Cards on the table: there is no God, and Christian rock cannot achieve greatness. Chances are you agree with the latter; to each their own with the former. John Jeremiah Sullivan, in his GQ classic “Upon This Rock” of 2004, claimed the genre had “excellence-proofed itself”:
It’s message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what’s more, it operates under a perceived responsibility—one the artists embrace—to “reach people.” As such, it rewards both obviousness and maximum palatability. . . . [A] question that must be asked is whether a hardcore Christian who turns 19 and finds he or she can write first rate songs (someone like Damien Jurado) would ever have anything whatsoever to do with Christian rock.
This question is wrestled with head-on in Adam Voith’s ingeniously titled novel Recommended If You Like. Christian rock is a genre, and also a professionalized network of labels, festivals, and churches with fat budgets and — crucially for struggling musicians — pay guarantees for playing. If you’re one of the real bands lightly fictionalized in Voith’s book, why give up all that institutional support for the indifference of the secular scene? Well, if you’re always just preaching to the choir, you’ll never know if your stuff is actually “first rate.” And you’ll never open for Modest Mouse.
R.I.Y.L. is set primarily in central Indiana and Seattle in the mid-’90s. Voith knows whereof he speaketh, with unquestionable bona fides in both the indie music scene and growing up “saved.” There’s the beloved youth-group pastor who lets the older teens smoke cigarettes. Cassettes ruined from being left in the sun. DIY shows in living rooms. The van that breaks down just before the sold-out gig.
The book’s first third follows the youth and young manhood of Andy Humphrey of Noblesville, Indiana. His Christian belief doesn’t preclude a lowercase-c catholic taste in music, which spans from Amy Grant to Jawbreaker. He works at a grocery store, lives with his parents, books Christian bands, and seems, by all accounts, a pretty amiable guy. This goes for the novel, too. In lieu of gut punches, we get belly rubs.
Chapters take the form of transcriptions of cassettes Andy records and then distributes by mail. There are 21 tapes in all, with four lost to time. The project is essentially a zine. Fans re-tape and share them with friends. He even has listeners in Canada.
In this way the text of the novel enacts the high-friction ecosystem of its subject. Discovering new music in 1995 — secular or not — took work. Maybe you had a Tower Records. Perhaps the wattage of a college radio station skimmed your neighborhood. More likely, you had a cool older sibling (see Almost Famous) or, in Andy’s case, a blue-haired friend to loan you CDs. Those of us born in the previous century can attest to the alchemy of the pre-Napster world, where that additional labor turned word of mouth into shared ardor. It’s how a band became your life. For some, life fossilized at this stage, as with Rob in High Fidelity.
Andy’s first few tapes are memory pieces, with a shaggy-dog charm that never turns saccharine. They aim for earnest disclosure: “The tapes are about feeling embarrassed.” Like John Jeremiah Sullivan, Voith seems constitutionally unable to look down on others. He’s also funny: “Rick Rider, who was older but held back twice, said his t-shirt was totally covered in come after sneaking away with a girl during lunch break. We’d been diagramming sentences in Composition, and I couldn’t understand how clothing got covered with an irregular verb.”
Once Andy befriends the emocore trio Roadside Monument, the chapters slide into traditionally dramatized scenes, with dialogue, settings, and a quicker pace. The Seattle-based band is about to release its LP Eight Hours Away from Being a Man on the Christian rock label Tooth & Nail. To quote James Murphy, “I was there,” and the title sounded cringe then too.
To reiterate, almost everything in Voith’s book is real. You can listen to Roadside Monument on Spotify. Add a stream to the 44,000 already logged for “Sperm Ridden Burden,” Andy’s favorite. Bob Weston of Shellac produced it, which was a big deal.
Andy unofficially signs on as roadie and assistant booker as the band crisscrosses America, bouncing between remunerative church shows and empty rock venues. When they can assemble a crowd, Roadside’s energy converts bystanders into fans, Christian or otherwise. They aren’t after “maximum palatability” or “message music.” Audiences can barely make out the lyrics.
Meanwhile, Roadside’s labelmate and neighbor Pedro the Lion is gathering buzz from the mainstream press. Critics don’t punish him for his association with Tooth & Nail. The novel asks, would Roadside have been more successful if they were godless heathens? Or simply more talented?
Consider the Blood Brothers, a screamo outfit from the Emerald City and roughly coeval with Roadside. Their first album boasted tracks like “This Adultery Is Ripe,” a blistering 97 seconds (to the 104 of “Sperm”) with sarcastic shock lyrics abetted by blitzkrieg sonics. They enjoyed success, for a band that lists a tractor among their instruments. Pitchfork gave Burn, Piano Island, Burn a 9.1, which minted the band overnight. They later shared a label with the White Stripes.
