Performing Angst and Authenticity: 30 Years of Tooth & Nail Records and the Underground Christian Music Scene

In the 2014 documentary No New Kind of Story, Brandon Ebel, founder and owner of Christian punk label Tooth & Nail Records, recounts that in the early days of the label, the bands he signed were “too Christian for the punks and too punk for the Christians.” The film, which focuses on the first ten years of the label, 1994-2004, documents the tension that Ebel’s statement is intended to evoke, particularly the idea that this tension, far from being a detriment, was what drove the success of the label through narrating this tension as a deeply authentic expression of both punk and Christian identities.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, Ebel saw groups of suburban teenagers from Orange County, Central California, and Seattle forming bands driven by two primary influences: their love of hardcore punk bands like Minor Threat, Black Flag, and D.R.I. and their love of their savior, Jesus Christ. By 1994, an entire audience of late Gen X and early Millennial teenagers who grew up in evangelical Christianity were desperate for music that sounded like secular bands such as Green Day and The Offspring but represented the values of the church, even if only on the surface, and was sold in Christian bookstores so that their parents would permit them to own it. For artists prior to the existence of any “Christian punk,” their dual identity raised various barriers to finding success in either the “secular” independent music industry or the world of CCM (Contemporary Christian Music), funneling them into the performance spaces of church youth rooms. Many of the bands and fans associated with Tooth & Nail and the broader underground Christian music scene used the tension of this double rejection—by the secular music scene and the conservative, institutional church—to form what they saw as a new kind of Christian identity, one rooted in and justified by the concept of authenticity.

This panel offers four papers that explore this concept of authenticity through specific case studies that interrogate the ways in which the boundaries between the evangelical culture machine and the “secular” music industry were policed, analyze the narration of identity by bands and fans of the scene, and examine the impact that Tooth & Nail Records continues to have on evangelical identity formation 30 years on from its founding.

The first paper analyzes the intertwinement of authenticity and the concepts of shame and shamelessness as these have been implemented in evangelical Christian punk identity formation. Shame and shamelessness reflect authentic Christian identity in two ways. First, the dual rejection and shaming by both secular punks and conservative or “mainstream” Christians is embraced shamelessly as a marker of authenticity. For many members of this music scene, living counter to any “majority” way of thinking is precisely where Christianity and the punk ethos meet. Being shamed by traditional Christians for how they dress or style their hair and by “traditional” punks for their religious beliefs was confirmation that both identities were being fully embodied. Second, the shame of sin was a primary thematic in Christian punk lyrics that paired with and reinforced the first mode. Christian punks narrated traditional evangelicalism as legalistic, stoic, and adverse to addressing “real” issues because they feared the consequence of shame associated with sin and often compared the “rules” of the punk community as they understood it to this kind of traditionalism.

The second paper takes the band MxPx as its point of departure, arguably Tooth & Nail’s largest success story. In their first few years of existence, the Bremerton, WA punk band shared the stage with CCM artists such as Audio Adrenaline and DC Talk, but by the late 90s were playing the mainstage on the Vans Warped Tour and opening for hardcore punk band Bad Religion on their national tour. The paper examines the band’s departure to A&M Records in 1998, their increased visibility within the secular punk scene, and the concerns this raised among evangelical leaders and parents to trace the ways the boundaries of evangelical subcultures are policed through bookstores, the Christian music industry, and educational materials.

The third paper argues that the categories of authenticity and marginality employed in subcultural music genres such as metal and punk created the space for members of Christian bands identified with those genres to narrate the concept of “authentic Christianity” differently than artists associated with CCM. Using the example of Christian metalcore band Underoath, the paper argues that the cultural marginality of alternative music genres opened the possibility to embrace histories, values, and communities outside of evangelical Christianity.

The final paper analyzes the ways that these negotiations between evangelical and secular space have been exacerbated and trasnsmorgified in the convert-heavy spaces of U.S. Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The Tooth & Nail band Luxury has three members who serve as Orthodox priests, one of whom created discourse around sexual and gender ambiguities in his stage presence, opening space for an analysis of the ways Orthodoxy in the U.S. negotiates sexuality and gender particularly as debates around gender and sexuality tend to “travel” from with evangelicals as they convert to Eastern Orthodoxy.