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University of California Press

God Rock, Inc.

The Business of Niche Music
by Andrew Mall (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $95.00 / £80.00
Publication Date: Dec 2020
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 322
ISBN: 9780520343412
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 18 b/w photographs
Endowments:
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About the Book

Popular music in the twenty-first century is increasingly divided into niche markets. How do fans, musicians, and music industry executives define their markets’ boundaries? What happens when musicians cross those boundaries? What can Christian music teach us about commercial popular music? In God Rock, Inc., Andrew Mall considers the aesthetic, commercial, ethical, and social boundaries of Christian popular music, from the late 1960s, when it emerged, through the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic research, historical archives, interviews with music industry executives, and critical analyses of recordings, concerts, and music festival performances, Mall explores the tensions that have shaped this evolving market and frames broader questions about commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover in music that defines itself as outside the mainstream.

About the Author

Andrew Mall is Assistant Professor of Music at Northeastern University and a coeditor of Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Playlists

Introduction: Popular Music, Markets, Margins, and the Curious Case of Christian Music

PART ONE. CHRISTIAN MUSIC: AN INDUSTRY AND ITS HISTORY
1 "Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?" The Christian Market's Origins
2 The Great Adventure: Commercial Success in the Christian Record Industry and the Price of Profit
3 A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing? Christian Ethics Encounter Rock
4 "Find a Way": Amy Grant and the Christian Market's Mainstream

PART TWO. NICHE MUSIC MARKETS: ETHICS, PROFITS, AND RISK
5 Music to Raise the Dead: Christian Music and the Ethics of Style
6 Lost in the Sound of Separation: Resistance at Christian Music Festivals
7 From Margins to Mainstreams and Back: Crossover Cases and Their Markets

Conclusion: The Stability of Risk and the Risk of Stability

Appendix 1. Discographies
Appendix 2. Pop Singles with Christian References (1957–70)
Appendix 3. Major Christian Record Labels and Subsidiaries
Appendix 4. Successful 1990s-Era Pop Singers' Albums
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"This landmark study of Christian music in the United States offers both resonances and challenges to those in the field of religious studies."
— Religion
"An entirely original book that provides great insight into this often-overlooked wing of popular music. Andrew Mall's valuable scholarship reveals Christian music to be complex and hardly the monolithic entity that the marketing category might imply."––Theo Cateforis, author of Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s

"Clear and engaging. Andrew Mall's book does two things at once: it provides insight into the Christian pop-rock world as it navigated and navigates tensions between religious goals, musical goals, and commercial goals, and it adds to the broader conversation about how markets and subcultures, scenes, and mainstreams interact with one another."––Eric Weisbard, author of Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music

Awards

  • Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Historical Research on Recorded Popular Music Category Certificate of Merit 2021 2021, Association for Recorded Sound Collections
  • Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award Shortlist 2022 2022, Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame