"Christian pop groups, Christian folk groups, Christian heavy-metal groups, Christian reggae groups... No album was actually titled I Found God And Lost My Talent, but I'm sure that was just an oversight."
— PJ O'Rourke, in Holidays in Hell, upon visiting a Christian music store at the Christian theme park Heritage USA in 1987
Cosy Moments, as its name (an inspiration of Mr. Wilberfloss's own) is designed to imply, is a journal for the home. It is the sort of paper which the father of the family is expected to take home with him from his office and read aloud to the chicks before bed-time. It was founded by its proprietor, Mr. Benjamin White, as an antidote to yellow journalism. One is forced to admit that up to the present yellow journalism seems to be competing against it with a certain measure of success.
Finally, Hell's Bells makes the fatal mistake of attempting to offer an alternative to secular music. Over images of sweeping American landscapes and footage of liturgical dancers plays a dreadfully dull, studiously rhythmless song about Jesus dancing into world to dance away our sins. Ironically, you can't dance to it. It has some strains of modern freakfolk, but with Beatlesque orchestration and dry, expressionless vocals. No wonder the kids listen to heavy metal.
To be a Christian youth-group kid is to be in an eternal state of knowing that you are getting the second-hand versions of everything else that’s cool, and you’re often getting it years after everyone has already moved onto the next thing. That your parents and your church are constantly handing you the knockoff that’s not nearly as good, not nearly as fun, and certainly not considered “cool” by anyone other than the people handing it to you in the first place. Whatever the trend, whatever the era, you don’t get to be part of it. In the ’90s, while everyone else at middle school was buzzing about Mortal Kombat or Pokémon or Harry Potter, you’re left out of the loop.
You can see American Christianity grasping for relevancy in the many teen-oriented bibles on the market. There’s the X-Treme Teen Bible (sunglasses and skateboards and neon fashion), The Manga Bible (big-eyed and spiky-hair renditions of the apostles), and The Gamer Bible (voxels and crafting and health bars and a summary of the book of Luke laid out in metaphors of leveling up your dedication to Jesus Christ). There are Christian versions of DanceDanceRevolution. Christian cover albums of the latest top ten pop songs. Christian versions of Pac-Man created by hacking the original code. There’s an old first-person shooter where you are Noah on the ark, using a slingshot to herd around animals to their stables. Christian kids were offered all this while their friends at school — or the people at school they wish were their friends — were experiencing the real thing. This dearth left kids scrabbling for their own cross-section of cool and Christian. Dancing right on the border of “extremely online” and “extremely offline,” you will find the Christian Sonic the Hedgehog fandom.
You can see American Christianity grasping for relevancy in the many teen-oriented bibles on the market. There’s the X-Treme Teen Bible (sunglasses and skateboards and neon fashion), The Manga Bible (big-eyed and spiky-hair renditions of the apostles), and The Gamer Bible (voxels and crafting and health bars and a summary of the book of Luke laid out in metaphors of leveling up your dedication to Jesus Christ). There are Christian versions of DanceDanceRevolution. Christian cover albums of the latest top ten pop songs. Christian versions of Pac-Man created by hacking the original code. There’s an old first-person shooter where you are Noah on the ark, using a slingshot to herd around animals to their stables. Christian kids were offered all this while their friends at school — or the people at school they wish were their friends — were experiencing the real thing. This dearth left kids scrabbling for their own cross-section of cool and Christian. Dancing right on the border of “extremely online” and “extremely offline,” you will find the Christian Sonic the Hedgehog fandom.
— Colin Spacetwinks, "The Pious World of Christian Sonic the Hedgehog Fan Art"
"I kind of got the sense that radio took on Juice WRLD as the acceptable mainstream version of XXXTentacion, with...no history of violence."
"It wasn't just not being gangsta. Tribe wasn't gangsta. The Beastie Boys were not gangsta. But Arrested Development felt anti-gangsta. You read all the praise of [their] first album, and so much of it is about not being Ice Cube or Ice-T. [...] No one took their talk of revolution seriously after they got so much praise from the establishment while other acts were clearly very threatening to it. Ice-T was rapping about killing cops and Arrested Development was rapping about playing a game of horseshoes. A game of horseshoes! When Ice-T says he hated them, it's also because he took [their] whole 'life music' thing as an implicit criticism that he only made 'death music'. [...] For a group who rapped about 'Who are we to judge?', they feel pretty judgey. They absolutely set themselves up for a really tedious discourse about who's really selling out by living down to negative stereotypes versus living up to unthreatening positive stereotypes. It's not like gangsta rap is beyond criticism — there's plenty to criticize — but the overwhelming impression was if you supported one, you were attacking the other. If you listened to Zingalamaduni, you had to put down the 'Gin & Juice'. And if people are forced to choose between Snoop Dogg and you, you lose. Every single time."
