Ethan Millman of Rolling Stone had an amusing story on his hands, if ideology had not prevailed and rendered it into an uncritical public relations piece.
The story is this: The Recording Academy changed the category of the album “Bible Belt Baby” by Flamy Grant from Contemporary Christian Album to Best Pop Vocal Album. Millman reports that the change was the result of vulgarities in the song “Esther, Ruth, and Rahab,” which includes this line: “God would only hear a prayer/If it came from a person with a cock.”
Millman quotes this statement from the Recording Academy that confirms its reason for making the change: “Re-categorizing recordings with explicit language/content has been a standard practice for the Gospel & CCM genre committee, given that the Gospel & CCM Field consists of lyrics-based categories that reflect a Christian worldview.”
And that’s the point when the detachment of traditional journalism concludes. I am sure that is shocking to Rolling Stone readers.
The rest of the story hands the microphone to Matthew Blake (the offstage name of Flamy Grant), who has a sense of humor about a great many things other than his victimization narrative. In this story, his word is printed as gospel.
First Blake complains about the category change — one that most purveyors of Contemporary Christian Music would welcome, given the genre’s reputation as being bland and dull.
But Blake believes the change “completely buried me” because, as Millman explains, Blake would “now be measured against the likes of the world’s biggest superstars as opposed to a smaller niche of peers from the Christian music community.”
Next, Blake presents as a naif in the woods of Big Music: “This is all so new to me; I’m pretty clueless about the inner workings of the music industry.”
