Reading through some of these comments, a lot of people are bringing up one of the reasons I initially asked this question.
Being as so many current jewish songs are plagiarized, can we truly say that their cores are as kosher/spiritual as we want them to be? As such, if we allow our children to listen to songs which clearly sound non-Jewish (an example which was brought up previously was Hashem Melech. while I enjoyed the song, it clearly sounds as though it would not be difficult to replace the pesukim with secular lyrics.- I am not sure about how original the tune was in the first place but that just accentuates my point), how is it much different than just allowing them to listen to clean, non-Jewish music?
The only significant difference would be that frum music has pesukim in it but that is solved by the fact that most frum children are constantly hearing those pesukim in the first place so not hearing them in songs backed by goyish sounding music should not make much of a difference.
If the intentions/ spirituality of the original composer is detrimental to deciding whether the song would affect the neshama negatively, doesn’t that also raise the issue that simply backing holy pesukim with non-frum music might be inappropriate? In this case, isn’t hashem melech just as treif as listening to Mozart or Sinatra?
As we stand now, it seems that what is “frum” music vs what isn’t is simply a matter of what the community allows. (obviously within certain limits. In no way am I insinuating that clearly treif rap can be considered frum music) I know that many people do not allow their children to listen to the Maccabees as it is a well known that their songs are parodies of non-Jewish songs yet they allow their children to listen to songs that, while sung with frum lyrics and sung by frum people, have tunes of ambiguous origins.
