Why Me, Why Then, Why Audio Adrenaline?

thinking an American Studies thesis. part 4.

Thoughts I have while writing my undergrad thesis on implicit white supremacy in my favorite band growing up, Audio Adrenaline. 

I was standing in our living room, on our purple-painted wood floors, in our 2-story white barn-shaped house, when my mom excitedly ran over to the stereo system to show me what she had discovered. It was the late ‘80s, I wasn’t even 10 years old, and I had no idea that my life would never be the same.

She had found 104.7, WFRN, a Christian radio station in South Bend, Indiana, and now that was all that the music we would listen to, my dad’s records of Simon and Garfunkel becoming subversive. We were deep in the throes of the culture wars, and I had no idea that I was being primed to be a warrior.

I was being homeschooled, my mom considering even the private school I had been attending too threatening to my 2nd grade innocence. The fuzzy legality surrounding school at home meant that I wasn’t allowed outside during the day, that I was not allowed to tell anyone about it, and I most definitely was not allowed to scream when getting spanked, because the neighbors might report us. If I was taken away because of CPS, it would be all my fault.

I grew up in a conservative religious home that thought it was constantly under threat. Dangers were everywhere, and one couldn’t be too careful. This was when evangelicals were boycotting K-Mart and Disney, and my pastor and adults at church were getting arrested for protesting abortion clinics, and our morality didn’t feel like it was in the majority. Discovering a Christian radio station, itself barely 10 years old, was a life vest to cling to, a piece of salvation in a threatening world.

The only problem, as I saw it, was that the music they played was for old people. It was slow ballads and hymn-like songs, not a drum set to be found. I didn’t know it at the time, but there actually was a Christian rock presence in the world. Sounding much like secular 80s music, bands like Whiteheart and Degarmo & Key existed, and in the case of DeGarmo & Key, made it on to MTV before getting pulled for having a music video considered too violent.

At the same time that my mom discovered boring Christian music, four Christian college boys were getting noticed for a Christian song they wrote and recorded, and within a couple of years they would release their first album, even though not many people heard it and they would later come to hate it. They would go on to release their second album in 1993, and this was what would change all of our lives.

In 1993, I turned 12 years old, and started 6th grade at a different private school, one so small that 2 grades were in a classroom. This was the type of school where everyone else had been friends since diapers, and I was the new kid. I desperately wanted to go to the public school with my friends from church. I desperately wanted a locker, and as I sobbed to my dad in the car, I just wanted to listen to Kris Kross like my friends. I wanted to belong, for once. I was tired of being isolated by my mom, by the way she banned so many cultural items, by the way she placed so many restrictions on my life, and although I didn’t have the words, by the way she heaped emotional abuse on all of us.

I was trapped in my life in so many ways, and as junior high wore on, I went from being bullied at the private school, to being homeschooled, before going *back* to the traumatic private school. To top it all off, in 6th grade I also lost my since-diapers best friend because of my mom, and I was completely alone and bereft of any hope. My mom hammered into my head that I would never be allowed to move out of the house to go to college, and my life looked like one long road of loneliness and isolation, with no glimmer of joy. It was no wonder that I fantasized about suicide.

But then, in the middle of that year, at the start of 1994, I joined an enthusiastic evangelical youth group with a couple of church friends, and was suddenly surrounded by kids as culturally strange as me. With Jesus as our gravitational pull, it was like falling into a pool of instant friendship, love, and acceptance. The love of Jesus was so broad, and so inclusive, that for people who followed him in the same way, nothing else mattered. You were scooped up, included, and welcomed. This sort of acceptance meant trips to amusement parks. It meant slumber parties and pool parties and trips to the beach. It meant lazy Saturdays of just hanging out, and it didn’t matter what you wore, or what the latest movie you didn’t see was. It meant car washes and late night church services, and someone to pray for you when you were sad and lonely. It meant bonding over Christian cultural items like books and movies, and music. Being an evangelical teenager in the mid-1990s meant being part of a collective of people who said ‘we love you’ and ‘you are welcome here’ to a short, scrawny, weird kid who cried herself to sleep every night. Being included in that literally saved my life, and for all the grief that would come later, how can I not be thankful?

The year 1994 went on, and I finally had an identity as a member of a group that gave positive meaning to my life. This was also the year when religion and politics seemed to come to a head, and the Republican Revolution seemed to show us that being a Christian deeply mattered. And then, a Christian pop song made it to the radio, changing my mind about what Christian music was, and giving us collectively the emotional outlet for what it meant to be a Christian.

The contemporary Christian song, “Big House,” climbed the Christian radio charts, the band instantly becoming my favorite, their lyrics directly speaking to everything I heard at home and church, and their music a welcome change from the radio. Our youth group gatherings quickly expanded to include Christian concerts and Audio Adrenaline’s songs about persecution, defiance, and the overwhelming goodness of God’s love no matter how painful life was cemented my identity as a white evangelical millennial. It would be 20 years before I would be anything different.