The partnership between Leona Lewis and American Idol’s Simon Cowell has reached fruition with Lewis’s debut album Spirit. After discovering her on Britain’s The X-Factor, Cowell has used his influential hand to guide her through to stardom. Lewis’s success is a testament to her talent as an R&B artist, but also to Cowell’s industry-savvy handiwork.

Spirit is a good R&B album because it pulls the right strings. The strong melodies, standard verse-chorus-verse structures and high-reaching golden notes are all the key ingredients to make a calculated, commercial success. But perhaps the ingredient we as Christians should be most concerned with are the lyrics typified by the genre, that record producers seem to keep feeding us and that we as listeners seem to keep responding to.

Spirit is all about the various emotions that love, or at least our human understanding of it, can pull us through. The album kicks off with the gut-wrenching ‘Bleeding Love’. To a creeping organ Leona sings ‘closed off from love I didn’t need the pain, once or twice was enough and it was all in vain’, launching into the chorus we all know and sing ‘I keep bleeding love’.

To the harsh bass-clap rhythm in ‘Take a Bow’, Leona sings with as much attitude as she can muster, ‘Take a bow, ‘cause this scene is coming to an end, I gave you love, all you gave me was pretend’.

She sings about the agonies of love like a pro, yet in the same album sings things like ‘We’re like Romeo and Juliet, families can’t divide us’ or ‘The first time I kissed your mouth I felt the earth move in my hands’. Like many R&B albums, Spirit weaves through a routine obstacle course of ups and downs, arriving no-where in particular.

Of course, these lyrics are manufactured to please audiences, but why should they be pleasing to us? If R&B music is any indication of what we understand about love, then we need to reconsider what true love really is. The kind of love Leona sings about is one that pleases us one minute, then frustrates and hurts us the next. This isn’t the love Christians know. God’s love is undying, unfaltering and goes beyond a rollercoaster of emotions. It’s the source of our very salvation and endures forever.