Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock
According to Beaujon, contributing writer forSpin, sales of Christian music totaled 47 million albums in 2003— outselling jazz, classical music and New Age combined, with sales climbing 10% each year for the past five years. Beaujon came up with the title of his book from a T-shirt he saw at the Cornerstone Christian music festival depicting Jesus's hands with holes in them. In addition to promoting fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, such messages, Beaujon explains, delivered in either folky ballad lilts or throat-wrenching Steven Tyleresque heavy metal screams, are strongly antiabortion ("stop killing my generation"), staunchly conservative (70% of Christian rockers and their fans are Republicans) and provirginity ("dating is prostitution"). Beaujon developed the book from a series of pieces written forSpinand, consequently, the text reads like pithy, onsite, you-are-there set pieces. In "Black and White in a Gray World," he profiles a day in the life of youthful prolife Christian rockers who tout their anticontraception, antiabortion and anti–stem cell research messages through prolife rock music. Many of Beaujon's musical references may be obscure to those over 25, but his insider view of the ideologically passionate world of Christian rock is compelling. Beaujon—an agnostic—reports well but passes no judgment.(June)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.