Harp & Bowl Weapon: Manipulation Through Music

Music Hello, welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-brandham.org, and with me, I have my co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a prophet, and former member of the International House of Prayer.

Jed is so good to be back, and so good to say son of a prophet again. I don't know if you've seen it in the comment feeds, I'm just getting dogged because I say this.

I think people don't realize how funny it is to me to say this. I did see those comments, and it's hard for me to understand how people can't get that it's, we're saying this facetiously, and you know, like the whole point is that my dad was a prophet in the community, according to everyone within the community throughout all of my upbringing, and it was only until like a year and a half ago that I spoke out and was like, he's not a prophet that ever any of that was exposed.

So yes, where I'm not trying to maintain that my father is a genuine prophet of God, that's kind of literally the whole point, but you know, it's a good clarification. So maybe we, you know, maybe we need to make it clear.

Well, and it raises the question, Jen, are there prophets? Are there prophets? Well, that's another thing too, is like from me, in my perspective, I would be like anytime anyone's claiming to be a prophet, whether it's someone who has been exposed as a fraud or not, I would be, I do not think that we should be thrown that word around in general.

So if ever I'm using the word prophet, please know that I'm using it facetiously. You're killing me, man. You know, people, especially in the Pentecostal and Charismatic circles, they'll dog me for that. You know, anytime I mention that the this term prophet, it's thrown around and it's turned into like the superhero of Christian religion, I always go back to the verse Luke 16, 16, the law and the prophets were until John, and since then, the good news of the kingdom is preached.

You don't find that verse preached too many times in the Pentecostal and Charismatic circles. I didn't even know about it. I'm terrible. I got old enough to be out of the cult. Yeah. And it's like, you know, I understand.

The, I understand the implications of that. Some people want to believe that there are people who can still prophesy. And I have family members who, my great grandmother, I'm told that she had some very, very accurate prophecies.

So did it happen? I wasn't there, I don't know. But that's not what the verse says. It doesn't say there will not be prophecy. It says we're not focusing on the prophets. And I can imagine Jesus coming into a world where you've got all of these people who are kind of like today's world.

They're self-righteous. They're digging through the law to try to nitpick what are the rules, kind of like a cult. And he comes and says, no, the law and the prophets were until John. And now we talk about the good news of the kingdom.

That's the way it should be. Yeah, well, you and I have talked about the hero worship in, especially in the like laterane New Apostolic Reformation communities and how dangerous that is. And the term prophet is almost exclusively used in that to provide a sense of hero worship to make like the Bethel culture of honor and the sort of celebrity culture around spiritual leaders, the terminology of prophet.

Because it doesn't even make sense. Because you believe in a world that everybody should be listening and speaking with God and communion with God. And that's the theory behind it. But then yet you have certain individuals who suddenly get the label of doing it.

And it is almost, I have never ever seen it not be extremely problematic when it's used. I don't know that I have seen too many that were real. I have seen, I have had dreams.

And I think I briefly mentioned that. But the gift of prophecy, as it's described in the Bible, manifests itself much differently than a hero on a stage, sometimes through music, which is interestingly, it's our topic for today.

But in the music, some people, what's within them starts to come out and you start to not predict the future. I think that's one of the key differences. The prophets of today, the quote unquote, prophets of today, they're really presenting themselves like the fortune tellers of old, not the prophets of old.

And so in the music, you're starting to see what's really something from the inside that's coming out naturally versus, hey, we're going to suddenly see the lights come on in the Kansas City Stadium and Joe's Army will appear.

Right, right, right. The whole stick of the international house prayer is probably marrying those two, the music and the prophecy. That's like... the whole thing that I grew up with. And it wasn't, there wasn't a lot of talented musicians.

Well, there was always some talented musicians, but like Mike Bickle, my dad, other Bob Jones, these people, the prophets were terrible musicians, all of them, and like had terrible voice. I had to listen to these men stand right next to me and try to like sing gospel songs, and they were all of them toned off, but they brought in a lot of people who are excellent musicians, but this is the whole like harp and bowl model.

Have we talked about the harp and bowl model? I don't know that before. I don't know that you and I have. I heard the term, who was it? I think it was with Alwyn when she was talking about IHOP.

Okay. I was like, I had no clue what she was talking about. Maybe we should. Yeah, so it is, it's not like something that IHOP invented,

but by any means, but there was this, I mean, when you're developing this idea of like 24, 7 prayer and worship, you got to get creative with how you keep playing music, because you would have people come in for two hour sessions and they would lead music.

And it's like, people get sick of the same worship songs, but you would still have these like very repetitive, sort of freestyle music. And what would happen is that you would have like prayer leaders and you would have vocalists who would, there would be like a column response between them.

