Is Cross Rhythms giving too much coverage to music perceived as "cool" (hip hop, alternative rock, etc) at the expense of music perceived as "cheesy" (easy listening, country and western, etc)?

Johnny Cash

Steve Pritchard, by email
The Cross Rhythms ministry is directed mainly at young people so the music that should be featured most should be targeted at that age group. Although I'm not a teenager I know from what they say at church what kind of Christian music they listen to. This tends to be modern praise and worship as well as trendy styles of music. It seems sensible to me that Cross Rhythms should concentrate on covering articles aimed at its target group. If you want to enlarge your target group to married or older groups of people, then yes you should cover articles on "cheesy" music as well.

Gay Dixon, Australia
As Music Director of Rhema FM, Sunshine Coast, Queensland, I find that the information given in Cross Rhythms on "cool" music very helpful and interesting. However, yes I do think that the "cheesy" (just love that description!) music is suffering. I would like to see a good balance in both areas of music and I would think that your readership would then grow quite a bit. My own personal taste in music covers most sections of "cool" as well as "cheesy"!

Tony Cummings
As this is the last Opinion8 for a while, I hope readers will allow Cross Rhythms' editor to throw in his sixpen'orth on the issue of cool vs cheesy music. When Cross Rhythms started back in 1990 we took particular delight in running articles covering the whole musical spectrum. We published cover stones on easy listening artists, ran a series on classical music composers and even printed such esoteric delights as a survey of the Estonian Christian music scene! Gradually though, we've run less and less on minority taste music and less and less on the middle of the road/easy listening axis. In retrospect, I think this is a bit of a shame. Cross Rhythms is a sufficiently mature enough publication with, hopefully, a sufficiently mature readership to be able to run a cover story on Marilyn Baker or an in-depth interview with George Hamilton IV without losing our readers' support. On the spiritual front, I feel the snobbishness you sometimes find amongst supporters of "cool" music shows a lack of respect towards those with different aesthetic tastes. Cross Rhythms was never meant to be simply a youth publication. I'd like to believe that whether a reader's interest rests in hardcore or hymnody, balearic or bluegrass, he or she would be able to see beyond the limitations of style and taste and perceive music as a vast cultural landscape through which the Spirit of God is currently sweeping.