The Spirit Grooves Them

GOD AND SUPERMAN

There is one line that stretches far longer than Batman’s. Or, for that matter, the Viper. And even, it seems, Magic Mountain’s recently erected showpiece, Superman.

Just down the road from the kiddie coasters, people stand waiting for a different kind of thrill ride--for something else that will send their heart into their stomach.

They have come: Congregants with fans and tams in air-conditionless school buses. Church groups and record label brass. The converted and the curious. They’ve come to the park’s 10th annual daylong Gospel Celebration. They have come to have “church.” First, a little blues-chasing praise music with singer Fred Hammond. But mostly they have come to see the spry spirit-chaser Kirk Franklin--who, all flip and flash, is now mid-act in his bid to turn the gospel world on its head.

“Wait. Let’s do this. . . . Raise your hands if you really love Jesus!” shouts the man of the hour. Franklin stomps out--boxing, swinging, arms wild. In oversized shorts, white T-shirt, black work boots, baseball cap, he is bantam-weight slight, but the voice that soars out of him is heavyweight. This is heart-in-the-throat, stomach-falling-away, joyous praise-and-testimony music.

All of it: Kirk Franklin’s flourish of a signature.

Part mega-tour, part soul-winning tent show, Franklin is on a mission: To kick open the doors of the church, even if it means tearing down all the walls and relaying the foundation.

With his first album, 1993’s “Kirk Franklin and the Family,” selling upward of 1.4 million units, Franklin and his churchified backing group, the Family, upped the ante with its follow-up, “Watcha Lookin’ 4.” It sold 1.7 million. But it was 1996’s “God’s Property From Kirk Franklin’s Nu Nation,” the record he made with his teen choir ensemble, that has spiked gospel music into a whole new realm by selling more than 2.5 million units.

The album features the crossover hit “Stomp,” which sat on Billboard’s Hot R&B; Mainstream Airplay chart for 42 weeks (peaking at No. 1 for two weeks) in 1997. It also sat triumphant on Billboard’s Hot 100 Airplay chart for 11 weeks in August of that same year. That success, coupled with its showings on the gospel and contemporary Christian charts, have made “God’s Property From Kirk Franklin’s Nu Nation” the biggest-selling gospel album ever.

With heavy R&B; radio airplay and MTV rotation, it’s been difficult to ignore the weight and wrench of Franklin’s words. He has become a crossover superstar. Even Vibe, hip-hop’s perfect-bound, high-gloss bible, gave him its imprimatur by splashing him on its cover. All of this is unheard of in the gospel world.

Lines and frenzy have followed Franklin around the country. So have screaming teens. And so has stern whispered reproach from those who demand decorum. Franklin’s defanged, playful borrowings--from Parliament to Grandmaster Flash to Puff Daddy--give many pause. The match of gospel with funk and rap seems too worldly, far too incongruous.

Predictably, out of all this has resurfaced that time-worn rift in the church community. Once again the wedge dividing old from young, traditionalists from futurists, has become pronounced. But Franklin appears to be surviving it all, even a freak fall off a stage in Memphis two years ago from which he was never expected to walk or talk again.

Tonight the house jumps wild. Franklin, MC-ing for the One for Eternity, ministers to the boys in the baggies and Kangols and the girls with the maraschino-hued Janet Jackson ringlets.

“Look at me! I’m a witness.” Franklin moves to the lip of the stage, cradling his baseball cap in his left arm, bending his voice into a rasp of a whisper. “When you’re 27 and black and . . . trying to be a husband and father, it takes a lot. A whoooole lot. You’ve got to say: ‘Devil, get out of my home! Devil, get out of my marriage! Devil, get out of my children!’ ”

Praise the Lord!

“You can love your husband with a Pinto. You can love him eating government cheese sammiches! Don’t trip, don’t trip . . . you know what I’m talking about,” he giggles, taunting in his best Chris-Rock-by-way-of-Richard-Pryor-ese. “You know . . . big hunk o’ cheese, fry the bologna till it bubbles.”