So the prayer leader would say something, whether they're prophesying, whether they are talking about a verse from the Bible or whether, you know, it's just this general idea, this line that they're kind of coming up with, like they would pray and it would be more free form and then they would hit on this line.

And then you would have the vocalist back up and sing whatever was being prayed. And this is all, of course, with music in the background and they're kind of playing very freestyle and rotating through their four chord progression or whatever it is while this performance is sort of going on.

And this is another way that I found out that all of these prophets had terrible voices sometimes the people praying would then try to sing too with the back up vocalists and it was uncomfortable every single time to hear them praying.

But you would have this like extremely repetitive and this is another aspect when people were like, I remember I always grew up having to like defend iHOP from being called a cult. Like if I heard people from more mainline Christian communities call the international house paracult, I'd be like, no, no, no, it's definitely not.

But the one thing that was always a red flag for me is like the very repetitive sort of meditative way that the music was played and there was this sort of call and response felt very cult like.

And if you went to the prayer room right now and you saw it and you saw this harp and bowl method, you would get like, yeah, this feels, this feels pretty culty. Yeah. And I'll be honest, I'll break the ice right now.

I don't really listen to much Christian music anymore. Not because I don't like it, I truly do. For the first 37 years of my life, that's all I played. This old style, Southern gospel, quartet, style, music, not even what was current.

I like the old stuff from the 40s and 50s and I like the blue grass and this, so my room here is actually, it's a statement more than anything because there are aspects of this room that I was not allowed to have while in the cult.

The drums on this side, for example. So in the Brannum religion, there's different splinter groups and different sects. Within each sect, some of them are more extreme, more fundamentalist, more, I guess I would say they were harsher with the rules.

And you had people who tried to go above and beyond that and become even more strict because they could get more holy if you did this. In the main sect that I was in, in the group of people that I was in, the drums were completely forbidden.

And I can remember, I remember being in my grandfather's basement and I was playing this old, you would laugh if you heard it. It's like the most monotonous old, unfun music that you could imagine.

I was playing it in this cassette tape, but upstairs, I guess the way the bass was shaking in the rafters, it sounded like a drum. And I don't think it had a single drum in the music, but my grandfather stormed down there and he's angry at me and he's saying, we don't listen to that devil music here.

Wow. It's like, just any drums. It's just any drums, man. I can't drums. And it wasn't like any type of percussion. They did not like percussion. And I really don't know why because it shifted over time, the guitars.

So in the sect that I was in, William Brannum told my grandfather that any instrument that had strings was the devil's music. And so the Brannum Tabernacle has an organ and it has a piano and that's it.

That's all you're allowed. for growing up, I'm a musician, I'm a critical thinker, I've always been a critical thinker. Right. And they told me this and I'm like, well, do you guys not know that that piano has strings in it?

Yeah, so everything in here's a statement, but you're talking about the repetitions. And that's part of the reason why I no longer listen to Christian music, I do sometimes, but for the most part, I just don't enjoy it.

Because after leaving, I swore I wasn't going to change. I loved my music, I have always loved my music. I've got all kinds of albums of my music, of me playing and singing and writing music.

And then after I left, I realized that as I'm listening to this music and I'm learning about how manipulation works and why and how I was manipulated, I started noticing the same patterns of manipulation from the sermons that I'd heard.

I started noticing some of those patterns were also in the music. And some of them had to do with repetition. They would just repeat this phrase over and over and over. And sometimes the phrase might be some theology that's just out and left field, it's not even biblical, but you're repeating over and over and over and it gets stuck in your head.

And we're talking about the prophecy. So William Brannum mentioned how he entered into the prophetic. And this is on recording. This is in front of a bunch of adult people. He says, now whenever I enter into prophecy, my brother, I start chanting in my head two plus two equals four, two plus two equals four.

And I say this over and he's talking about getting himself in a trance through vain repetitions. Oh wow. And it's crazy if you think about the spiritual, he was in Indiana where spiritualism was heavy during his era.

But I started thinking about the vain repetitions in the music, especially some of the more modern style music. And it's the same kind of thing. They want to get your head into this state where they can easily inject whatever it is they want to put in your head through the music.

Wow. That's crazy. And that makes so much sense with, I think that you have, you have a lot of music that is just repetitive because it's uninspired because it's just, we gotta do something and we gotta, you know, less insidious, I think, but just like, hey, this, the four four, you know, these four chords have been proven to work.

Everyone's familiar with them. We're gonna do, you know, verse chorus, verse bridge, you know, whatever, like the formulaic. So there's like the formulaic aspect of Christian music that is just, you know, uninspired, but then there's, So the more insidious sort of like repetitive nature of the like cult music, the more mind control.