This may be my own nostalgia, but how can you resist songs named “Guitarmy,” “Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck,” and “Meet Me at the Waterfront After the Social”? (That last one’s for the Letterboxd crowd. It’s a quote from cult slasher Sleepaway Camp.) And as a former college-radio DJ and onetime resident of Seattle’s Capitol Hill — where Roadside’s manager lived — I can attest to the Blood Brothers’ batshit concerts. Picture a sweat-soaked, black-walled basement packed to the gills. Jordan Blilie croon-yawps the opening line of “Kiss of the Octopus”: “Do you want to live forever, baby?” A hundred kids pause the mosh pit to scream in unison, “Fuck yeah!” If memory serves, PBR shot out from my nose.
Meanwhile, R.I.Y.L. follows Roadside’s slow crash after takeoff. Perhaps they should be grateful for being able to tour at all. They were pushing CDs during the most lucrative decade for the music industry, when teens, flush with spending power, forked over $18 for a record with one hit. As Steve Knopper notes in his music-industry history Appetite for Self-Destruction, major labels killed the singles market to boost sales for full albums in yet another self-own as file sharing hastened their downfall.
For Roadside, it’s always one step forward, one step back. A random gig will move loads of merch. The next day they’ll be kicked off a bill for being signed to Tooth & Nail. Voith shows us how much these small differences mattered: Eight Hours Away from Being a Man came out the same year as Creed’s debut album, which sold 6 million copies. At the same time, the indie scene has always been defined by the narcissism of small differences. If you winced at my use of emocore, congrats! You may already be a flagpole sitta.
Here we must pause and note that Andy Humphrey distributes his cassettes under the nickname “The Christian Humper.” This ranks among great-awful monikers like Fuckhead, from Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, and Howie, from Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. (Regrettably, it also calls to mind Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers.) As Andy’s tapes find success, fan interactions appear inside of the tapes themselves, an aw-shucks mise en abyme that grates by the third instance.
This may be Voith’s hat tip to Bolaño, whose Savage Detectives seems an obvious influence. It also reinforces the laser focus on documenting its milieu. Voith includes warts-and-all dialogue with more “dudes” and “that sucks” than a middle-school skate park. Whenever deeper currents arise — around divorce, barely disclosed homosexuality, and sex of any kind — they’re quickly dispensed with.
The same goes for the larger machinations of Roadside’s scene. Where Sam Lipsyte, in No One Left to Come Looking for You, expands the aperture from strung-out punks in ’90s NYC to the institutions buffeting their art and audience, R.I.Y.L. is content to transcribe at the ground level. For example, we never set foot in the Tooth & Nail office, and so questions about whether the band is being supported or exploited go unanswered.
By preserving “ugly” echoing dialogue and the quotidian, shapeless details of life on the road, Voith maintains a pretense of authenticity familiar to readers of autofiction. If you’ll pardon the pun, your mileage may vary. I for one would love to see Voith’s oral history of his subject, à la Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom.
As a novel, R.I.Y.L. abrades against its container. Sometimes apprentice work emphasizes historical reality at the expense of the particular “truth” of the story. To my eye, Voith’s love for his characters proves the biggest obstacle, which parallels the sin at the heart of the novel: a lack of skepticism.
In “Upon This Rock,” Sullivan writes of the surety he felt as a born-again teenager, and of his later apostasy:
You can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It’s not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it—many were—it’s that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping into a circle, one that closes with you inside.
Voith writes from the other side of that door, about a genre of music that presumes the leap of faith has already been made. But youthful rebellion has been a pillar of rock music since Elvis Presley appeared on Ed Sullivan. Contrast this with pop, and its lack of a “just for us” ethos. A teenager might love Taylor Swift, but their parents’ fandom doesn’t dent their own. Not so with Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails. Or 100 gecs, now. (I think? I’m old.)
Sometimes teenage discovery is inherent to the work. It’s why you’ve never met an adult only now getting into Operation Ivy. Since the midcentury invention of the teenager, rock has been for the kids. And, to a lesser degree, definitionally anti-mainstream. Rock celebrates the short-term ecstasies of youth: yelling “Fuck yeah!” as you throw yourself at a stranger in the pit. Time is not supposed to be on your side. When Spearmint sang in “Sweeping the Nation,” “The tattoos all look old and faded / And stupid with a suit,” that stupidity’s a badge of honor.
Christian rock isn’t really against anything. And a novel devoted to its spirit imposes limits on itself qua novel. It may be odd to say that R.I.Y.L., with its found-text quality and period setting, lacks sufficient distance between author and subject. But a little distance makes all the difference.
As it stands, Voith’s novel is as much time capsule as love letter, capturing a bygone scene for fellow travelers. The heads who appreciate a Steve Albini cameo. The nostalgists with that threadbare concert tee they now wear while mowing the lawn. And nobody is more nostalgic than a ’90s rock fan. They’ll tell you, over and over, they were there.
Ryan Chapman is the author of the novels The Audacity and Riots I Have Known. He lives in Kingston, New York.