(RNS) — In a July 25 interview, Norman Gyamfi, a founder of the gospel music label Maverick City Music, stirred up fans and industry insiders as he explained the state of the genre bluntly. Gospel, he declared on gospel music artist Isaac Carree’s podcast, was stale.
“The gospel norms wasn’t workin’ no more. Y’all sing too hard. Stop doing that. Don’t nobody wanna hear no runs,” Gyamfi said.
A three-time Grammy Award winner who is no stranger to controversy, Gyamfi has been crucial to the rise of the worship music powerhouse Maverick City. In the podcast, he explained how, taking notes from mainstream music executives like Justin Bieber’s former manager Scooter Braun, he created Maverick City’s aesthetic, strategically avoiding explicit references to the trials of Black life as well as musical elements associated with Black music in order to appeal to white consumers.
Reclined in a swivel chair and waving ring-clad fingers, claiming to have resurrected a genre no one knew had died, Gyamfi seemed to revel in his edgelord persona as he explained how he remixed songs from white-dominated Christian contemporary music with just enough soul. “You had Black kids with, respectfully, white writers and producers. So, they were training them not to over sing,” he said. It’s blue-eyed soul in reverse, but make it Christian.
Bragging about gutting gospel music of its soulful urgency and political relevance to increase profits isn’t the flex Gyamfi thinks it is. The interview leaves you feeling as if you’ve been learning how hot dogs are made.
Gyamfi’s critique of gospel music makers stirred outrage because gospel has always been more than a commodity. It existed before there was a music industry, and it will outlive the music industry, which has been in decline for years. Gyamfi’s commercial success may protect him from these facts, but the truth remains that anyone who speaks of gospel music strictly in market terms has lost the plot.
Gospel music is more than a genre. It’s a survival strategy. From “Go Down, Moses” to Marvin Sapp’s “Never Would Have Made It,” gospel brings God’s presence to bear on African Americans’ ages-long struggle for freedom, dignity and well-being in a society built on Black suffering. It’s a lifeline for the Black community, a vital resource in resisting spiritual death.
Gyamfi isn’t measuring the value or relevance of gospel by the spiritual nourishment it has given and continues to provide Black people. He measures it by the stats in the Spotify for Artists dashboard. “Maverick City out-streams the entire gospel music industry combined,” he boasted. That claim — true or not — seems to be all that matters to him.
He dismissed the notion that Black people still have a sociopolitical struggle, one that demands a soundtrack, that summons the presence of God within a specific historical context. Though he concedes that racism still exists, Gyamfi seems to believe Black people’s greatest struggle is no longer systemic racism.
“I don’t know nothing about no struggle,” he said, “I ain’t grow up on no food stamps in the ’hood. My kids can’t relate to — like the way ‘Never Would Have Made It’ hit my grandma, don’t hit me the same way. It’s different. We relate to a different story. … I’m just speaking to the general young Black kids. Our struggles today are more internal than they are external forces.”
That’s a wild claim to make as white Christian nationalists are in power, bent on restoring a less equitable American social order and engaging in one of the most aggressive reversals of racial progress in the United States since the end of the Reconstruction era. The current administration is cutting diversity, equity and inclusion programs, reverting military bases to their Confederate names and trying to deport as many Latinos as possible. It’s only slightly less surprising if you know that Gyamfi himself is a supporter of Donald Trump, which he also said on the podcast.
Gyamfi may be right that the old ways of making money from gospel music may be outdated and unviable. His market-driven approach may be the only way forward for the genre, but at what cost? Gyamfi seems content to make a Faustian bargain, trading gospel’s prophetic edge for about $0.0035 a stream.
In “The Prophets,” Jewish philosopher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel argued that the prophets convey the pathos of God. Gospel music, with its melismatic groans, whoops and squalls of athletic vocalists, does just that. It does what Jesus proclaimed he’d come to do when he recited the words from Isaiah’s scroll — to proclaim good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives. That should be the standard of measure for gospel music’s value.
To be sure, Gyamfi is just doing what good businessmen do — trying to maximize profit. But it doesn’t profit gospel music to gain all the white listeners in the world, just to lose its soul.