And I definitely think that the international house prayer, like I grew up in the program listening to hours. I mean, I would be in the program for eight hours straight listening to music where it was just sort of the same ideas being repeated over and over and over again.

And I totally, like I think of this one artist who a lot of people still like him. And I like I don't want, I'm going to be saying his name because people will be familiar with it.

But John Thurlow was this worship leader who would lead, it was Tuesdays at 10 a.m. I think it was, but it was 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. And for all of my high school, I would go to the sets and he would do these like meditative sets for that were two hour sets that they would just like focus on a single passage.

And I think for like six straight months, he just did a lot of music on John one, like the word was, well, now that I'm even forgetting what it is means that it's been a while since in the beginning was the word and the word was within the word was God.

Again, this is just hitting parts of my brain that I have not touched since in a long time. Like that same verse was repeated thousands of times each two hour section and then next Tuesday would be the same and the same and same.

And he was a good musician and I think that he was trying to like, I don't want to be throwing shade on him, but it was this sort of very repetitive, very enforcing this sort of central biblical principles that they were being taught.

And then usually like, then there would be more specific verse or chance about Israel, like the harp and bowl method, we would have people get up and pray about Jesus returning in about Israel and very politically charged, very like American Christian Zionists, some like vaguely anti-Semitic stuff too about when the Jews become Christian, then there will be a revival and a tell they're saved and this, like I remember a lot of language around that and a lot of like language around It's like the anguish of the Lord not returning.

I mean, Misty Edwards, have you listened to much of Misty Edwards music? I have not. Okay, so but you should listen to it just when you get a free chance, you should listen to it because it's kind of wild when you do listen to it because immediately you're gonna be shocked by the lyrics.

The music itself is like much, it was like very edgy for charismatic Christian world, especially in the early 2000s, 2010s when she was like becoming very prominent, but she was this talented vocalist out of and music writer out of Kansas City.

She became very well known, even within like the larger Christian world, a lot of her music like would be familiar to listeners of the show. I'm sure, but it was very interesting growing up in that world because like her, the lyrics of her song were filled with like this anguish and a sort of love sick nature and they were like really explicitly sexual and there was always this kind of confusion of like whether or not she knew what she was talking about.

Whether like was she just the most sheltered unaware individual who just like didn't understand that all of her music was double in tantras and that was like very, very sexual

and then turns out that she, so we've talked about the bridal paradigm in the past and how this was like one of the central doctrines that Mike Bickel lashed onto is this idea that this metaphor of Christ being the bridegroom and the church being the bride and this sort of love sick longing that like one day Jesus will return and is very apocalyptic in that sense that like we are awaiting for the return of God that will happen one day in our lifetime, but it's sometime in the future and it's mysterious and tell that day we are going to have this sort of

love sick longing that like we will never be complete, we'll never be perfect, we'll never be like

have this part of our, so there will always be a part of ourselves missing until Jesus returns. And meanwhile Bickel was using that same sort of terminology and that same metaphor to groom young women.

Like it was it was it was explicitly the same tactic that he was using to have teenagers and children. and like become a rapture by him where he would groom these young women and tell them that one day they will be together, that one day in the future and he would give prophecies about how he and whatever victim he was talking to, would one day be together and these wrongs would be made right and one day it's going to happen and this love sick longing will suddenly be fulfilled.

And he was absolutely telling these things to Misty Edwards. And also Misty Edwards, this has been written about, was having a very like abusive toxic relationship with someone who was extremely controlling not just Mike but there was another man named Kevin Brosh and a worship leader who was like explicitly blackmailing her in relationships, just really, really depressing heartbreaking stuff. And so in her music, you hear this like anguish and this genuine real emotion. And I think that that's why people really gravitated towards it, because in a community where not a whole lot of genuine emotion was expressed, a lot of like

these formulaic sort of cookie cutter songs were being made, you suddenly had this individual who was expressing this very loaded, very sexual and very like emotional agonizing music. And everybody that I knew was captivated by this music and it would be played live and it would we had these one thing conferences where we pack out Bartol Hall and I mean the largest sort of other than like Kansas City Chiefs football games, it was like the largest gatherings that I was continually a part of where there was like thousands and thousands of people in this large room

and everybody sort of agonizing over this music of like this love six sort of like please return Jesus, please make me whole like I am nothing and you are everything and I am sick and you shall make me whole and I drop to my knees and pain like this is all sort of like the metaphor.

