The Gospel According To...Me?/*Sunday June 28-twitter

This was in response to a few tweets made by my homie Courtney:

you're right, to a certain extent. What's starting to happen is in an effort to bring a bigger audience, gospel seems to be crossing over into the rap/r&b market, but instead of on it's own terms, it's sort of cross pollinating. It's still praise music, but with a real solid hip-hop asthetic. As opposed to older gospel luminaries trying to bring in a younger, hip-hop/r&b audiance by utiliazing those genre's key elements, it's a younger, already hip-hop influenced generation, trying to find common ground between the music that's popular amoung their peers, and the message of gospel, the music they make and love. Music changes with the people and times ; you can always learn about an era' people through their music. even today's "traditional" style gospel is completely different from that of it's golden age and beyond...

on another note, gospel music has done a better job of keepin it's hands on it's artist since the 80's. That's why contemporary r&b has suffered so much since the 90's; one of the 70's 60's and even 50's popular black music's greatset strengths was the fact that a huge percentage of it's performers came up in the church, or lovers of gospel. Almost all of the GREATS came from a churhc background, let alone the "lesser" artist (for lack of a better term). Since the 80's, the church has held on to it's biggest assets, and because of that, we started dealing with a whole new generation that had been seperated from "church music" (which really says a lot about society at the time, dontcha think?). Less soul, less passion, and more emphasis on image and all the new styles that came with the huge musical technological advances and trends. I'm ramblin now, and if I dont stop, it'll never end. lol