Amen!

Praise Jesus!

Then, as the bass rumbles up beneath:. “We gotta get our praise on before we get up on outta here! All young people who are drug-free and with Jesus, headbang for Jesus!”

Young, old, black, white, brown. Lifted. Laughing. Stomping. Shouting. Speaking in tongues.

A sanctified mosh pit.

Indeed, all rise. Let us all headbang.

HOLY GHOST PARTY

Some want to finger Franklin.

But that would be those short on memory. Others would say that the real renovator was John P. Kee, who in the late ‘80s tinkered with urban contemporary rhythms and then set them against traditional church chordal structure.

Some would upbraid Commissioned or the Winans (BeBe and CeCe and the rest), while others would focus their vitriol on Andrae Crouch. Still others, who remember chapter and verse, would reach back to Edwin Hawkins’ sunny tambourine and hand-clap 1969 hit, “Oh Happy Day,” as the who in the question: Who stole the goal?

“Every person who is innovative has had a problem,” says Crouch. “People get comfortable with their own pose. They want to stay in the safety zone. So many times in churches still, in black churches per se, the songs you’d hear would be about being saved, maybe going to heaven. Maybe some hard times and praise-the-Lord music. Very seldom in a religious song do you hear anything about relationships in a real world.”

Kirk Franklin has upset the gospel establishment as much as any of those who have stepped out of the safety zone. His message is as flip as his aubergine suits offset by gold lame, sequined or rhinestone lapels that spread like butterfly wings across his narrow shoulders.

It’s just as disconcerting as the voice, edged with a similar impatient, battering-ram quality that put Public Enemy’s Chuck D on the rap map. His machine-gun delivery, however, lets loose a “get with God!” message--and consequently is that much more subversive.

Sunk into slick, funk-based production, plucked ripe for urban contemporary play, Franklin is inciting a generation to “get their praise on” in a way heretofore unimagined: In other words, you can’t help but dance.

“What I like most about it,” says Lisa Collins, Billboard magazine’s gospel music editor and editor-publisher of the industry bible Gospel Music Industry Round-Up. “You’ve got people driving in the car listening, and before they know it they are singing Jesus!”

Franklin isn’t alone in his attempt to reconfigure gospel, but he is certainly--in numbers and fanfare--leading the pack of new jack gospel artists, who are re-imagining the borders of the praise song. They include Hezekiah Walker & the Love Fellowship Crusade Choir; John P. Kee & the New Life Community Choir; L.A’s own Kurt Carr & the Kurt Carr Singers; Trin-i-tee 5:7; Fred Hammond & the Radical for Christ Choir; A-1 Swift; Virtue; and the late O’Landa Draper.

Although the singer-composer--whose new album, “The Nu Nation Project,” was released on Tuesday--is based in Houston, his recording career’s epicenter is in Inglewood. When he signed to Gospo Centric five years ago, he was an unknown and the label a fledgling. It had been founded just a few months earlier by Vicki Mack Lataillade with little more than $6,000.

That label is now “the leading company in the gospel industry,” according to Collins. “In terms of impact, no one has had more in the last five years.”

This bootstrap story of a poor boy from Riverside, Texas, and a Los Angeles striver who drew on her father’s postal pension isn’t lost on the music industry as well as the church community, who look at Franklin’s success as a multilayered parable.

“A hit in gospel five or six years ago was 50,000 to 75,000 copies,” says Collins. “Today, a legitimate hit in gospel is upward of 200,000 at least. Your top 10 gospel artists now sell on average above 150,000 copies. Five years ago that would have made you a superstar.”

For radio programmers, concert promoters and retail buyers, this is tangible proof that gospel is an untapped commercial market. Gospel and contemporary Christian music is now a $550-million business. That may be a small percentage of the entire music industry, but because the genre is growing so fast, major companies--from Tommy Boy to MCA--have added a gospel or contemporary Christian music division.