Obviously the language was extremely different. I could give the actual language but again it is explicitly sexual and so I don't want you to bite filter. I don't want you to get you demonetized and also I would turn red saying it. But you can look it up and listen to it and know that I'm not just making stuff up here like that was what was going on and so it's just really this marriage between the music and the prophecy is so so fascinating to me.

of the few people that I have more fun when people are poking jokes at me than I do of making fun of other people. And so for the first 37 years of my life, I truly was naive.

But somewhere along those 37 years, there comes a point in every adult's life whenever you suddenly start to realize what other people are saying and the language they're using. I chose because I like people to, I like to see people laugh.

I chose to continue pretending to be naive, even though I knew what they were talking about and knew what they're saying. And I would purposefully just drop the most obvious double entendre, make the whole room start laughing.

And then I had, I also have the ability to keep a fully straight face, so I'm just acting fully naive. Everybody's laughing at me. I'm like, what are you guys laughing at? But I don't know that I could do that in a church.

But you know, to your point, music is something, it fascinates me. As a songwriter, as a composer, you really get to see what's inside of a person. It is like a window just opening up into the soul.

Because whatever they're going through, whenever I was in the, towards the end of being in a cult, I was in deep, deep depression. And it was painful going through it. Some of my best music and songs came to me.

And I was having so many songs coming at that time that like, I'd be driving down the road and the song would hit me. I actually have forgotten more songs than I wrote down because they just keep coming.

And you get to see what's inside of a person. So it's fascinating to me when you, when I experience the helping somebody who's been in a different cult than I grew up in or even a different splinter group.

If you can get into their music that was written by the people in that sect, you can kind of see what the sect is all about. So it's totally. It's also this way. It's like a blueprint of a schematic of the mappings of their souls inside of this movement.

Totally. And I think that there's also this tension that arises because like you said, in these communities, you're also not allowed to, depending on the rules, the very arbitrary, ridiculous rules of whatever subset you're a part of, you have these rules about the type of music you make or whether you can use drums or not or whether visible strings are present.

You even talking about that is crazy to me because like, I have never even heard of that. And it's wild to me that our sects that we grew up in, um... are really not that far apart from each other, yet they have wildly different rules and wildly different boundaries.

And it shows how kind of arbitrary and pointless a lot of these are, is that 10, 20 years later, the subgroups that were birthed out of the message code

don't have any of these same boundaries because they're kind of silly. And like drums are good to have in your music. And by anyway, the point is too, there of course are like restrictions because you don't want, if you're in a cult community, you don't want people making music or being open to music that is worldly music, whatever that means, whatever is of the world.

So whether that's rap or hip hop or whether that's using drums or using electric guitar or this type of experimental music, all of these things will be forbidden because there's this idea of like, we need to separate ourselves from the world.

And also like emotions, what emotions are you allowed to have and express within these communities? Like for me, when I grew up, like I couldn't express doubt, I couldn't express anger with the world that I grew up in.

You know, I could express anger with the rest of the world but I couldn't sort of express any form of discontent. I couldn't, a lot of these negative emotions that I had or emotions that weren't beneficial to the cult community were like strictly forbidden.

And I couldn't sing about those, I couldn't do, I couldn't explore that emotion at all. And I couldn't explore ideas that were outside of the conventional ideas. And I think that this is what's really interesting is that you have all of these musicians who are a part of these worlds that are handcuffed.

I mean, they're having to play music with two hands tied behind their back and not express this particular type of emotion or use this type of music or otherwise they'll be criticized. But every once in a while, you have some like genuine emotion slip out between the clock cracks with the music.

And like you said, that's when you really get to, that's when you really get to get a picture of what the community genuinely is, is when these cracks open up and you get to hear the music and you get to hear what people are actually really thinking.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of... Modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the New Apostolic Reformation, you can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org.

On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Steven Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others, with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book.

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As I said, this room that I'm in is kind of counter-culture to the cult that I was in. And I wish I could show you above my monitors, I've got these little figurines that, whenever I've had news reporters and journalists come into my office, but the first thing to do when they see these figurines are like, what in the world?

This feels out of place. In the right-hand corner, I've got the little figurines of the Kiss Band, you know, with all the makeup and all the, and it's counter-culture because we grew up in a culture that was so heavily against that.

And by and large, it wasn't even just the message cult. You had all of these propaganda preachers saying things like this is knights in Satan's service. You watch so your kids don't get abducted by these guys.

And me, a critical thinker, I want to know all things. So when I first discovered that the band actually, the name actually came because what's his name, Peter Chris, I think, the band member, he came from a band that was called Lips.

And so as a statement against Lips, they created Kiss, which was kind of, it's kind of funny history. There's a documentary on, I think it's Hulu that I watched, a great documentary of the band.

