. . . and the man there said the music wouldn’t play . . .
Posted By vblack on January 17, 2012
I love music. I especially love well crafted, powerful music that includes creative arrangements and deep lyrics. Unfortunately, as a Christian, I am less than excited about a lot of the music that has been released by Christian artists over the last few years. A lot of it is predictable, repetitive, and simplistic.
Christie Nockles, formerly of Watermark, released a song a couple years ago called, Waiting there for You, that I feel is well crafted, even inspired. It is hard to describe why a song touches your soul, but you know it when it does. And when it does it just makes you want to smile. I can’t imagine anyone, even a non-believer not wanting to hear this song. So, I beleive that a song like this one should even be played on a secular radio stations and not be exclusive to Christian Stations.
I do not believe, as many fellow believers do, that listening to secular music is a sin. Granted, placing any music above God in your life is sinful, but listening to and even enjoying well-crafted music that is not blasphemous is no more a sin as walking into a building that is not a church. God is everywhere.
This morning I was flipping stations and came across Christy Nockles Waiting there for You. Oddly enough it was on a rock station that promotes itself as Playing what we want. What they want to play is not always what I want to hear, but, but often it is so this station is on speed dial. However, I have rarely heard a song played on this station that was as bold in proclaiming God as this song is. I thought it was cool that this very secular station was proclaiming the Gospel and the programming director probably didn’t even know it.
When the song was over, an ad for K-Love played. I looked at the radio, a mistake considering I was dodging college kids while driving through Hinds Community College at the time. I thought, maybe I was just mistaken and this wasn’t the rock station after all. But the radio dial clearly said 94.7, not 100.9. What was this? A glitch in my van’s radio? It was a mystery.
Well I solved the mystery the same way I solve most mysteries these days, I consulted Google. I discovered that as of midnight last night two rock stations, 94.7 and 93.9 changed ownership to K-Love. They made one a K-Love Station and the other an Air-1 station.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not going to mourn the loss of 94.7. I don’t really care about 93.9. I didn’t like it any way. And I am glad there are more Christian music radio stations in Jackson, MS. The only thing is I question the logic of this decision by K-Love Radio.
There ar e few reason I am not on board with this decision.
- Since there is almost nothing local about K-Love, 12 employees of the two stations will apparently be unemployed; always a sad situation, yet even worse in this down economy.
- JAck FM had a unique “No DJ” format that was refreshing no matter what kind of music it played. I have always hoped it would rub off on the other stations.
- People who only listen to Clasic Rock now only have 106 to listen to. If you ahve ever listened to the DJs on 106, you would understand why I am not a fan.
But I guess what bothers me the most is that K-Love is continuously crying for more money. Its DJs are constantly saying how their stations are underfunded and claiming that if I don’t give more money, stations will close and Christian music will cease to exist in certain major markets. Yet, they are spending 2 million dollars so they can own 3 stations in a market as small as Jackson, MS. And two of those stations will be identical, playing the exact same music at the exact same time. This seems to me to be poor stewardship of the funds they have been given.
My only hope is that, now that they purchased Jack FM, they will learn from it and tell their DJs to shut up and just play the music.