Anyone remember Surfaces?
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Has Contemporary Christian Music been ripping off “Sunday Candy” for a while now or is this a novel attempt? I am Jewish and cannot be bothered to do any more research into this.
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Julian Axelrod: Before I listened to the song, I was drawn to the title. Maybe this would be a testament to compromise in a relationship, or an ode to learning new things from your partner. Nope! It’s about Jesus! (Turns out the album title Child of God II is not a Clipse-style subversion of religious iconography.) The actual song is perfectly fine, but as with most Christian music, it does sound like Forrest Frank is singing about being in a romantic relationship with his Lord and Savior. So maybe I was kind of right?
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Nortey Dowuona: This sounds like Peter CottonTale doing a quick fixup for Brian Fresco in a Zoom session back in 2021, then deciding to do a choir arrangement to fill up the mix. It doesn’t work — not even for me, who likes Peter CottonTale.
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Katherine St. Asaph: I hope someone is publishing a simplified hymnal so praise bands and congregations do not attempt to sing “togeh-eh-eh-eh-ther.”
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Alfred Soto: Maybe Mk.gee and Dijon could produce this sister Christian.
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Leah Isobel: The nexus of American capitalism and American Christianity activates my fight-or-flight instinct. Best wishes to Mr. Frank, but I need this song bleached from my brain.
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Ian Mathers: If this kind of Contemporary Christian crud is mainstream enough that it makes sense for TSJ to cover it, that’s as bad a sign of cultural decay as corporations deciding that there’s no more money in signalling homophobia (et al) is bad. The fact that the song fucking sucks is just a little cherry-shaped turd on top of the shit sundae.
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Al Varela: What the fuck is wrong with you?
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Claire Davidson: By now, multiple music writers have made the argument that the best pop cultural mirror to America’s current descent into fascism is the number of pop songs that have attempted to distill the bland aesthetics of contemporary Christian music into secular contexts, with Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” the obvious example. This is concerning already given that pop music, with its emphasis on sexuality and immediate, bodily pleasure, has been a lightning rod for conservative culture warriors for decades, and seems even more primed for backlash in an era characterized by willing tradwife submission and manosphere-driven vengeance. Somehow, though, Forrest Frank — one half of the duo Surfaces, already responsible for one of the decade’s most inane pop hits — managed to create an even more insidious offshoot of this trend with “Your Way’s Better.” The song begins as a typical Christian power ballad, where Frank laments his previously sinful ways that left him purposeless and disillusioned with life. This opening verse is already a rough sit, given Frank’s willowy, febrile timbre — if it were played straight, Frank would hardly be best the spokesperson to attest to God’s strengthening power. When the chorus arrives, “Your Way’s Better” becomes a mangled hybrid of pop, gospel, and hip-hop, implementing a painfully staccato piano beat and hollow, programmed trap skitters, ostensibly to rouse a younger demographic. The meme of the youth pastor attempting to relate to kids these days is overplayed, but that’s really the only analogy that conveys just how laughably ill-fitting this genre splicing is. Worse, in trying to assume the pose of a credible hype man, Frank contorts his broad platitudes into turns of phrase that further bastardize his supposed spiritual convictions: if the most one can say about their higher power is that their words “[make] waves like a jet ski,” their creed should not command any attention. What really disturbs me about this song, though, is that the presumably white evangelicals who contributed to its success — an overwhelmingly conservative cohort — likely also helped elect all manner of politicians who have worked to make life irreparably harder for Black Americans: the same demographic who pioneered the hip-hop tropes that Frank so dreadfully mutates here. (Remember, Forrest Frank is from Texas, a state that is currently enacting some of the Republican Party’s most inhumane instincts.) In that sense, “Your Way’s Better” may be the perfect musical encapsulation of the second Trump administration: a valorization of a regressive cultural hegemony that attempts to erase the very marginalized people who made it possible in the first place.
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