And now after years of prodding and fund-raising, Los Angeles has a full-time gospel station, KYPA-AM (1230), “The Spirit of Los Angeles.” “What the industry is finding is that it’s not a trend,” says Reginald Utley, radio personality at KYPA as well as KACE-FM (103.9), “but it’s God music. It’s message. And what we’ve learned is that in evangelism and missionary work, don’t just leave your message in one place.”

All this is new for a city known primarily as a “church and choir town” and as a costly, time-consuming detour along what Cal State Dominguez Hills professor of music Hansonia Caldwell has dubbed the “Gospel Highway.”

For decades, “gospel music here just was not plentiful,” says Cora Martin-Moore, the daughter of Chicago-based gospel pioneer Sallie Martin. It went against the region’s buttoned-down grain. “They were just singing out of hymn books, the Gospel Pearls.” But it was St. Paul’s Baptist, where Martin-Moore was minister of music for 38 years, that took up the duty of spreading the then-controversial, blues-twined Chicago gospel sound throughout the Southland.

“They went wild. We’d get people from all over--black, white--2,500 in its prime. It’s happening all over. Attendance falling off. A new platform needs to be set up.” And what that means, figures Martin-Moore, is that “we have to save our church. And [my generation], we’ve already done our building. And we have to help them do that. . . . Time’s over for jivin’.”

THE SPIRIT WILL NOT DESCEND WITHOUT SONG

In a sea of church hats, Collins’ floats above the rest. Tonight, she is doing the business-card-hand-pump thing. Collins’ two publications, L.A. Focus and Gospel Industry Round-Up, coupled with her biweekly column for Billboard, make her a different sort of “Church Lady.” There are two, maybe three more events that she must stop in on, but she addresses everyone as if she has endless Sunday afternoons’ worth of time.

This reception at Mount Moriah Baptist Church is a 10th anniversary party for New Life Gospel Records and its proprietor, Sherry Anderson. Located on Jefferson Boulevard, a quick step around the corner from West Angeles Church of God in Christ, Anderson’s store offers perhaps the most eclectic range of gospel recordings--from hymns to jazzspel--in Los Angeles. For touring gospel artists, the store has become one of the most important promotional “must-stops” in the city.

Hair piled high, glossy on her head like a fresh-cut centerpiece of exotics, Anderson talks business as flashes fire off around her, making her sequined dress shimmer like a disco ball. She poses with an array of behind-scenes people who have sustained gospel in the city over the years.

They have shown up in their finest: the ubiquitous and carefully marcelled publicist Dorean Edwards of Consultant Entertainment; Rodena Preston of the L.A. Chapter of the Gospel Music Workshop of America/IMC Mass Choir; and Reggie Utley of KACE and KYPA, in an emerald green jacket, balancing a plate of jambalaya atop a plastic cup filled with red punch.

All the while, Collins is chatting with praying-to-be artists and hard-working choir directors. She slips notes and press releases in a purse the size of a pastry box fit for petits fours. She recalls names and faces without hesitation, presses people into a hearty hug. The consummate preacher’s daughter, she keeps smiling, though those heels are high and new enough to look like they are for nothing more than Sunday-go-to-seating.

There’s a reason to congregate. Collins and Anderson and everyone else want to take time to say proper thank-yous.

Gospel is showing up in places that would have been unheard of just five years ago--on urban contemporary stations like 92 The Beat and Power 106, on MTV and on movie soundtracks. Whether it’s Magic Mountain or the Universal Amphitheatre, artists are holding church in traditionally pop venues around the country.

The seeds of this change began in the late ‘80s with singer-composer Kee. “He would have to be the first pied piper of church youth,” says Collins. “His music was traditional church music infused with this energy that you could parallel with R&B;, but it wasn’t R&B.; It was very hip.”

