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Goodbye Jesus

Ojo Taylor - Ex Xtian Rocker Turned Atheist


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Hmmm...neat. I've never heard of Underground though...

 

I guess I'm still waiting for the members of Petra to leave the cult.

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Undercover was a favorite band of mine back then; their first three albums were pretty embarassingly trite - ("have you heard the latest/Jesus is the greatest") - but they did a couple of albums that were really honest and addressed pain and struggle.  It continually amazes me though how few get to this point and figure it out, even from my own Xtian past.

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The band's earlier fundy days:

 

 

 

Their fifth album, Balance of Power, was written in the wake of the death of the guitar player's wife and Ojo's divorce and disillusionment with extreme fundamentalism - it's an album I still like.

 

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I remember him!  They played at my church!  I had at least two of their cassettes!

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Okay, that first song was so bad that I shut it off after 15 seconds...it wasn't even the lyrics - the music was just really amateur...

 

...however...

 

The very SECOND that bass line started in the second song, I was hooked. That one is well done.

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I don't recall ever hearing about Undercover, and that was back when I was into Christian music. Then again, I may have heard some of their early stuff like the first video clip up there and quickly turned it off and not paid any attention to them afterwards, in which case I wouldn't remember them after so many years. Even though I was into Christian music, I only liked the good stuff. I couldn't stomach the crap that comprised a large percentage of the CCM industry. (That second song was far better and definitely listenable, even if a little redundant.)

 

Regardless, it's good to hear that Ojo has broken free from the cult.

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I'd like to see Petra leave the cult too. What about Stryper? I remember people liked Keith Green. Wonder if he had lived, and deconverted, what that would have been like.

I've gotten a lot out of reading books by ex-C's, peple like Dan Barker and John Loftus. But wouldn't it be pretty cool to find someone like Bob Larsen left the cult. Or maybe Carmen, that little political psychofant of the 1990s evangelical movement. I do think about it, a "perverse" train of thought for me, something like imagining some goody two shoes on acid.about

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Bob Larson was just a flat-out con man - I don't think he ever believed any of his own crap.  As to Keith Green, I heard Xtian people seriously theorizing that 'god' caused the plane crash to remove Keith Green from the planet because he was starting to go soft on Catholicism, which of course is the beast.  I've always been amazed at the things people I thought were basically intelligent could believe.

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I completely forgot that Ray Boltz came out as homosexual a number of years ago (looked it up yesterday for Brother Jeff...Glory!).

 

The guy that wrote the song "Thank You" that every shitty singer in church tried to crack out a few times a year during the offering.

 

I feel slightly bad that I get more of a thrill out of the fact that people freaked out that he's gay rather than being happy for him that he is now happy and free to be himself.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi...new here. Interesting to see a thread on Ojo.

 

My formative years were spent listening to a lot of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) unfortunately, but it's actually not all bad. However, I will say that quality and proselytization tend to have an inverse relationship. When one goes up, the other goes down.  Even in my xian days, I was drawn to artists who weren't about proselytization, and there are plenty. They just aren't well known because people who typically want to listen to CCM want dumb evangelical lyrics and bland music. Undercover were never one of my favorite bands but they were definitely awful in the 80s. I started to appreciate them in the 90s, beginning with the aforementioned Balance of Power, as they were a completely different band musically and lyrically. Ojo is not the only one in that band who is no longer a believer. The lead singer on their final album isn't a believer either.

 

There was a hushed backlash to explicit Christian lyrics in the early to mid 90s in that scene. Artists like Mike Knott, The 77s, Starflyer 59, etc seemed to sing more about human failure, relationships, hypocrisy from the religious right, and other more universal topics, which could make one wonder why they were even bothering with CCM. It seemed like things were headed in a more humanistic direction and then boom - shit got ugly again in the late 90s when worship bands started getting big. Now, it's just a cesspool of rotten music. A few of the more authentic artists have managed to carve out a niche audience and either independent or released stuff through non-CCM based labels.

 

Anyway, a few other examples of artists who left CCM:

 

Doug Pinnick (King's X) - He pretty much came out as gay and agnostic at the same time around 1997ish.

 

Jeff Seaver (Black Carnation) - Is an atheist now and formed the Freethought Association http://www.freethoughtassociation.org/pastmeetings.htm.

 

Klay Scott (Circle of Dust) - He's a pretty big musician now performing under the name Celldweller.

 

Gary Lenaire (Tourniquet) - Former lyricist for Tourniquet, who wrote a book called the Infidel Manifesto. http://sandstormreviews.blogspot.com/2007/01/infidel-manifesto-why-sincere-believers.html

 

Roger Martinez (Vengeance Rising) - One of the more bizarre stories from that scene. He is atheist now though, but he also went a little nuts. I'll spare you the summary. You can google though and there is plenty of information on it.

