Ethan Millman of Rolling Stone had an amusing story on his hands, if ideology had not prevailed and rendered it into an uncritical public relations piece.
The story is this: The Recording Academy changed the category of the album “Bible Belt Baby” by Flamy Grant from Contemporary Christian Album to Best Pop Vocal Album. Millman reports that the change was the result of vulgarities in the song “Esther, Ruth, and Rahab,” which includes this line: “God would only hear a prayer/If it came from a person with a cock.”
Millman quotes this statement from the Recording Academy that confirms its reason for making the change: “Re-categorizing recordings with explicit language/content has been a standard practice for the Gospel & CCM genre committee, given that the Gospel & CCM Field consists of lyrics-based categories that reflect a Christian worldview.”
And that’s the point when the detachment of traditional journalism concludes. I am sure that is shocking to Rolling Stone readers.
The rest of the story hands the microphone to Matthew Blake (the offstage name of Flamy Grant), who has a sense of humor about a great many things other than his victimization narrative. In this story, his word is printed as gospel.
First Blake complains about the category change — one that most purveyors of Contemporary Christian Music would welcome, given the genre’s reputation as being bland and dull.
But Blake believes the change “completely buried me” because, as Millman explains, Blake would “now be measured against the likes of the world’s biggest superstars as opposed to a smaller niche of peers from the Christian music community.”
Next, Blake presents as a naif in the woods of Big Music: “This is all so new to me; I’m pretty clueless about the inner workings of the music industry.”
For a few paragraphs, Blake expresses frustration at not hearing about the change directly from the academy, but only through friends.
In the penultimate graph, Blake says “Esther, Ruth, and Rahab” is “the most biblical song I’ve ever written. It’s literally about women in the Bible.”
Well, not so literally, considering how Blake describes both Eve and Jezebel:
Of course Eve said, Fuck this system, I am chasing after wisdom
And Rachel wouldn’t let herself be played
Jezebel sure gave ’em hell, but she wasn’t scared to die
If you’re with Jael, think twice when you recline
The only reason we have Moses is cause Miriam was there
To keep his petty ass in line
In the final paragraph comes the heart of Blake’s self-pity: “Next time I write a song addressing the oppression of women and LGBTQ+ people in the church, I’ll be sure to do it in a way that’s more palatable to those doing the oppressing.”
Yes. As we all know, the Recording Academy is a hothouse of those people.
FIRST IMAGE: Esther Denouncing Haman, via Wikipedia