What Sufjan Stevens Does Better Than Any Other 'Christian Music' Star

What Sufjan Stevens Does Better Than Any Other 'Christian Music' Star
NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 06: Sufjan Stevens performs during Cyndi Lauper's 4th Annual 'Home For The Holidays' Benefit Concert at Beacon Theatre on December 6, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic)
NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 06: Sufjan Stevens performs during Cyndi Lauper's 4th Annual 'Home For The Holidays' Benefit Concert at Beacon Theatre on December 6, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic)

In a 2003 episode of South Park, Eric Cartman sets out on a quest to make a platinum record, and decides the easiest route will be to start a Christian band. It’s pretty simple, after all. Just take a bunch of popular songs and copy them, but don’t forget to mention God a few times. Cartman does exactly that: He becomes famous by singing a number of mainstream ballads, inserting “Jesus” in place of “you”—only to discover that with the Christian music industry you can’t actually “go platinum,” you can only “go myrrh.”

While clearly an exaggeration, like almost everything on South Park, the episode underscores a stigma still surrounding Christian music 12 years later. The general consensus is that, when it comes to music, Christians tend to make, “devotional artifice” and “didactic crap," at least in the words of the singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, whose newest album Carrie & Lowell comes out March 31.

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