And it's not my favorite band, it's not my favorite music, but it's a statement as is the rest of this room because it's, I'm countering the culture that I came from. What's interesting is what we were in, both you and I, we were in a religious counter culture.

What these groups did, they wanted to take whatever is the current status quo in the world and say, this is evil, come to us, we're better than the evil. And we will protect your kids, we will, we will bring you into heavenly bliss.

That's how it works. And what's funny is you can examine the music over decades and you can see how this has changed and evolved because, so I've been out of the cult, we left January 1st, 2012.

So from that time until now, the music that I listen to then people would think is old, timey and out of date and no fun. The music they listen to now, my former self would say, well that's devil music because we've been preached at left and right, this is devil music.

And yet the music they're listening to now isn't current. It's from like 10 years behind. So they're kind of like always a decade behind. And you can go all the way back through time in my research I've tied basically Christian fundamentalism merged with Pentecostalism, two form and create brannemism, which created Laterane and created IHOP.

All of us was built on counter culture and the things that they preached out in one decade, the next decade they would readily adopt it because the culture has changed and it's no longer popular.

And then whatever they're preaching at during that decade, give it another decade and they're allowing it and they're preaching against what was what was current then. So as you watch it change through time, you can watch these changes also happen in the music.

What's allowed to be as music styles, as music genres, what's allowed in the lyrics, what's allowed in the structure of the music. All of that seems to shift and change. And I began to notice this.

So I mentioned my grandfather, the church didn't allow strings. Well, my grandfather was an evangelist and he toured with aunts and uncles who played stringed instruments and William Brannem. The narcissist said, no, you're gonna stop this.

That's the devil's music. And I came across a photograph of him, William Brannem playing a guitar. And I was like, no, this just doesn't make sense. He was against the guitar. I was not allowed to play for many, many years because of this.

And then even when I was allowed to play, it was this big battle on my family because I had a guitar. Well, he had one and then I began researching further back in time.

The church that my grandfather preaches at the Brannem Tabernacle. When it was created, it was created filled with music. They had choirs and they had choir directors and they had a traveling music band that came out of the honky talks.

And I guess they would play in the honky talks and then they would come play in the Tabernacle and then they would go on the road and they were winning awards for their music.

So over time, the shifted as a counter culture, as music gets to be popular, they started preaching against it. And the music began to change and evolve into this very slow, organist style music.

I don't know if you've heard any of this, but it's the kind of stuff that I would say puts you to sleep, but it's so monotonous, it would probably wake you up. Well, and repetitive and emulating like a...

emulating a previous era's type of music, which like the idea that in our community, we were always 10, 20 years behind culture in the art that we were producing because there was this cycle of like, well, there was always a tension.

You had, on one hand, you wanted to set, like you said counter-cultural, you want to be different than the culture at the time. You want to not be doing the same pop music or styles, or even a lot of like xenophobia was rooted in this.

There was a lot of like fear on what was different and what was of the world. And so people would like separate themselves from that. But then yet, 10 years later, you would be like, okay, well, but like this music with the drums and the electric guitar, a lot of people are listening to.

And we want people, we want to be evangelists. We want people to come and appreciate that which we do. And if you're not, well, you and I have talked a ton about how the miracles and the like miracle performance of prophecy and healing was the primary way that these communities drew people in.

But more recently, I think it's been more about the music, about using music to draw people in. And that was true too, but like the traveling bands in the past, you know, like having something to engage the people.

And so then it becomes this question of like, okay, well, we want to create music that is appealing to people. So then you start looking at the world being like, what is music that is appealing over here?

And so 10 years after it became popular, or 20 years after it became popular, you see these communities starting to adopt the very things that they said were of the devil because it's kind of become grafted into society and they're trying to entice people in.

They're trying to create rock music to bring people in. But the thing is, and this is the problem, like, and I know this very deeply because I was very much a part of this.

I went to, when I went to Y-WAM, like I went to be a part of this organization that was creating, that was like filmmaking. And our whole idea was like bringing the Bible into popular culture.

And we were like, we want to make good movies that like even a secular audience really loves that it has all of these Christian values. But the problem is, is that we didn't have a whole lot of respect for other communities.

We didn't have respect for other traditions and the way that these, whether music or film or whatever, the art itself, the process in which it was developed, we didn't have any respect for it.

So of course we weren't going to emulate good art because we didn't understand the art. We were just trying to make our best imitation of stuff we thought was successful. And of course it was not good.

I can't tell you how many sermons that I have heard about how music with a beat is the devil trying to entice your children. And that's not just the random call. So I've heard this in Pentecostal search.

I think I've even heard this in one of the new modern, one of the modern denominational churches that I've been to, they try to scare you, I guess is the best way to put it, that you might accidentally catch a demon through the music.

That's really what they're trying to do. And again, my critical thinking just, do you not know that every music has a beat? And that's how it brings music, it has to have a beat.

But what's interesting is the, I can't remember if I've mentioned this before or not, but in the Brannum cult, the theme song was only believed, written by Paul Raider, who was key into the fundamentalist in the Christian identity cults.

And so he wanted to make this music that was appealing to the modern culture because the way these counter-culture religions work is they grow, they get enough members, and then they just shut off the culture and they start preaching against the current culture.

Well, people get tired of it and so it kind of diminishes a little bit. And then they have to say, well, we must make ourselves more appealing. We need to draw on bigger crowds.

So they started dopting what was maybe not modern culture, but at least a decade ahead. So then they start bringing new people in. Well, I found newspaper articles talking about the composition of the song, Only Believe, which if you heard it now, it's like elevator music, Christianity, not that great.

But back then, apparently it was stunning to the Pentecostal community because they were bringing in a beat and make it a jazzy style. They wanted to, they specifically took some of the beats of Latin America and Africa, kind of made it to where it would kind of resemble this, to be more appealing so that it would attract bigger crowds.

Decades later, Elvis Presley sings it. Elvis is one of the people who was heavily preached against all throughout fundamentalist evangelical Christianity is Elvis or the Beatles. You're gonna preach against the two popular ones, right?

Right. And I'll never forget after leaving, it was probably a year after leaving the cult. I heard my first Beatles song and didn't. I did the thing where I would chant or I would play music in my head when I heard secular music so that I didn't catch this.

It's a dental demon, so I'd never really listen to it. And the first time I heard it was like, dang, this isn't very good. It's really, I mean, it's good, but it's old. It's not even half as scary as what they were trying to teach me.

But they've created this counterculture, and through time they start adopting what was the previous counterculture that they were striking against. And in doing so, it's really weird. Like I said, I've left the, I've left the brand on religion since January 1, 2012.

The music they listen to now is completely different than I was allowed to listen to. And I'm just shocked when I see the changes. Well, I'm one, like, on one hand, I do, I will say, if I started my own call, I would probably also preach against beats, just to hide the fact that I have no sense of rhythm.

And so just make it so that so I get that, no, I'm obviously a kid, but yeah, I, I, this cycle of like preaching against the thing because it's demonic, it becoming a fixture of pop culture, you know, largely so much so that it becomes less, it becomes sort of a nerd.

It becomes less offensive because like it is now familiar. Then the church adopts it, adopts the very thing that was once demonic in order to draw crowds in, while then now finding a new thing to call to mind, a new, you know, something different.

If it was, if it was rock music and the Beatles in the 1960s and the 1970s, then now it's in the 1990s and 80s or 1990s in the early arts, it's like rap music or hip hop music and now it would be a electronic music or still rap, I don't know, I have no idea what's being preached against in contemporary churches, but it's always this weird cycle of like forbid the thing, then once it becomes sort of a nerd, adopt the thing and try to pretend like you didn't ban it 10 years previously.

You know, after leaving the random quote, like I said, I don't enjoy listening to Christian music anymore because it was used as a manipulation tool. And unfortunately, I think I've mentioned this in the podcast I had with Adam, which will come out before this one, but Bethel music just was so popular and the style of worship that they've led, everything began to integrate itself into Christian music until it became all of these vain repetitions that...

just for me it's really scary because this is a really this is an indoctrination tool whether it's good or bad whatever they're saying with the lyrics you know that's for you to decide but the manipulation of it that aspect just bothers me so I can't listen to it but in one of the churches we attended there was a group of people going to hear Christian rock band and I'm you know I'm not I don't enjoy Christian rock I'm it's not my thing and I've heard a little bit of it and it's you know I've heard real guitarists that can just really brilliantly play

the guitar and then you hear this Christian rock stuff and you're like could you not find anybody better than this but I will say I went and a majority of the music was just repeated phrases and I was like tuning it out I don't want you in my head and then this group came out that was different than everybody else and so the rest of the groups they would walk out on the stage like you would normally expect grab the microphone sing the repetitions over and over and over and over and over and over and then they

would leave and I was blocking you know mentally this group walks out and there's these two Asian ladies dressed in tuxedos holding a violin like this which was different I was like that's different that's cool they walk out and they're on either side and then the main band walks out there's a girl playing the drums which was really that idea was foreign to me that that point in time I had not yet discovered Karen Carpenter so it was it was unique to me but they walk out the girl gets on the drums and then all of a sudden they start jamming

and the the two Asian ladies on the violins underneath them this pillar just lifted them way up into the air and the smoke bill is out and they started shredding the violin yeah best violinist best violinist that I've ever heard that music was amazing and yet at the same time it still had these repeated phrases yeah because what they I mean that that does sound very spectacular it It also is, it gets at the grandiose nature of how Christmas music is becoming, now it's becoming a spectacle, which I'm both fine with, and it's problematic, and so far as they're still the whole Bethel hero

worship that is involved with that, where now it's not just the prophets, it's the musicians who are also given this sort of celebrity status because when you're lifted on a pillar and there's smoke behind you, you start becoming a celebrity.