It may have been hip, but the style that Kee introduced--organ riffs meshed with funk-based beats--came out of the most hallowed of traditions: James Cleveland’s Gospel Music Workshop of America. For more than 50 years until he died in 1991, Cleveland was known worldwide as the King of Gospel. When he moved from Detroit to L.A. in 1964, he joined a loose network of black churches--St. Paul Baptist, Mt. Moriah, Victory Baptist, Massadonia--that were nurturing the gospel sound. Cleveland’s arrival, though, sent a shock down the city’s spine.

His workshops, held around the country since 1968, were huge, weeklong, annual affairs that drew upward of 25,000 people. They served as the proving ground for up-and-coming gospel singers.

“They all came out of the Gospel Music Workshop of America,” remembers Annette May Thomas, chief executive and trustee of the James Cleveland Charitable Foundation/Trust. “Your Kirk Franklins, your John P. Kees would walk across that stage. And Rev. Cleveland, he would sit through all of them, give his blessing.”

Thomas, the daughter of gospel great Brother Joe May, “the Thunderbolt of the Middle West,” was one of the founding members of the workshop and Cleveland’s right arm when he moved to L.A. She continues to head up the workshop’s youth department, which now tips toward 1,000 members. Over the years, she says, it became clear that youth wanted something to do on their own. After all, the Good News gospel grew out of the blues and wound itself around jazz, R&B; and soul. Hip-hop, then, seems the next logical step to woo a younger flock across the church’s threshold.

Still, Thomas worries. Gospel is ministry; it’s missionary work. At its core, the music is about saving souls. But is that getting lost amid all the “rocking and rolling”? Is it too much show and not enough message? Is it too secular?

“Nowadays,” Thomas says, “we have what we call the Brat Pack--Kirk Franklin, Donald Lawrence, Hezekiah Walker. [The young people] all want to jump up and come down in front. Last year when Kirk came out they went crazy. They had bodyguards because everyone was trying to mob him. And I said: ‘Uh-uh.’ . . . That’s a lot of hero-worship-type stuff. And that way you’re not putting God first.”

From the beat to the costume, this new strain of praise song tests not only the limits, but also the patience of the elders: “Contemporary gospel, the BeBes and the CeCes, is more desirable now,” says Thomas, “Because all of the hip-hop stuff is going too way out! It’s not only changed the sound, but it’s changed the mode of worship, dress code, everything. And church is not a concert.”

Success in gospel has historically been measured by how wide the good news is spread, not by the size of your hired car or entourage. It often means sacrifice. It’s that dissonance that gives many traditionalists pause--like John and Vermya Philips, who have hosted a gospel music radio show, “Moments of Decision” (currently on KTYM-AM [1460]), every week in “dead-man’s hours” for 41 years, far out of the reach of the spotlight.

“All this emotional music,” figures John by way of aphorism, “well, I’ve often said an empty wagon makes a lot of noise. Now if the wagon is full, it goes down the road smooth. I mean with some of this emotional stuff, they need to go back to square one, if they want to take gospel music higher.”

GOD DON’T NEED ALL THAT!

Vicki Mack Lataillade is hungry.

It’s this regimen she’s put herself on in hopes of sliding into some slinky outfits by summer’s end. She and husband/business partner Claude have hired a personal trainer, and they have been trying to be religious about the regime. A geyser of words and gesture, she looks as if she could burn a couple hundred calories simply by sitting in place. It’s taken months to get a face-to-face interview with the woman who is rewriting the definition of contemporary gospel music and doing so in triplicate. This is a heady time for Gospo Centric.

Its latest coup, the stylishly smooth trio Trin-i-tee 5:7 (dubbed the gospel version of naughty boy-toys like TLC), has in four weeks gone to No. 1 on the gospel charts and No. 5 on the contemporary Christian charts with its single “God’s Grace” (written by R&B; star R. Kelly). Franklin’s new CD will ship a million copies--the first time ever for a gospel recording.

