Several years ago, my mom excitedly baked chocolate chip cookies for a drug-addicted sex pest.
Knowingly? That’s a different story – this story.
Michael Tait, one of the biggest-selling vocalists in CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) history, primarily through dc Talk and Newsboys, admitted last month that his resignation from the latter band in January – in which he said he was living a double life – was to go into rehab for cocaine use – cocaine he is now alleged to have given away from the Newsboys tour bus. And the allegations of young men he sexually touched decades ago are, along with the bigger package of accusations, “largely true.”
For the Newsboys’ part, they are siding with victims and horrified to learn the allegations are largely true. But there’s suspicion regarding how much they knew and how they could have missed this.
The investigative report breaking this story is long, detailed, and unflattering to anyone with power. Those with more power are distancing themselves hard; the band says it’s been dropped from its label, not long after separate legal issues scrapped the Canadian leg of a tour. And radio stations have been shelving dc Talk and Newsboys songs in the wake of all this.
Tuning In
My family was introduced to the music of the Newsboys by my uncle. The band had made a comedy feature-length video in connection with their album Take Me to Your Leader – a kind of This Is Spinal Tap but about saving a family circus instead – and at age 11 I might have been right in the sweet spot for appreciating it. At the time, the band wrote most of its lyrics in conjunction with Steve Taylor, who brought rare wit to CCM, and that’s what drew my parents in.
In 2000, the band was my third-ever concert. The tour for the album Love Liberty Disco involved an AirDome, which was rightly called an “inflatable arena.” I probably don’t need to tell you that inflatable arenas are cool, and it allowed the band to set up in surprising places, like the large parking lot in Harrisburg where we went.
They played a mix of old favorites and new material, as you would expect, and we bought a poster that went up in my room. But those old favorites had John James singing them on the record, and he was not on that tour. Why? The official line was that he’d left to pursue ministry. The truth, as he talked about years later, was that his marriage had fallen apart as he spiraled into alcohol and cocaine abuse.
Socially Acceptable
To a secular band, losing two rock and roll singers to sex and drugs in 25 years might be seen as normal attrition rates. But not in CCM, where the image has to stay cleaner than clean to be viable. And make no mistake: dc Talk, even in disbandment, and the Newsboys have been viable. Both have sold millions of albums. dc Talk had a Jesus Freak cruise a few years ago, the surest sign that the kids who adored you are now adults with jobs.
What happens when there’s an inconvenient setback to that viability, like hedonism? There’s an awfully big incentive to deny and bury. That’s quicker and less disruptive than assessing whether the industry is asking too much of its stars, or whether a message of grace and redemption for all implies that the messengers are also a mess.
In CCM marketing, the messengers aren’t allowed to be a mess. Given the largely ‘90s origins of the marketing, that was the feature, rather than a bug. Many Christian things of the decade positioned themselves as what later decades of marketing strategy would call healthy alternatives: safe, clean fun in contrast to the secular world’s unsafe, dirty fun. But to succeed, they always had to move in the shadow of those less healthy alternatives – really, require people to like the less healthy alternatives first. “Oh, do you like this band? Well, this Christian band is like them.” That was always the symbiosis: let the world lead, and the Christians will follow.
This symbiosis also had to perpetuate the notion that it wasn’t one, because secular music was dangerous. Conveniently, the culture already believed that. Backmasking scares, Tipper Gore’s parental advisory stickers, and so on reflected a world where music was considered unknowably and unbelievably unsafe, made by flawed people. The antidote was music considered unbelievably safe, made by flawless people.
But both sides were unbelievable, because both sides involved people. For every demonization, there is an equal and opposite lionization; learning to think of someone as unalloyed bad is also learning to think of someone else as unalloyed good.
Reality
That brings me back to my mom. As the AirDome’s portability hinted at, the Newsboys have made a lot of their money touring heavily in parts of the United States that don’t get many bands. If you’re familiar with where and how much Weird Al Yankovic and They Might Be Giants tour, it’s a similar model. Flyover country is drive-through country, and drive-through country has a lot of midsize towns wanting something to do.
In my parents’ case, that’s Quincy, Illinois/Hannibal, Missouri, which as a region has over 100,000 people and is seven hours away from CCM’s home base of Nashville. That’s definitely enough people for a profitable concert.
My parents, in a move much more characteristic of me than them, bought the VIP package for one of the Newsboys’ Quincy concerts in the 2010s. That let them be part of a Q&A with the band before the show. And to be nice to the band, figuring all that bus life denied them some normal comforts of home, my mom baked them chocolate chip cookies. They very much appreciated them, and for all the reasons my mom had figured they were worth baking. But for all that cookies are, they aren’t cocaine, and it turns out she could not give the normal comforts of home Michael Tait might have been craving.
For years, my mom has said that she wants the Newsboys song “Breakfast,” a jaunty number about a surprisingly theological school breakfast club, played at her funeral. The other song she’s always talked about for that is “Sky Takes the Soul” by the Proclaimers. I’m curious if that’s still true.
I was there for the 90s CCM era, and there is a whole lot of insightful truth to what Brandon digs into here.