 

Dave Bazan (Pedro the Lion) - He didn't really make a big name for himself and until he released albums outside of a Christian Record label, but he eventually became full blown agnostic. Some of you might have heard of him as he's pretty big in indie music.

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Anyway, a few other examples of artists who left CCM:

 

Doug Pinnick (King's X) - He pretty much came out as gay and agnostic at the same time around 1997ish.

 

Jeff Seaver (Black Carnation) - Is an atheist now and formed the Freethought Association http://www.freethoughtassociation.org/pastmeetings.htm.

 

Klay Scott (Circle of Dust) - He's a pretty big musician now performing under the name Celldweller.

 

Gary Lenaire (Tourniquet) - Former lyricist for Tourniquet, who wrote a book called the Infidel Manifesto. http://sandstormreviews.blogspot.com/2007/01/infidel-manifesto-why-sincere-believers.html

 

Roger Martinez (Vengeance Rising) - One of the more bizarre stories from that scene. He is atheist now though, but he also went a little nuts. I'll spare you the summary. You can google though and there is plenty of information on it.

 

Dave Bazan (Pedro the Lion) - He didn't really make a big name for himself and until he released albums outside of a Christian Record label, but he eventually became full blown agnostic. Some of you might have heard of him as he's pretty big in indie music.

 

Gary Lenaire broke free?! Wow, I didn't know that. I was a big Tourniquet fan back in the day, so it's great to hear that.

 

I'm also a big King's X fan and I was aware of Pinnick leaving the faith. He seems to have softened somewhat to religion since then (he was quite pissed at the church for a while), but I think Jerry and Ty have both at least questioned religion. The last King's X album had a song written by Ty that apologizes for having told people that they needed forgiveness.

 

I wasn't as big of a fan of Vengeance Rising, but I did like some of their stuff and was aware of Martinez leaving religion.

 

I've never heard of Black Carnation and I wasn't into Circle of Dust or Pedro the Lion, but it's great to hear of more people breaking free from religion.

 

 

I will say that quality and proselytization tend to have an inverse relationship. When one goes up, the other goes down.

 

As a generalization, that is true. However, one very noteworthy exception is Whitecross. They were my favorite band for several years, and although they were evangelistic, they were very, very good. Rex Carroll was one of the best guitarists out there and could've easily outplayed the vast majority of guitarists in the secular rock scene. Although their first drummer was rather simplistic, their subsequent drummers were quite good. Overall they had a ton of great music that would appeal to fans of bands like Ratt and Motley Crue. Their proselytization definitely did not hinder their music, at least during Rex Carroll's time with the band.

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Yeah…even artists that proselytize can be good musicians from a technical standpoint, but a lot of those good musicians can still create some seriously sterile sounds. In fact, that was the problem with a lot of CCM. A lot of perfectly placed notes, slick tones, technical wizardry, coupled with canned Christianese.

 

I am pretty familiar with Whitecross as a friend of mine liked them and, yeah, you can put them against pretty much any of the other hair metal bands of that era, remove the Christian lyrics, and they’d hold up (although I could not stand “Holy War”). I remember Rex bring propped up as a stand out guitarist from that time, although he left the band after their biggest album, no? Hair metal of the Christian persuasion seldom came with vague imagery or abstract lyrics (that I can recall). Those bands pushed the Christian agenda pretty hard. It wasn’t really a favorite genre of mine though, Christian or secular.

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I am pretty familiar with Whitecross as a friend of mine liked them and, yeah, you can put them against pretty much any of the other hair metal bands of that era, remove the Christian lyrics, and they’d hold up (although I could not stand “Holy War”). I remember Rex bring propped up as a stand out guitarist from that time, although he left the band after their biggest album, no?

 

Rex left after the two new songs on "At Their Best," the first Whitecross compilation. The last full-length album before his departure was "High Gear," which I'm quite sure was not their biggest selling album. I suspect that the previous album "In The Kingdom" was probably their biggest selling album, since the title track got a fair amount of CCM radio play at the time, but I don't actually know sales figures. From my experience, most Whitecross fans prefer the first three albums, though. Only the first album had poor production quality (due to a low budget for recording), after which the sound quality was always good, but fans still liked the first album because of the strength of most of the songs and Rex's fantastic guitar work. Whitecross did re-record the first album after Rex returned to the band, greatly improving the sound quality (though they should've used the original vocal tracks instead of re-recording the vocals, imho).

 

I personally liked probably 95% of the music they put out with Rex. Even now I would still listen to them if the lyrics weren't so damn preachy. Great music, but the extremely religious themes are a major turn-off now that I no longer believe the myth.

 

(Sorry for derailing the thread a bit.)

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I liked the first album cause it sounded just like Ratt.

they put the singer in a different range vocally after that album IIRC.

Tried to make their own sound

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