Up until relatively recently, the best of black music’s singers, musicians and producers developed their craft in the black church, bringing the oil with them into the world to sprinkle some anointing on soul and R&B tracks. The genres have always influenced each other even as they’ve denied each other. Gospel and secular music have a decades-old love/hate relationship. In honor of his birthday, today’s Music Sermon takes a look back at how he changed an entire genre–maybe two. There was a wide chasm between gospel and secular music. Easy to forget that a gospel artist dressed like a rapper or member of your favorite male R&B group wasn’t common. But it’s easy to forget that way back in the 90s when Kirk Franklin’s music first hit MTV, the pop charts and the cover of this publication, church folks were scandalized. In this era of music, there’s “trap gospel,” one of the biggest rappers of the last several years wears a “3” on his hat to represent the holy trinity and holds his own version of the altar call at the end of his shows, and the song “Jesus Walks” is an old school classic. The series seeks to tell unknown and/or forgotten stories that connect the dots between current music, culture and the foundations of the past. #MusicSermon is a weekly series by Naima Cochrane that highlights the under-acknowledged and under-appreciated urban artists and sub-genres from the ’90s and earlier.
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