But also, it's kind of cool, so at least they're doing something fresh and new. That's, I always think of that with, like, you go to... Or you go to museums and you see all of the art that was made in the Renaissance.

And I think that beautiful art can come out of even cloistered religious communities. Because again, sometimes it's the only emotional expression within that community. And so you can have these really powerful things that sort of break the mold and give very genuine expression.

And like at the International Observatory, you talk about could have gotten better musicians. They're a really, really good musicians at the International House of Prayer. And part of that was because they were playing music so much.

I mean, your job is just to play music. Now, unfortunately, there were only playing certain type of music over and over and over again. So how much that makes you expand your talent? But like as far as just becoming masters and tacticians, or not, sorry, masters of their technical ability, there was a lot of really, really talented musicians.

And if they weren't talented, then they trial by fire. Like you have to learn very quickly to become good. And so I think that it is fascinating. You know what's fascinating, too, is my dad would, when he would prophesy, he would often have musicians come up and play music behind him, whether piano or whether guitar.

Usually, you know, some of that softer music to kind of give this sort of gravity. And it became a part of his like prophetic performance. So, and there was some really talented. There was this man named Luke Hendricks and great, great dude, great individual, great piano player.

And he would travel a lot with my dad and he would come and he would play music, play the piano behind my dad. And it gave so much gravity. I remember just so many of these incredibly emotional performances of my dad has preached for 45 minutes to an hour to maybe more than that because, you know, you go long in the charismatic church, of course.

And he's not prophesied at all. He's just talked about different stories and whatnot. And then it was all kind of leading up. You would always put the prophecy at the end so that people wouldn't leave before, you know, it's like putting the sales at the back of the store to make sure that everybody walks through the whole store.

And here's the whole sermon. So that they stick around and pay attention so that if their name is called, you know, happens at them and to like end on this emotional high. But he would have.

Luke or someone come up and start playing music behind him, and it really, really made a difference in

it gets you into this place, this emotional place where then your name is called out and you have this live music and incredible incredible music musicians who know how to ebb and flow with the tone of what is being said when there's like a crescendo in this sort of brought to climax of like the prophetic as he as he starts talking that it starts out soft and then it grows and as he's giving his powerful this is what you will do and you will change nations the music crescendos behind him and it it became like a very very powerful

performance heart and I understand why people could become totally enraptured by these things and that's the whole idea of the harp and bowl model is that you know if you were just sitting there chanting You know the word was with God and the word was God and Again, I can't believe that I'm messing it up now. I should know John one Well in the irony of it is that was a passage that was repeated over and over and over and over in the Brannum cults because that was the really manifested sons of God passage The word became flesh. Well now we have the spoken word that when now we have what what people today call the word of knowledge that we have this thing

That's the word being made manifest among us so that the fact that that was put into the lyrics I think drives the point of all of this for me home because I don't have a problem with With music. I love all kinds of music if you look at my playlist I've got everything from classical to polka to rock and roll to everything. I love music, right?

When I was in the cult it was like a painter being told I could only paint with a color green. I like all music But as a songwriter I can tell you at least for me and I'm curious if other songwriters are listening Give me feedback in the comments. As a songwriter I never get a song come to me that has a repeated phrase over and over and over and over and over and over and over again That doesn't happen when you're a songwriter. It just doesn't happen The only way in which that happens is if you are a

person who knows how to manipulate a crowd and you know how to get something that stuck in their head Well, then you have the power to choose what it is that's getting stuck in their head Me that's the out of all of this that's the most scary part.

It's not just the phrase, that's where the music comes with it. Like it's the repeated of the melody that we don't cycle through different. It's not jazz where there's, where you're going in all separate directions and there's never resolution.

It's, you have these very cyclical sort of melodies paired with this repeated language. And so it becomes stuck in your head and it continues to repeat and repeat, repeat, repeat. And what, and then what happens too is that you're forbidden to listen to other music outside of that music, which this was definitely a thing.