In her early 40s, face scrubbed clean of makeup, hair tucked under a DKNY baseball cap and outfitted in a sweat suit the same shade of the cantaloupe she intermittently snacks on to get her blood sugar up, Vicki could be settling in for a pre-finals all-nighter.

“We like things in extreme, that’s the kind of company that we are,” she says. “Our goal was to create alternative music for today’s urban youth. I have two kids, and I didn’t want them to look at the latest videos, or listen to some of those records . . . because there were a lot of the gangsta lyrics.”

Settling back into the desk chair, she lowers the volume of the Trin-i-tee 5:7’s CD. “They were upset because there was nothing for them. My daughter said: ‘Well, Mommy, you’re in the record business, do something about it.’ But, what could I do? I kept thinking, ‘Can a little person like me do something?’ ”

Born in San Mateo, Vicki received her bachelor’s degree in the theater arts at UCLA. During college, she worked as an intern at KNXT-TV (now KCBS) and KDAY radio. “I was hustling to get gas money together so that when a position became open for an intern at RCA, I had this great resume.”

In 1977, she stepped into a full-time job as inventory specialist at that label. “The big thing was I did the Elvis inventory. Display work, until . . .” Vicki pauses, “something interesting happened. I became a Christian while I was there.”

Consequently, Vicki began leapfrogging around the local gospel industry. Working at Light Records and Sparrow Records and with acts like Walter Hawkins and Al Green, she began to learn the bridges and shortcuts, the dead-ends and the open roads.

“When I left Sparrow, there were no blacks at any major Christian companies. You couldn’t be a VP or president or anything. It wasn’t a glass ceiling. They called it a brick box.”

If she was going to effect any change she would have to think outside that box. “But I could not get money from any bank in L.A. Even with my background. But my dad believed in me. That’s all I needed. That and just really faith. And I just believed that God was really bigger than racism, sexism. Anything.”

With help from her father’s postal pension, Vicki began assembling Gospo Centric in 1992. She did independent work for one company, and it bought her a couch and coffee table; she advised another, and it set her up with computers. The label’s first record was by the Tri-City Singers, but what put Gospo Centric over was a piece of twofold luck--or in Vicki’s view, something that occupies the realm of a blessing.

Gospel artist Daryl Coley, who housed his management company in the Gospo Centric offices, had been walking around with a song in his pocket for six months. The refrain went: “Silver and gold, silver and gold/I’d rather have Jesus than silver and gold.”

Hearing it, Vicki realized “that if I kept myself concentrated on doing the right thing, the rest will come.” And it did.

The author of that song happened to be an unknown out of Texas named Kirk Franklin.

“It was crazy. At the time, Kirk’s car was being re-poed. He’d been kicked out of his house. And we were sitting up on the phone negotiating. But it was more than just negotiating. We bonded. Our visions were the same. He wanted to reach the youth. He wanted to be competitive with the other music that was out there. He wanted to put some new flavas on it. He wanted to do the music the way he felt was right. He was a great writer, and nobody was telling him that. And I understood what he was saying.”

Vicki signed him without even seeing him. “I didn’t realize that I had done it. I thought: ‘Oh boy! I flunked Record Business 101! See the act first!’ But I didn’t have enough money to go anywhere.”

The first record, “Kirk Franklin and the Family,” released in 1993, went platinum. Not as radical as what soon followed, that album significantly raised Gospo Centric’s profile. But the even-better-received follow-up, “Watcha Lookin’ 4,” with its pop-radio-ready remixes and hip-hop-tinged sensibility, announced to the music world that Gospo Centric had a knack for repackaging praise.

Quickly, Vicki’s growing roster began to challenge the confines of gospel tradition. Gospo Centric now boasts approximately a dozen artists: from the husband-and-wife gospel rap team A-1 Swift to Stellar Award-winning ensemble Kurt Carr & the Kurt Singers to their new chart-buster Trin-i-tee 5:7. The company has also spun off two labels: B-Rite, headed up by Vicki’s husband, which will cut and cater to a more youthful street sound (acts like the Gospel Gangstaz and God’s Property), and Fo Yo Soul, which will serve as Franklin’s laboratory.

