In an ongoing series, Dw. Dunphy takes an occasional look back at Christian contemporary music (CCM) of the past and makes the case for a new audience to rediscover the best of it as great, lost pop music …

My first reaction to Prodigal was the reaction a band wants their audience to have: “This rocks!” As a positive exclamation, the term has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, but it meant a lot in the 1980s, and a lot more when applied to the CCM sub-genre. “Rocking” was usually just a description that meant the songs had guitars, the guitars had amplifiers and, occasionally, the lead singer would shout “Yeeeaaahhh!” like he was really into it. Between the first downstroke and the shout, however, things didn’t sound very different than your parents’ church music. If I’m not making this clear, imagine your grandfather in a tracksuit and many shiny gold chains, attempting to rap. Either you’re laughing or you’re mortified.

That first experience, coming from the band’s second album Electric Eye (1984), was immediately visual. The cover of an almost sepia-tone living room wall, a TV beneath a window with a lightning bolt outside. The reality of the bolt is bland and colorless. Meanwhile, on the television screen is the same bolt, radiating color and energy. Much discussion could be had on the meaning behind the image, but the first impression was screaming “legitimacy,” something other records on those racks, well-intentioned though they were, lacked entirely. Then the needle hit the record and the sound of emergency sirens crossing the left to right channels, followed fast by a shockingly satisfying guitar chord crunch, filled the listener with the sense that, yes, this was not for your parents. This was for you and it was for real.

And while in the back half of the 21st century’s first decade modern ears will pick up those touchstones of ’80s rock, we were grateful at that moment for something so modern. I was listening to arena rock at that time, featuring healthy portions of bands like Foreigner, The Cars, even Journey, and found Electric Eye able to fit in very nicely to that ethic. The lyrics were realistic to my understanding, not condescending or, worse, the kind of God-talk that plagued the, again, well-intentioned. A song like “Fast Forward” wasn’t someone saying, “You are a workaholic! I have a better way!” It was, “I am a workaholic, and how did I get this way?” You know, like normal music. And that was what I found so brilliant about Prodigal: it was normal music with a different worldview.

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