Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

So I tend to talk about it like an industry.

So CCM is not a genre so much as it is like a media ecosystem that really became popular

in the 1980s and 1990s, at least popular in the way that it is now.

So this music mirrors what you'd hear on mainstream radio in terms of like style and characteristic, but you wouldn't have the objectionable content.

So think, you know, no sex, no drugs, those kinds of things.

Yes.

Like Amy Grant.

Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith.

I mean, names that people might not know anymore, but those are like...

the big names.

Its growth coincided with this kind of moment of cultural panic that brought together a lot of white evangelicals, think moral majority moment, politically speaking.

And this industry really rose up because it offered an alternative to MTV, an alternative to hot radio.

You had parents that were worried, oh, the teens are listening to this music that has all this objectionable content.

Here is this kind of clean Christian version of it.

Well, there have been multiple surges in CCM.

So these like crossover moments, there've been multiple of them over the past three decades.

So Amy Grant would be one.

In the early 2000s, if we were having this conversation, we'd be having it about Switchfoot and a couple of like Christian rock bands.

And you'll remember that like Switchfoot had this moment where, you know, they were on the soundtrack to this Mandy Moore movie, A Walk to Remember.

Yeah.