On God and Pop Music

PARTY WAVE released their debut album DAWN PATROL today and I can’t stop listening to it.

Catchy, warm, it feels like California sunshine. The kind of music that makes you feel like the windows are down and everything is going to be alright. Underneath that feeling, woven into every hook and bridge, is an unambiguous Christian message from artists Forrest Frank and Noah Hayden. Unhidden. Unapologetic.

It is masterful to get people to sing along without realizing they are worshipping. In a world where some of the loudest, most broken, fractured versions of ourselves dominate the charts, DAWN PATROL feels like a wonder.

Ideas need vessels. A thousand iterations of the same radical message moving through whatever cultural container can carry it. The message doesn’t change. The vessel does.

Bob Marley spending a lifetime smuggling scripture into the bloodstream of global popular culture. Justin Bieber living in the threshold between worship and pop. Kanye standing at the intersection of faith and divine confrontation.

Pop music doesn’t just reflect culture. It engineers it. What a thing it is, when someone chooses to put something sacred there, gathering us in the quiet collective remembering that we were never just looking to be entertained

May many more come. Christian or otherwise.