Upon its May 27 release, the album God’s Property from Kirk Franklin’s Nu Nation debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200, and became the first gospel album to top the magazine’s R&B/Hip Hop Albums chart. And in fact, the hit single version of “Stomp” was a remix, built on a repeated snippet of Funkadelic’s utopian “One Nation Under a Groove.” This was a big tent song.Īs often happens, the objections of some cranks got reworked into a selling point, and the song sold. For the unchurched, Franklin’s intro was something else entirely: an irresistible claim that this song “Stomp” was so innovative, so subversive, so Notorious B.I.G.-quoting, it could no longer stay confined to its obscure corner of Tower Records. The gospel fans already knew Franklin’s music, and might have heard the same criticisms in their own congregations. It was an introduction directed, in different ways, at gospel and pop fans. “Well I got news for you: You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.
“You think we’ve gotten too radical with our message…” (Gospel music was radical now? What did that even mean?) “For those of you that think that gospel music has gone too far…” (Wait a minute: Who thought gospel music had gone too far?) In fact, he addressed them in his introduction to “Stomp,” the first time many non-gospel listeners heard his voice: The people in the video gyrate, throw their hair wildly, shake their bodies, and Kirk even does the Snake.” Another letter ended with a piece of advice: “Kirk needs to stop playing church to the beat of Satan’s drums.”įranklin had heard such critics throughout his career. One concerned reader of VIBE, responding to the magazine’s profile of GP’s perpetually-in-motion leader Kirk Franklin, wrote, “It’s hard to believe that ‘Stomp’ is a church song. They also upset fans who felt the groups were abandoning their principles. And they found them: Their albums went triple platinum, becoming the biggest ever sellers for, respectively, gospel choirs and anarchist collectives. With these two simple motivational anthems - each had a second verse same as the first - the groups sought unlikely fans outside their normal audiences. Credit the groups’ shared evangelical impulse. If gospel choirs and anarchist collectives had anything in common, surely it was bashing the video channel and its skin-drenched paeans to mammon. In 1997, seeing God’s Property’s “Stomp” on MTV was just as weird as seeing Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping.”
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