Gospo Centric has indeed “blown-up.” Having outgrown its white cinder-block office space, it is about to move into a state-of-the-art facility just four blocks away. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have time for an hour of office prayer every Monday. It keeps them grounded, Vicki believes. So do gestures like contributing to the Burned Churches Fund of the Nation Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S. or building a second studio in their new complex that’s accessible to neighborhood children.

“It’s a business,” says Vicki, “but I also want kids to learn technology. Because so many kids think, black kids especially, that to be in the record business that you have to be a star. You have to be a rapper. There are so many other areas like manufacturing and engineering, writing, that we want to expose them to.”

Still, Gospo Centric’s good works aren’t enough for those who believe its musical approach is quite simply impious. “Some people are angry that we’re doing this,” Vicki says. “But you know, we want to reach the youth. We keep saying that, and one of the easiest ways of doing that is through music. And you’ve gotta stop beating them up and do it right. We talk to pastors. We just really want to make sure that we’re not doing things that are wrong toward the word of God or our community, because we know we’re on the edge. We know that.

“Teenagers are not midget adults. They’re teenagers. They like their beats a little grating. They want something that’s uniquely theirs. I’m not saying dilute the word. but there’s nothing wrong with dancing.”

The criticism, though, has been loud, particularly in the case of “Stomp,” with its aggressive boom-box rhythms and street-savvy testimony of Cheryl “Salt” James. It comes from as high as the pulpit, and it comes in the form of cold shoulders and disapproving stares--and in the form of hate mail and even death threats. And it all rests heavy.

“There was a big conference with about 40,000 people there,” Vicki recalls, “a pastor got up and just blasted us. Kirk and myself. And it was devastating. Because I couldn’t understand. Well, you don’t like the gangsta rap. But then when we try to do something positive, they got mad. ‘Stomp’ is a song of jubilation. And so in the most literal terms we felt dammed if we did, and dammed if we didn’t. Phariseeism. That’s what I call it. A bunch of Pharisees.”

‘YOU’VE GOT TO LIVE THE LIFE YOU SING ABOUT’

“How many of you are going to pray for the gospel singer?” Hezekiah Walker has spoken. Reverb shrieks. Applause goes from a trickle to a roar within Greater Bethany’s packed-to-the-limits sanctuary.

Walker has come to preach. Fully outfitted with the Love and Fellowship Crusade choir for a church circuit date, the Verity recording artist and Brooklyn-based minister slows it all down to drop a public service announcement on behalf of the new gospel sound.

“I want you to pray for my friend Kirk Franklin. There are people who are accusing him of stepping on territorial ground. People are so afraid to step on territorial ground, but what they don’t understand is that we’re not trying to bring the world to the church.”

Walker smiles, a pregnant pause, an organ pumps, a snare pops under his own cadence: “I want the church to go to the world! And there’s a whoooole lot of gospel singers, and God’s got their number. Somebody’s gonna be mad at me now. Go ‘head and be mad at me! But we need to flood our churches with holiness. Old-time holiness.”

Here at Greater Bethany on Hoover Street, the flock is often bathed in holiness. This is Bishop Noel Jones’ rollicking church, a swarm of people, young, old, black, white, Latin, pushed together in pews and folding chairs. Lit with the spirit, some spring from their chairs, doubled over, backs arched upward like a startled feline, dancing the dance of the awaken.

Gospel, by its very definition, sets itself apart from other forms of popular music. It must then operate under a different set of rules. “It is a love letter written by God,” says Jheryl Busby, head of DreamWorks’ black music division. “A love letter and an instruction manual. If you don’t know the word, then you’re just singing a song. And if we don’t pass that on, then we are doing a disservice.”

Appropriateness and accountability is of paramount concern in gospel, says Lisa Collins. And the measure?

