This Week In Jesus: The Dovies Edition

Everybody knows Jesus loves Him some music. This week, the Dove Awards was broadcast live for the first time in several years, on the new and promising Gospel Music Channel, and Jesus was all OVER it, dude! I wonder what He thinks about the second-rate wannabe-GRAMMYs telecast. If you ask me, I think that He’d be disappointed that it wasn’t a little more fun and a little less intentionally-fractured-to-appeal-to-too-broad-of-an-audience (this week’s TWIJ sponsored by Hy-phen.com).

The Dove Awards are a perfect microcosmic example of what’s generally wrong with CCM as a whole - too few individuals dominating too big of an industry. In Christian music proper, it’s Salem, who dominates radio and print media. For the Doves, it’s the Gospel Music Association (GMA).I happen to know that the folks over at the GMA are great people, and they REALLY want the Dovies to be a big night for Christian music, but they just don’t have the resources or apparently the creativity to make it something special. For example, despite continued poor TV ratings and mediocre production value, the same guy that has produced the show for the last seven years (admittedly a pretty nice guy who has hired me in the past and gives a good friend of mine a fair amount of work) continues to get the gig. I don’t think anybody is deluded enough to think that he’s doing a killer job, but apparently he’s the only one that is willing to do the job he’s doing for what they can afford to pay. And it’s not that the show is terrible, but it’s kind of like a lot of stuff in Christian media (read: Relevant Magazine) - you WANT to get excited about it, but in order to do so, you have to accept mediocrity. And I only accept mediocrity in my American Idol contestants and my Star Trek movies.

The other plague on the Dovies (and, to a certain extent, Christian media in general) is the aforementioned fractured nature of its audience. In popdom, you’ve got the GRAMMYs, you’ve got the AMA’s, the CMA’s, the various MTV/BET awards, and a multitude of smaller niche shows, all with their own focus. While the GRAMMYs touch on a similarly smorgasbordic (not a word, but should be) plate of genres, they’ve got the resources to pull it off in a way that is if not successful, then usually at least interesting. You could make a case that the GRAMMYs have lost touch with the average music fan, and I would agree with you - I would also suggest it’s because they have suffered from the same scope creep phenomenon as the Doves. At the end of the day, the GMA is charged with the impossible task of taking basically every category of music (and music fan) and giving it its mandatory face time, all on a shoestring budget and a prayer (literally). And it just doesn’t work for them.

Christian music has made significant strides in the last decade towards producing music of an increasing qualiy, and it’s time that their one night to show the world that they matter got upgraded as well. Luckily, there might be help on the horizon. The three year old Gospel Music Channel (do NOT put a “the” in front of it - they HATE that) needs something different too, and they are new enough to the Christian music world that their aversion to CCM (Craptastic Christian Media) should still be firmly intact. While they have adopted a familiar shotgun-blast approach to their programming - their website names the following artists as GMC fodder: CeCe Winans, Johnny Cash, Randy Travis, Kirk Franklin and Jars of Clay - they appear to have the financial clout that GMA covets (not in a “thou shalt not” way, but in a…well, yea, mostly in that way) and as “the fastest-growing cable network in the country” they definitely have the national exposure that artists and their labels are after. They’re not going to put up with crappy ratings for long before they start demanding changes.

Will the Dove Awards still be mediocrerific next year? Yea, probably. But here’s hoping that sometime in the near future we graduate from the GMA’s monopoly on significant Christian awards shows and that SOMEBODY will step up to the plate and give us something different.

Bonus TWIJ notes:
-Jesus made another appearance on His favorite reality singing competition, as Carly Smithson of American Idol gave us her rendition of the moderately-controversial “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Apparently it wasn’t enough to appease either the Big Guy or the voting public, as she got the proverbial boot.
-In an emailed statement late Friday, blowhard televangelist John Hagee - whose endorsement of John McCain was both a blessing and a curse - admitted, regarding his controversial assertion that Hurricane Katrina was God punishing New Orleans for the fact that they were planning a gay pride parade, “As a believing Christian, I see the hand of God in everything that happens here on earth, both the blessings and the curses. But ultimately neither I nor any other person can know the mind of God concerning Hurricane Katrina. I should not have suggested otherwise.” It’s cool that he was humble enough to issue that statement, but unfortunately, based on the fact that he called Catholicism “The Great Whore of Babylon” and compared the Pope to the Jesus still thinks he’s an idiot (He told me so.) Fortunately, we do still love him just the way he is (but only because we have to.)

That’s all you’re getting out of me this week, TWIJers. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Tivod Colbert Report that’s not going to watch itself. Holla!