How Sufjan Stevens undermines the stigma of Christian music.
In a 2003 episode of South Park, Eric Cartman looks for a platinum album and decides to choose the simplest route to start a Christian band. After all, it's pretty simple. Just take some popular songs and copy them, but don't forget to name God a few times. Cartman does just that: he becomes famous by singing a number of regular ballads, by inserting “Jesus” instead of “you”, only to find that with the Christian music industry, you can't actually go platinum with the Christian music industry. Although blatantly exaggerated, like almost everything in South Park, twelve years later, the episode underlines a stigma that still surrounds Christian music. The general consensus is that, when it comes to music, Christians tend to make 'devotional artifacts' and 'didactic nonsense ', at least in the words of singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens.
Sufjan Stevens
