ChatGPT has just reminded me1 that a large part of my musical input is what is loosely labelled ‘Adult Alternative Pop Rock’. To be fair, the AllMusic description has me nailed to a post. Well, let’s lean into it.

I was probably at youth fellowship a decade too late for the Christian ire against Joan Osborne’s seminal 1995 single, One of Us, but as a piece of pop – sorry, adult alternative pop/rock – in my mind it bookends a whole category of North American female singer-songwriters who crossed over into radio-friendly pop rock, with similar production sounds – from the jangly rock stuff to the big-but-compressed drum tracks.2 The first iteration is people like Alanis Morissette, Osborne, Sarah McLachlan, Fiona Apple, Paula Cole, Shawn Colvin.3 Can we include Lisa Loeb? Let’s.4

The second round come five years or so later: Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, Sara Bareilles. You get the idea. There’s alt-rock on one side. There’s bubblegum pop on the other. Somewhere in between, but tending towards the former (thankfully), are four-minute, crafted wonders.

Crafted is an important word here. It’s easy to dismiss pop music. Pop music is incredibly difficult to do well. I had a humble go at song-writing for years; I wrote a few genres, but pop is too hard. These pop-rock records go through iteration after iteration to nail the hook and hone the lyrics. (If you’ve twenty minutes at some point, the Vice doc on Vanessa Carlton’s journey with 1000 Miles makes the case well. She clearly ended up feeling it wasn’t quite her song any more, yet it still means so much.)

So, back to Joan Osborne.

There a lazy, cultural Christian response5 to this song which I don’t think sincere believers should give too much weight. We might even point out: well, God did become one of us. That’s sort of the central pivot of not just the Bible, but time itself.

However, the songwriters argue the song isn’t about God at all: it’s about us. Co-writer Eric Bazilian:

‘The key line is: “What would you ask if you just had one question?” But my first impression was that it wasn’t about God. It was about what would happen if you saw something that blew your worldview out of the water.’

I’m not sure that arguing this extreme really holds up either, though I’ll accept the lyric certainly is one of confrontation. It’s just that, plainly reading it, it seems to be being confronted by God:

‘If God had a face, what would it look like / and would you want to see, if seeing meant that you would / have to believe, in things like heaven / and in Jesus, and the saints, and all the prophets…’

The 2020s aren’t the 1990s; nevertheless, I remarked in a sermon last night that our everyday cultural dialogue remains saturated with the language of faith, and the Christian faith in particular. Setting aside any kind of pseudo-theology, this lyric does asks us: what would it be like if we were confronted by God in the flesh? What would we do with it?

Well, I am no expert apologist or theologian: but every time I hear this slice of music history, I am continually moved to think: he did have a face. He poured himself into a form that meant we could see, we had to believe, and nothing about our interior or exterior lives can really stay the same. Of course he wasn’t just like us: he was the best of us; made incarnate, the God of names and faces, of slobs and buses, of strangers and friends, of pastors and popes – the God who made and governs all of it took on cells and blood and membrane6 in order to show us what a completely fulfilled human life actually looks like: one of community, one of suffering, then one of everlasting triumph. and the free and open invitation to be part of it forever.

It is so blatantly obvious that even (checks notes) adult alternative pop-rock cannot help but be touched by it from time to time.

  1. To riff on a famous label from a century ago; eyeball-gnawing statements like this might, I think, lead to us thinking of this decade as the Boring ’20s. As in: this is peak humanity? Relying on LLMs to tell us things we’ve forgotten? We’re so dull. Yet here we are. ↩︎
  2. They’re all songs you could swear are on a volume of Songs from Dawson’s Creek. And to be fair, several of them are. ↩︎
  3. Sonny Came Home. No notes. It’s not getting an entry but it could have been the headliner for this article. ↩︎
  4. That woman’s punked-up cover of her own song alongside New Found Glory is fabulous. Her voice is absolutely ageless, all credit to her. ↩︎
  5. cf. Harry Potter. I remember the petitions being passed around at school. Thank goodness the same completely sincere but unfortunately misguided people clearly weren’t aware of Tolkien and Lewis. ↩︎
  6. John 1:14. ↩︎