On God and Pop Music

Forrest Frank and PARTY WAVE released DAWN PATROL and I can’t stop listening to it.

It is California sunshine. Catchy, warm, the kind of music that makes you feel like the windows are down and everything is going to be alright. Underneath that feeling, woven into every hook and bridge, is an unambiguous Christian message. Not hidden. Not apologetic. Just... there. Naturally.

Pop culture doesn't just reflect culture. It engineers it. In a world where some of the loudest, most broken, fractured versions of ourselves dominate the charts, DAWN PATROL feels like a wonder.

It reminds me of how Jesus Is King was such a turning point in pop culture or how Bob Marley spent a lifetime smuggling scripture about love, redemption, and the divine into the bloodstream of global popular culture.

Ideas need vessels. A thousand iterations of the same radical message moving through whatever cultural container can carry it. The message doesn’t change. The vessel does.

It is masterful to get people to sing along without realizing they are worshipping. And this is exactly what Forrest Frank and PARTY WAVE are achieving with DAWN PATROL.

Religion comes from the Latin religio — “to bind.” Is that what we have quietly, collectively lost? And what we are quietly, collectively remembering?

Pop culture has always been the fastest road to the human heart. What a thing it is, when someone chooses to put something sacred there.

May many more come. Christian or otherwise.