we seem to be facing similar dilemmas regarding this.

I've often wondered where 'secular' music fits into the christian life. It's probably been more a source of doubt (and perceived guilt=distance from God) than any other area in my life, even more than the sexuality problem or anything else for that matter. You know: I could probably give up sex, give up thinking of boys, material possesions; but I can't imagine my life without the Beethoven Sonatas, the Mahler Symphonies, or the Bach Sonatas & Partitas, etc. It's inconcievable to me. And I find much of 'christian music' (let's just use it as an umbrella term) pretty much exacly as you do. It does nothing for me.

Strange things have happened to me spiritually with secular music, though.
Things like the variations of Beethoven's Op.111, where I can literally feel something not-completely-human going on, as if the poor wretched old man, beaten by life and alone, could for a moment surrender, look up (or inward, IDK) and actually express a bit of heaven, and in the process bring the listener closer to a pure expression of God. Or Mahler's 'Veni, Creator Spiritus', which always leaves me out of breath and wondering 'how can this NOT be good for me?'. The only time that I can say without a doubt I've felt the Holy Spirit was one day in my room, alone, listening for the first time to the 'Cum Sancto Spiritu' of the Bach B Minor Mass. That was AN EXPERIENCE. It took me a whole week of life's troubles to come down from that high.

At the back of my mind is always the scipture about the devil dressed as an angel of light. And I do believe 'art' is either influenced by one OR the other (that would be the 'Holy' and the 'evil'). I can never quite figure out if I'm 'allowed' to listen to something or not. Just because it SOUNDS good... Obviously there are things like Shostakovich's or Mahler's darker scores, Beethoven's C minor storms, most of post-Wagner romanticism, the more out-there examples of avant-garde and serialist stuff, where you can tell 'you're not supossed to be listening to this' from a spiritual perspective. But what about the rest of not-so-extreme music? Can I listen to a Haydn Quartet? A Tchaikovsky Concerto, even though he was gay? A Messiaen score? Same goes for all other artforms, but it's music that's my Achilles' heel.

Several times I've tried to make peace with god, renouncing secular music for stretches of days, weeks, only to come back to it eventually. I'm just too miserable without it. It's been an essential part of me since I was a boy, my dream was to become a composer, but thanks to this problem, this indecision, I never actually achieved anything. I found myself incapable of writing 'spiritual' music (basically what I think God wouldn't deny me entrance to heaven for) so I didn't write all the piles of symphonies/sonatas/concertos/songs floating in my head. I didn't want to be responsible for ANYONE getting lost because of my music (which, for the sake of simplification we'll just call "VERY SAD AND VERY DARK!!"). Now that writing is no longer an issue, there's the matter of listening to it.

...I was gonna carry on like this for who knows how much longer, but it's late here and tomorrow's a busy day, so I'll see if I can finish off the thoughts when I'n not falling over the chair with exhaustion.