Like my community was less strict on like the type of music that we would play or the type of instruments that we would play within the community. But I of course was forbidden to listen to anything that was considered secular music.

And I remember having an argument with one of the leaders of the sort of like youth pastors, I remember being like does Mozart count as secular music? Because it's not Christian music, you know?

And he was like, does it bring you closer to God? Yeah, sure, of course it does. And I don't really like, if that's a question, I'm having a spiritual experience to the Beatles or whatever, you know, like then we could totally open it up and it was so funny because so I wasn't allowed to listen to any music that wasn't Christian.

But I grew up in the era of tapes and CDs and when I would, the way that I got new music is I would go with my grandma to Mardelz. Do you know what Mardelz is?

It's like a Christian department store. They, it's like, I think it's in conjunction with Hobby Lobby or they're close to it or whatever. But you go in there and it had, you know, Veggie Tale T-shirts and everything that was like Christian.

And so they would have a whole music section and it was all the Christian music and my grandma would let me go and you could pick out CDs and you could play them. They had like their own little CD players there.

So you could sample all the music and she would always be like, you can pick one, you know, album and she kind of was like, well, this is all Christian music. She didn't also care.

My parents were way more strict. My grandma was like secretly teaching me how to like play poker and stuff like that. Like she was, she was fantastic and was like not, she was not stricter part of that community at all.

So she didn't care. But she respected my parents and stuff, but she was like, okay, well, we're in a Christian music. or in a Christian store, so like all of this music must be fine.

And I got, basically I got into a lot of the like Christian punk rock scene because that was like the most edgy thing that I could find in it. And I know that you might not be familiar with it, but like the reliant K and Ann Berlin and all of these different artists who like even the punk scream-home Christian music, I would listen to as well and that was so edgy and whatnot.

But I was having all of these very like spiritual, emotional, artistic experiences because I was suddenly able to listen to music that I had never heard before. And now I listen back to it and I'm like, it really wasn't that great.

Like it was pretty formulaic, it was pretty like pretending to be what, you know, Jimmy Eatworld and these other more like secular pop punk bands and stuff like that. But that was sort of my exposure to music that had more emotion in it than like the conventional worship music.

And I think that it's pretty downright pretty insidious to cloister off people's sort of artistic experiences, especially when it has to do with like children and growing up being like, hey, all of this other music you can't listen to, these types of movies you can't watch, these types of like just artistic experiences are closed off.

And I think it's done so that your only emotional artistic experiences are happening at your worship service that they then these repetitive cult-like, trans-like music that you are allowed to experience, that becomes your sort of only channel into experiencing art.

And what's funny is that like I get why they do it because like as soon as I started listening to music that was different and started expanding my horizons, that started the unraveling of my whole faith in the community and I was like, there is a lot of like better moving more interesting things that are going on.

We are supposed to be the light on the hill, we are supposed to be like the pinnacle of culture, we are supposed to be saying stuff that is more profound than everyone else. This is the idea that is being presented in the community that I'm in.

And like... I am listening to other music and I'm realizing we don't have anything worthwhile, or comparatively, through this music that is beyond us is so much more interesting, compelling, and emotional than what we have. I get why then you try to, like if you want to control people, you want to force them to only worship your music. They only listen and experience and have, you want to have pure access to people's emotional experiences. And this, like, politics that surround music was one of the primary ways in which that happened.

Yeah, I think that is one of the key concepts to understanding how it was a religious counterculture. I'm a sci-fi fan too, and right here is the Millennium Falcon. I don't know if you can see it, but in every episode we do the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars is right there.

But I'm a sci-fi fan and fantasy fan, and there's this concept that you've probably seen it in various movies, especially recently, where you've got this city that everything's kind of okay, and then suddenly they're inside of this wall, and then suddenly there's this hole in the wall, and people see the other side. And once they see the other side, well why are we in here? Why are we stuck in here? So there's this big journey to the other side, right? That whole concept exists because of what we're talking about. When you have a religious counterculture that has built mental

walls around your head, they can't keep you from seeing what's on the other side, and so they have to adapt and make it more appealing. But once you do, once you experience what's on the other side, my grandfather would say they went out of us because they were not of us.

So basically, once you see the other side and you experience the other side, people, a lot of people would just say, well heck with this, I don't want to be trapped in here, you're not going to tell me what to do. And so they break the counterculture religion.

But that concept is really what we're talking about today, and all of the music and the way that they manipulate your head, it's all tools to keep you in those walls and the boundaries mentally.

So this is excessively fun. I could talk about music probably for the next 10 hours. So I think it's great. Yeah. I think we're over. So we'll stop here. But thank you for doing this.

Yeah, my pleasure. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.