Music can be divided into three general categories—music you should repent of, music you can grow from, and music you can grow into.
Music can be repented of for two reasons. The more obvious would be the intellectual musical attempts to declare the world to be a different kind of place than God created it to be. The music of Schoenberg and John Cage should be placed in this category.
Another form of repentance would be for thinking that any piece of music, provided you like it, should be suitable for any occasion. But the Bible teaches in multiple ways, that music is designed to accompany, and therefore there is one kind of music for mourning and another kind for dancing. There is music for worship, and there is music to get your guests chattering.
Music you can grow from is probably the kind of music you naturally gravitate to. Musically, it is not in rebellion against God—no non-Euclidian scales, everything is tonal, the rhythms are . . . rhythmical, and so forth. But in these days of mass production, most of it is pretty forgettable, and can almost be thought of as a consumption item. It is not sin, any more than Kraft Mac n’ Cheese in a box is sin. But if you are still having that for every dinner fifteen years from now, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that you married the wrong person. With the musical equivalent, the lyrics are trite and the melodic hooks are, if possible, even more trite. This is true of most popular music, but not all of it of course. Young people, if you like what you like, find the good stuff there, study it, think it through. Above everything else, do not define the “good stuff” as that which is currently hot.
What we want the music of the church to do is provide two things—a sense of the need for diverse music for diverse occasions, and an example of the kind of music that we should long to grow up into. What will music be like when it matures? What will music be like in the resurrection?