider what you learn when you watch great performers and sing their songs.  It's about tempo, volume, tone, how you position your body, facial expressions, and the whole nine yards.  In other words, musicality and performance.


So if indeed the CCM brass are encouraging this, it's no surprise that they're not producing a worthy product.  They're telling bands to short circuit the process of learning the trade.