While road tripping to Iowa with Detroit phenom Terrence Parker,
we were regaling each other with stories of recent parties we'd attended. When
he told me he had spun at a Christian rave during this year's Movement
Festival, that immediately caught my attention. Rave? Christian? To me that
seemed like an anomaly, even a contradiction in terms.
As it turns out in the heart of the Motor City lies God's secret
weapon: Nate Carlisle, DJ and head of the God's DJs crew. The party is called
Reformation, and is an official Movement pre-party. This burgeoning
organization also runs the largest online Christian electronic entity in the
world and is laying the foundation for other countries to follow. With the aid
of TP, I was able to get Nate on the phone to tell me more about this
fascinating subject.
This
is kind of a different interview for me given that you're not a strictly House
Music artist, which 99 percent of our interview subjects are. Can you tell me
more about yourself?
I'm 30 years old and based here in Detroit. I've been DJing for
10 years now. I was doing the rave scene in the late '90s and of course fell
into the drug culture and party scene. I was a Christian at the time but fell
away from my beliefs and got caught up with all the things around me. About
2003-2004, I made the decision to get away from the scene. I took a step away,
got cleaned up and returned to the church and recommitted my life to God.
It was late 2007 when I really felt a strong desire to reconnect
with others in the world who loved electronic music, but really had no one else
to communicate with because the mainstream Church worldwide has no clue when it
comes to that. So I started posting on a small forum and we started with about
30-40 people, started finding more people that were searching for good
Christian dance music and here we are five years later with 150,000 registered
worldwide members on our site, a 24/7 online radio station with about 1000
listeners a day and we play Christian electronic music as well as clean
mainstream music as well. And with this exponential growth, as our outreach
grows and our members grow, we're seeing electronic dance music is going to
surpass Rock and Roll in the church within the next five to ten years. If the church
continues to only work with Rock and Roll bands, it's going to be completely
obsolete.
So
walk me through the time frame again... What year did God's DJs start and was
it a production company? What came first?
It started in mid-2007; the original intent was to make a
website with a list of Christian DJs, but we then changed it to a community
forum. It gave us the opportunity to interact and share stories with each
other. Then we decided to do a weekly radio show, and that grew to where we
opened up our own radio station. The station has actually brought a ton of
members into our community. I would say 10 percent of our new members come
through the radio outlet. And we are the only Christian electronic radio
station in the world. Many people for example will go to iTunes and stumble
upon us that way.
Is
it safe to assume that your parties accept all creeds? What are the basic
tenets in your parties that you ask everyone to respect if they want to be a
part of it?
For the small group of people that actually make up the God's
DJs staff, we absolutely require that they are firm believers in Christ and
that they have a relationship with God. I have to know someone really
personally before they're on the team. With the 150,000 people we have in our
community, there is no requirement. You can be of any creed, etc. etc. but you
need to come into this with the understanding that you're joining a group that
believes the following. There are no requirements.
As far as the events that we produce they are all in the
sanctuary of the church. We do Future Sound of Worship every year and Terrence
Parker has played for us a couple of times. We literally run it like an actual
church service except for the fact that we've got 30,000 watts of bass, lights
and lasers. So the vast majority of people that go are churchgoers that are
interested in a new style of music. Or they have the same type of story as me.
Let's
talk about the Movement Fest in your hometown. I see you have quite a presence
with there.
I've attended every single Detroit Movement Festival that's
taken place and we're actually a partner with Paxhau. We have a booth there
every year. And our Reformation party last year was an official Movement
pre-party.
I'm
curious about the history of these parties. I'm assuming there were some that
predated yours. How does one start a movement like this and how do you promote
it? Are you aiming it at people that are Christian or is the goal really to
have more of a secular audience to spread the word?
To say we're the first ones to do it would not be accurate, but
to say that we're the first ones to do it successfully would be. We firstly
give all credit to God. There's also the timing. I think right now, mainstream
culture is moving towards electronic music whereas in the '90s it was not. Then
it was very firmly rooted in Rock and Roll and Hip Hop.
