Some call it Godcore…
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Brad Shoup: The typical megachurch takes great care to project a corporate image. From bullet points explicated on embedded screens to staffed informational booths to coffee shops in lobbies, the modern congregation projects both a matter-of-fact prosperity and an assuring organizational competence. Concentrating worshippers in bright, modern structures reminiscent of Silicon Valley headquarters is one way to stanch the trend of declining attendance, as is installing a pastoral staff with the vision-casting ability of the cultiest corporate cultures. To the credit of Redman (a veteran worship leader) & LZ7, they’re channeling their cultural and spiritual capital into a profound social-justice effort. While their partner charity accepts direct donations, its hopes are pinned on “Twenty Seven Million” going viral. And if it does, it surely won’t be because of the song, or its awkward, redundant efforts to paint enslaved sex workers as actual human beings. The song is an unholy union of two genres: UK charity event hip-hop and soft-rocking, exhortatory worship. LZ7’s Lindz West goes for a point-free poignance, barking out a generalized picture of despair that goes out of its way to avoid the specter of actual sex. “Toilet Tisha” this isn’t — hell, even “Waterfalls” was more explicit. For his part, Redman enjoins us with flaccid, general urging, vague enough to convince its listeners that by spending 99p at iTunes, they’ve done their part. Supporting all this go-nowhere concern is a meek, piano-heavy production that suggests David Guetta as a teenage Mormon convert. Anything that brings humanity closer to justice is vital, to be sure, and no one’s getting a Facebook photo with a smiling brown child out of the deal. But as evangelicals, surely Redman and West believe that evil will exist until Christ returns. To lard one’s charity single with statements of incredulity at the extent of wickedness reveals the naive faith of the technocrat. God help us if they ever announce the Twenty Seven Million Conference.
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John Seroff: PROTIP: When in doubt about whether you’re being callous if the subject is meaningful but the music is horrible, always remember that you shouldn’t have to be a masochist to appreciate a song about ending sadism.
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Iain Mew: At one point last year, large numbers of my Facebook friends changed their profile pictures to cartoon characters, usually with a message stating that this was to raise awareness of child abuse. As That Guy who replies to heartwarming photoshops and urban legends with Snopes links, I just wanted to point out that that they were achieving nothing except making themselves feel morally good for doing something that they enjoyed anyway. Only doing that would make me just as bad. I ended up making a donation. Now, I really want to talk about how musically hopeless “Twenty Seven Million” is: how it sounds like Enter Shikari without the musical chops, exciting metal bits, or lyrical subtlety. I want to talk about how “That’s 27 million people who need heaven’s mercy!” is a big tactical error in excluding those militant secularists that are apparently taking over. So, basically, I think there’s a big future in secret outsourced charity trolling.
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Anthony Easton: Human trafficking is a sin which functions clearly against the Christian traditions of hospitality and economic justice. But how we handle that sin must come from a place of radical humility, and not the privilege that soaks through this track. But the pop charts aren’t the Wobbly songbook or the work of Billy Bragg, and expecting something ideologically pure leads one to some fairly dark corners (see the entire career of Bob Geldof). I damn well know it’s” a kind of historical oddity that I can sing most of the words to “There Is Power in a Union,” but there is a line in that song: “But who’ll defend the workers who cannot organize/When the bosses send their lackey’s out to cheat us?” which posits that the question of solidarity, of working on behalf of someone else’s liberation is alive. Here, that question is absent. Mostly because singers cannot think of themselves as sex workers, or domestics, or undocumented workers, or anything but someone speaking from a place of privilege and status. Its politics don’t disguise its failure as music. The flow is terrible. The sound track is self-serious. The whole enterprise is self-congratulatory enough to be toxic.
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Alfred Soto: You want corny uplift? You got it – with choir and everything!
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Jer Fairall: The problem isn’t the over-earnestness of this kind of issue song, nor even the generically rousing chorus, but that the news clips that open the song tell the whole the story. Without the foreknowledge that the subject is human trafficking, nothing that the artists themselves bring stops this from being a sanitized version of many a hard-luck ghetto tale, told much more effectively and unflinchingly by twenty-some years worth of rappers that most Christian music fans would never be allowed (or allow themselves) to listen to. This guy’s crap mock-Caribbean accent helps matters not one bit.
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Katherine St Asaph: Someone has probably filmed me singing every Matt and Beth Redman song (wonder why Beth’s barely credited? Wonder not! No, seriously, don’t wonder) in our youth group’s praise band. I don’t remember them sounding so much like “I Gotta Feeling,” but if you’re bowdlerizing any pop sound for the seekers, that’d be the one. The lyrics could’ve been written by any middle-school small group, which explains the yearbook sexlessness, the speaking for the subaltern, the iffy theology in a genre that shouldn’t allow iffiness (surely Unnamed Sin Worker isn’t actually in the pit of hell, unless being trafficked is now the unforgivable sin or unless resurrection is now a thing.) But let’s face it: nothing in this post will matter a whit. It’s got a message (and funding), and you can pray to it.
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