As the Catholic music industry catches up with the rest of the Christian music scene, what does it really mean to be a Catholic artist? (Concurrently appearing online at www.gvonline.net)

Seems like a pretty innocent question but one that is loaded with landmines, as I found out very quickly in my role as a pre-screener for the United Catholic Music and Video Association Awards (www.UCMVA.com). Having been very vocal about some blatant gaffs by the organization in the past (particularly in either allowing very old recordings to be continually re-nominated or in having music in totally inappropriate categories), I was asked to put my money where my mouth was and help reshuffle and weed out this year's first round of nominations.  It turned out that one of the hardest tasks was not trying to determine the categories or eligibilities of recordings from their copyright date, but it was in determining who was actually a Catholic artist and what actually constitutes a Catholic recording!


The CCM (contemporary Christian music) scene has been battling with this for years.  Artists such as Amy Grant and Switchfoot have had recordings that  are essentially secular in their content and really have little spiritual lyrics at all.  In fact, Amy Grant's Behind the Eyes turned out, in retrospect, to be about her imminent breakup with Gary Chapman and remarriage to Vince Gill.  The nominations of this album for the Dove awards probably caused a few uncomfortable moments for this prestigious organization.

As the Catholic music market grows and matures (and it is definitely doing so, based on some of the excellent recordings I heard during the nomination process), we will also continue to experience growing pains when deciding what exactly is Catholic content.  If a devout Catholic puts out an essentially secular recording, does that qualify?  If a band is essentially an evangelical Christian group with a couple of Catholic members, does that qualify?  If the main songwriter of the band is Catholic, should that be the determining factor?  If a band covers a song that is not written by a Catholic, should that song and person be allowed to be nominated for Songwriter of the Year?  What about an artist who is not Catholic but covers a few Catholic cover songs?  What about a Catholic band that does not want to be labelled as Catholic (perhaps to compete in the general and more lucrative CCM market) and has generic Christian lyrics without any overtly Catholic overtones? These are all scenarios that I had to deal with during this year's UCMVA awards.

For those of you who are hoping that I will give a pat answer to the above questions, I hate to disappoint.  I am struggling with this as much as everyone else.  This year, we tended to let things through as we really didn't feel it was fair to exclude recordings in the absence of clear rules.  Rest assured we are looking at this very carefully and there will be guidelines put in place before the process is repeated for the next set of UCMVA awards.  There is definitely a lot of discomfort in tightening things up. As an artistic community, there needs to be some urgent and earnest discussions about these issues.  However, on the positive side, it also shows that the Catholic music scene is pushing its boundaries.  This can only be seen as being very encouraging!  The coming years should be very interesting times.