Gungor, Zombies and Inhabited Music

It looks like a human... It eats like a human… It still walks and makes noise and resembles a human, but it’s not. It’s a zombie. It has no soul. – Michael Gungor

If you have not discovered Gungor’s music yet, I would highly recommend giving them a listen.  It’s rare for me to find music that truly excites me, let alone excites me more each time I listen to it.  Gungor’s music has that effect on me.  It’s extraordinarily engaging on the first listen, and rewards further more detailed listening as well.  I’m waiting on further work from them, but I’m dangerously close to including them in my pantheon of all time favorites. 

For me, the quality of their music that seems to most consistently catch my ear is its inhabitedness.  There is an alive quality to it.  The music embodies the heart of the song.  The melodies, harmonies, instrumentations and voicings all seem to exist to serve the song.  To Gungor, the song and the body of songs seem to be a beautifully valid end in and of themselves, period.  What makes this more interesting is the ideas embodied by the music and lyrics are what might typically be categorized by genre as “worship”, though I don’t think much of their music would be adaptable to many contemporary liturgies.  I’m always a sucker for tension, so this is one I’d like to take a quick dive into.  Why would this beautiful, worshipful, engaged music seem to be out of bounds for most churches?  Or perhaps to rephrase the question, is there something about their music that is at odds with Christian, and perhaps more specifically Evangelical Christian tastes?  We’ll explore two sets of ideas to answer that question, Michael Gungor’s and Flannery O’Connor’s. 

Michael Gungor, the lead singer and songwriter of Gungor, obliquely addresses my question in a blog he wrote last November.  He suggests, I believe correctly, that many Christian singers and songwriters view music simply as a vehicle intended to deliver the content (lyrics) of a song.  The vehicle (the music) from this perspective then is interchangeable.  It doesn’t matter what the vehicle is as long as that which is carried in the vehicle clearly points people to Jesus.  Songs here are simply 3 to 4 minute sermons.  He cites a quiet, intimate song he had written that was covered by a hardcore/screamo band as an example.  Instead of recognizing the inherent connection of the lyric to the music, the screamo band uprooted the lyric from the shell of the song and replanted it into what from Gungor’s perspective is an entirely foreign and inhospitable terrain.  He goes on to share why he believes this utilitarian understanding of music undermines music’s inherent value.  He writes,

 If you want to reach emo kids, then sing emo music but with Jesus language. The problem with this is that emo music is not simply reducible to certain sounding tones and chords. There are emotions and attitudes of different genres of music that are the soul of the music. You can’t remove the anger from screamo and have it still be screamo. It’s the soul of that music, whether that soul is good or evil is not the point, simply that it is the soul. So when you remove the soul from music and transplant the body parts (chord changes, instrumentation, dress, lights, and everything but the soul…) and parade it around with some more “positive” lyrics posing as Christian music, then what you have is a musical zombie.

It looks like a human.. It eats like a human… It still walks and makes noise and resembles a human, but it’s not. It’s a zombie. It has no soul. It just uses its human body for its own purposes.

I find it interesting that this “body snatcher/zombie” music essentially puts on the style and airs of the genre its engaging, but replaces its soul with something foreign.  Granted this is very imprecise/metaphorical language, but I think you get the picture.  There’s a sense in which when Christians engage musical genres (and one can make the same case for film, novels, the visual arts etc…) in this manner, they actually create something that undermines the heart of the Christian message, which is the Incarnation.  I understand that may sound preposterous, but follow me here.  

The Father loved and respected humanity, which is of course a Divine creation, so much that the Father sent the Son to share their existence as a means of communicating the depth of the Father’s love.  Jesus became the language (the Word) through which the Father chooses to communicate this love.  The Father didn’t simply send the Son as a facsimile of a human in order to articulate a proposition; no, the eternal Son BECAME flesh. The Son embodied the message of the Father and through his words and actions on Earth acted out the Father’s love for all to see.  So if the Father respects the brokenness, foibles, and foulness of humanness enough to fill it with the Son, shouldn’t Christians respect musical forms (the language of music) to the extent that we don’t zombify it with the Christian message.  Instead, if we’re to follow the Father and Son’s lead, shouldn’t the musical form be inhabited by the Christian who then embodies that Divine message of love?

Flannery O’Connor speaks about this when she discusses the inherent value of the novel.  Citing Jacques Maritain’s assertion read through Aquinas that art exists for the good of that which is made, O’Connor asserts, “The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it.”  She goes on to suggest, “I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.  Then they find themselves writing a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.”  I think this parallels what Gungor writes.  What is created, particularly by the Christian who respects the Son’s Incarnation, should only be created for the good of that which is created.  To this end O’Connor would write, “God does not care anything about what we write.  He uses it.”  The Christian creates out of a creativity/muse/heart/inspiration under the influence of the Holy Spirit.  Should we not trust the Spirit to work through the gifts given the Christian?  

That brings us to the heart of the answer to the question I posed earlier.  I might suggest part of the reason Gungor’s music would seem out of place in many liturgies is because Christians, particularly Evangelical’s don’t trust art.  Perhaps it’s because it doesn’t directly produce results, read conversions; or perhaps because we prefer direct references to the truth to indirect allusions. Whatever the reason, I think the music of Gungor is evidence that we do ourselves a disservice.  We miss opportunities for Divine encounter by not allowing the arts to do their work in our lives.  Take a listen to a few of the links below, and see if you might agree.    

Let There Be - An amazing song about creation.  You can hear form coming to formlessness 

This Is Not the End - A wonderfully joyfully defiant song about death

Church Bells - A melancholy song about lost joy

Ezekiel - Drawn strait from Ezekiel's parable