September 11, 2008

Through Thick and Thin

Greg, one of our teen employees and rather accomplished drummer and rap artist, approached me the other day wondering when we were going to write a song together. This came as a bit of a surprise to me—I’m an acoustic guitarist who listens to bluegrass and experimental rock; I don’t know the first thing about rap except that in my earlier, more rebellious days I occasionally listened to Coolio. I didn’t expect Greg to be altogether interested in writing a song with me. But write one we did. Greg and I sat down together one Friday evening in the small back office at New City, waiting for inspiration to strike, when Greg burst out, “Let’s write a song about friends.” Alright, I said, sounds good. I played a guitar riff—“How about something like this?” I asked. Greg listened and slowly his head began to groove to the music. “Yeah I like that,” Greg smiled, “I can work with that.” Which is exactly what he did. Forty-five minutes later we had two rap verses that Greg wrote, with a sung chorus and bridge that I wrote.

This past weekend we debuted our song, entitled Through Thick and Thin, at the Xchange, the monthly hip-hop worship service put on by the New City teens. With the addition of an electronic drum beat created by Giovanni, a member of the Xchange Prep crew, and a bass line written and performed by Khalil, another teen-staffer, we performed our song to the crowd of about fifty, all of whom were out of their seats, waving their arms and singing along by the end of the song. It was, if I may designate it so, a hit. But perhaps more than just a “hit,” it represented to me the coming together of not just two rather different music genres, but the coming together and intermingling of two rather different cultures. For four minutes and ten seconds, it was the joining of two different musical, creative, and cultural backgrounds, sacramentally fused together in the form of a song about friendship.