Promoting a Christian electronic music event is extremely
difficult and extremely expensive. And to be honest, I've wasted a lot of money
not doing the right thing, because we didn't have a precedent to follow.
We don't produce raves, but we DJ at them constantly. We're at
almost every major rave in Detroit, down to Ohio and Indiana. We can then use
those parties as an opportunity for outreach.
So
how many people were at your Reformation party? What percentage were
non-Christian?
At this year's party we had just under 400 people. At our first
year we didn't advertise it and we had about 25 people. I would say about 50
percent are non-Christian maybe. We've actually established relationships with
all the rave production companies in Detroit so essentially you've got all
these hard core ravers and drug users saying "We're endorsing your church
event." [laughs]
It's an all ages event even though most of the people are
adults. There were families that came and the people that were able to bring
their kids were so happy. We've probably had five year olds with their parents.
We do stages that go from 6pm to midnight.
I think people really respect that we're trying to bring a
positive image to this type of music because so much negativity is associated
with it.
I think the biggest difficulty with the
Christian rave scene that is it's too small and the church is way behind the
times. I'm sick of the church not doing ministry to people at clubs. But the
church will wake up and we'll be having huge Christian rave festivals like Electric
Daisy Carnival. You can mark my words, you will see that happen.
--Matthew J. Bentley (artist)
--Matthew J. Bentley (artist)
I'm
going to ask you the obvious question then. Like you said raves are associated
with everything that is antithetical to the establishment. For example, drugs
and raves supposedly go hand-in-hand.
I guarantee you there were people that came to our party that
were on ecstasy, I guarantee it. This is how we look at it: anyone that wants
to come into a church anytime is always welcome. If a person wants to come to
church and wants to see what's going on there, but the church says, "No
you can't come in because you're on drugs" - that's a bad church. Because
they're turning away the people that are most in need and who obviously want
help.
What
about all those girls that dress all scandalously? You know the ones in bikinis
and furry boots?
You know we were actually kinda worried about that this year
because I don't know where this go-go dancer thing came from. And actually one
of them sent me a message saying "I'd really like to come but is it ok if
I wore my thong and bra?" I told her I preferred not because there's going
to be children there and it's in a church. And she said, "No problem, I'll
let all my girlfriends know that we need to just wear normal clothes."
[laughs] My wife was standing there with t-shirts just in case!
The
thing that's hard for me to wrap my head around is the nature of some of the
electronic music itself. Whether it's Dubstep or just something harder, the
bass is so heavy it's just hard to associate it with praise. It's such a grimy
sound with so many dark components to it.
I understand what you're saying but anytime we're going to play
music like Dubstep or Drum & Bass, we usually try to have our own vocals
accompanying it, and they're always worship vocals.
The number one thing we hear from Christians that come to our
event is, "Wow what an amazing service, I can't wait to do it again."
And we make sure we try to be as even as possible. There's an even amount of
Trance, an even amount of House, Dubstep, Drum & Bass so that the people
that don't know anything about the music get a nice cross section, and also in
a very uplifting positive way. It's how you produce the music, it's how you
play the music, it's the attitude of the people around you.
Given
that you've been a fan of this music since you were just about 10 years old,
you've seen many trends come and go. I like to allow people to play the game of
musical forecasting, and I'm hoping House never really goes away.
If you look at House, Techno, Trance, Drum & Bass... those
genres have been around for 20 to 25 years. These genres and sub-genres have
withstood the test of time, I don't think they're going anywhere. I think
they're going to continue to grow and change but I think we're always going to
have our core genres.
I think in the next 10 to 15 years Rock and Roll, Hip Hop and
Country music are all going to take a back seat to electronic music. The bottom
line is as much as people especially musicians hate to admit it, the need for
instruments is quickly going away. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing.
But the need to play an instrument is disappearing. The need to create and
write music is always going to be there but the way we do that is changing as
technology changes. I mean to be honest 15 years from now DJs are probably
going to be using our minds to control the turntables. It's going to be nothing
like it is today.
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