By JJT (written for ThinkChristian.net)

How Tom Waits, Kendrick Lamar, and Beck blend the sacred and secular.

I’ve said it before and I imagine I’ll keep saying it until the day I die: I don’t believe in “secular” music.

It’s not that I don’t agree with it or listen to it. I don’t believe in secular music the same way I don’t believe in mind readers or alien abductions. It doesn’t exist.

Ever since I was a little kid there was something about music that captured me—as a fan first, then as a participant. Music is spiritual. I believe, in fact, that it is essentially spiritual. It is its spirituality that makes it so powerful. In the Bible, music soothed an angry King Saul. It led Joshua’s troops into battle. It encouraged the early church, ushering partakers into the presence of God. Today, music still helps us celebrate and mourn.

Of course, music can also sell cheeseburgers, spread political lies, and embed the telephone number of a carpet company deep into the recesses of our brains. So we should be just a little afraid of music.

It is the spiritual essence of music, I would suggest, that gives it its power. While artists attempt to harness that power in the service of thought and feeling, propagandists harness it in the pursuit of crass and nefarious ends. As “secular” as a burger ad may seem, it is the spiritual nature of music that makes that ad so effective.

In The New York Times Magazine, interviewer Wyatt Mason spoke to three very different musicians about artistic creation. Their thoughts revealed something about the spiritual quality of music. In separate conversations with Kendrick Lamar, Tom Waits, and Beck, Mason instigates the kind of hype-free, non-commercial, creative reflection that is like water to someone like me.

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