The message must remain clear and true. The idea is not to communicate, “I want to get with her,” but rather the message has to be, “She has a beautiful spirit. I want to go to church.” In other words, Collins says, “You can look good, but you’d better not look sexy.”

Much of this concern is almost always capped with this coda, a resounding chorus among staunch traditionalists: If it ministers to the youth. Hallelujah. If it gets them to church on Sunday, so be it. But once they are there, do they stay? And if they stay, what do they do?

Jones--like Bishop Clarence McClendon of the Church of the Harvest or Bishop Charles Blake of West Angeles Church of God in Christ or Bishop Kenneth Ulmer of Faithful Central--belongs to a generation of ministers that supports this new wave of spirit music.

Because youth, in particular, go up against such spiritually debilitating issues, it’s important, these ministers believe, that the church address what youth confront everyday--from gang violence and drugs to sex and AIDS. But attracting and maintaining a younger flock is something that vexes many ministers.

“Political change doesn’t all happen within the four walls of the church,” says McClendon. “The Kingdom of God is bigger than the church. So what would shock in one context works in another.” Because it’s a video and audio generation, McClendon says, you need to go after young people with a whole different set of lures. “God is not as concerned as people are. He will use whatever medium and method to accomplish his purpose.”

When McClendon, 33, came to L.A. came to preach six years ago, there were but 27 people in the pews. Today, long lines wrap themselves around corner for the Church of the Harvest’s five Sunday services.

The draw? McClendon’s flash and dynamism, sure, but the church’s propelling up-to-the-minute music. McClendon (who has just released a CD of his own called “Give Glory to God) knows that his posture is radical, but he thinks the alternative is more bleak. “Converse with the harlots, the thieves--all of these things Jesus did, religious people of our day should be doing.”

When Franklin lights in town he might pull McClendon aside for a heart-to-heart and a prayer. Singer BeBe Winans and Montell have full-access passes, as well, for counsel. “I’m more comfortable sitting with Montell and Puff Daddy than most preachers,” McClendon says. “My point is I have more in common with them, because I share their concerns. I know what they’ve seen. And I know if Jesus came today, he wouldn’t come in white robes and sandals. He’d dress in contemporary clothes. He’d be a bridge. And bridges get walked on.”

As the music and message converge with the world, the more proactive efforts are creating strange bedfellows: For example, radio station KYPA has hosted gospel brunches at Hollywood Park. “We’ve already gotten [people saying] ‘How dare you. How can you do that?’ ” says the Rev. Merri Alyce Murry, Spirit Broadcasting’s public relations director.

It is this very transformation of gospel radio, says Lisa Collins, that has been smoothing the tension, because it broadens exposure. “Where gospel radio was once dominated by traditional tunes, now you’ll have 60% contemporary, 40% traditional. So the tides have turned in gospel radio, and obviously because the tides have turned, there is acceptance on a larger scale.”

And so Vicki Mack Lataillade keeps pushing. Just recently, she went into partnership with Interscope Records. The deal, which provides that she still retains control of Gospo Centric, is one more indication that the music industry thinks contemporary gospel will continue to boom. For Vicki, though, it leaves her open to a whole new set of criticism. Interscope, after all, has been home to such gangsta rappers as Eazy-E and Dr. Dre and rock ‘n’ roller Marilyn Manson.

“Some people had a problem with us being where Death Row [Records] was. But now Death Row is no longer there, but Marilyn Manson is,” she says with a quick “whatever, no sweat” shrug. “We figured what a better place? If you want to make a change. We felt this was the most effective way. . . . It’s kinda like missionary work.”

All of it is moving in mysterious ways.

“My biggest thrill: One day I’m in my house in Inglewood and booming down my street was ‘Stomp’! That was when I knew we were doing something. It was hip as everything else,” says Vicki, arms upraised, testifying. “Driving down the street . . . they had it loud enough for the whole block to hear. I wasn’t even mad at ‘em.”*