Fans worship Christian rock
Tim Gross
Issue date: 5/1/09 Section: Features
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Sports Assignment Editor
Even the most accomplished rock stars roll with Christian music.
Last March, U2 released "No Line on Horizon," the band's 23rd album in the last three decades.
The album's subtle, solemn track incorporates a melody written centuries before the Irish rock band's 1980 debut.
"White as Snow" recounts a soldier's dying thoughts in Afghanistan. The tune starts slow with piano chords and single notes. A guitar line and a slow heartbeat take over the rhythmic set up before Bono's voice kicks in with the melody.
As he sings the first lines, "Where I came from, there were no hills at all/The land was flat, the highway straight and wide," a familiarity rides along his sinuous voice.
"My brother and I would drive for hours/Like the years instead of days/Of faces as pale as the dirty snow."
The verse's melody came from "Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel," a Christian hymn written around 1100 A.D. by an unknown composer.
While music today continues to change and develop, Mark Huddle, professor of history, said old tunes still find their place in popular culture.
"We live in an age of sampling," he said. "Old music is always being deconstructed and used to create new forms."
Old melodies helps people relate to the pieces they listen to, Laura Peterson, a professor of visual and performing arts, said.
"I think across all music, if you can insert a tune that somebody knows, it's going to immediately make the music sound more familiar to them," she said.
Peterson said music sampling helped build up the rap genre, as rappers re-hashed and blended old melodies underneath new lyrics.
If an artist borrows an old melody, original lyrics could play a subconscious role in the new song's meaning, said Les Sabina, a doctor in music composition.
"If there's a text to it, like lyrics, and people know what the original text was, it would be maybe a further statement on what the idea was behind the original text to put new lyrics to the same melody," he said.
Huddle, who teaches a cultural studies course called "The Politics of Pop," said U2 has been known to apply deep meanings and underlying themes to its work. He said more bands have been applying, among other things, a religious context to popular music.
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