Changing The Context Of Music
The best way to listen to music, is in a DJ mix. Most music now really serves to be background music, as we all are accustom to walking in coffee shops, grocery stores, even at work, listening music playing in the back. It’s kind of funny that we have embraced the idea of background music, and found a way to make it interesting and something that you can vibe to. The right background music, can change the tone of our environment, much like the soundtrack of a movie.
Most DJ’s that we see today via social media, are typically people behind a crazy amount of DJ gear, dancing, turning buttons, dropping the crowd favorites. Have you ever wondered what they’re really doing back there? There are a lot of bells and whistles these days in the DJ culture. We come from a bit of an old school mentality though…
We believe a skilled DJ, should be able to play in any environment, and play music that you didn’t even know you wanted to hear.
We believe that, a good DJ mix gets you feeling music that you might have been unfamiliar with, or can make you feel refreshed by songs you’ve heard thousands of times.
This was our original motive when we started to making DJ’ing part of our ministry work. Over time though, we felt like we’ve found an opportunity to also address a bigger issue among Christians. When we started to do mixes for the Bread & Beats Mixshow, we realized how of Christians had never heard that music before. That made us realize how, as Christians, we have very limited music options. So, we’re going to try and address that with these Vibe Time DJ Mixes.
Look, we teach the Bible and have done so in many different environments. Sometimes the “vibe” wasn’t a good one. Yet, in other cases when we were just hanging out, playing music, conversations would spark, which allowed for a different kind of Bible teaching to take place. We noticed that, the music we played (which is FAR different than the traditional Christian EDM or Worship Music you see widely available now), often set a cool vibe, where folks were relaxed, and willing to engage. This was helpful for us for ministry, but was also helpful to the people we talked to.
Realizing this changed our approach to ministry AND how we search for music. We learned that we didn’t want to just find the hottest new tracks before every other DJ. Now, we’re looking to curate music to create cool vibes in any environment - especially where that might be helpful to encourage Godliness. Sure, we work hard to find music where there is no explicit lyrics, or explicit content. At the same time though, we’re also taking the approach to re-contextualize music that is not necessarily “Christian.” The world, and even the church takes scripture out of context, often! So, we figured, we can do that too, but in the sense of taking any music – secular or otherwise - that may have a good vibe, nice sound to it, and put in the context that promotes an opportunity to clear the mind for Godly and Biblical thinking. If David could take Goliath’s that was meant to slay the people of God, and use it to slay Goliath himself, why can’t we recontextualize beats meant for one purpose, and use them for a Godly one, to encourage and motivate the people of God?
That’s Vibe Time…