Black Music Month Special
by Rob J. Thrash IV, Ed.D.
The new film Sinners lays bare, in chilling metaphor, a truth we have long felt but too rarely name. The white vampire, Remmick, who weaponizes music as a tool of control over Black souls, represents more than just a cinematic villain; he is the embodiment of systems that seek to co-opt and commodify Black expression. His fixation on controlling Sammy’s voice—Sammy, a gifted Black musician and son of a pastor—mirrors the very dynamics unfolding in real churches today. Just as Remmick attempts to own and reshape Sammy’s sound, modern worship spaces are increasingly tempted to contain and commercialize Black sacred traditions, stripping them of their liberating, embodied, and communal roots. His method—to lull, to soothe, to hypnotize—mirrors the ways whiteness has historically used culture, including sacred music, to pacify Black resistance and redirect our spiritual energy toward subservience rather than liberation. Remmick isn’t just after a sound; he’s after the source. He wants control over the music and the voice of Sammy, a gifted Black singer and musician, the son of a pastor, whose anointing is both raw and ancestral. Sammy’s voice holds something that cannot be digitized or diluted, so Remmick tries to own it.
The vampire’s music in Sinners is not life-giving; it is life-stealing. It drains vitality even as it masquerades as beauty. It offers pleasure without deliverance. In this way, Sinners becomes more than a horror story; it becomes a prophetic mirror. It asks: whose songs are we singing? And to what end? Are we lifting melodies that sustain our survival and honor our ancestors’ fight? Or are we unknowingly harmonizing with forces that seek to drain us of our cultural and spiritual power?
I offer these reflections fully aware that they represent my lived experience, my thinking, and my heart. I also recognize, and honor, that there are brothers and sisters in ministry who hold deep space for Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), and who could write pieces just as lengthy, just as passionate, affirming their sincere affinity for that style of worship. I am not suggesting there is no place for CCM within Black churches; it would be hypocritical for me to do so, given that there have been moments when CCM songs have genuinely helped facilitate encounters with God in my own life. Rather, I am amplifying the harm that occurs when Gospel music—the ancestral, communal, liberatory sound of our people—is replaced, minimized, or muted in favor of a sonic standard not born from our struggle, our memory, or our prophetic voice. This piece is offered not in condemnation but in love: a love fierce enough to name what must be protected, honored, and passed on.
There is a sound that lives in our bones, long before a choir robe is fastened or a Hammond organ hums its first chord. It is the sound of chains being shattered by song, of sorrow metabolized into praise, of names called out in prayer by grandmothers who never learned to read but knew God in five octaves. That sound, what we call Gospel, is not just music; it is memory. It is deliverance. It is how we’ve always known we were still alive.
And now, some are saying it’s time to move on. Time to evolve. These voices come from a range of places: church leaders chasing broader appeal, worship teams trying to emulate industry trends, record labels prioritizing marketability, and congregants unknowingly shaped by a culture that equates whiteness with professionalism and progress. Time to adopt a sound that is sleeker, softer, more neutral; more palatable. Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), they argue, offers a broader reach, a modern polish, a more professional tone. And while CCM has its place and its beauty, let us not confuse inclusion with transformation. Let us not dress up assimilation as evolution.
Because what you call progress, we often recognize as erasure.
When the Black church begins to trade in the Gospel sound for CCM, not as an addition but as a replacement, we must be honest about what is being lost. Gospel music is not an accessory to our worship; it is the architecture of our survival. It was forged in the fields, layered in the hush arbors, shouted on brush arbors, refined in storefronts, and thundered through cathedrals built brick by brick by people who had little but faith and a drum.
The cry for the return of the choir is not simply a longing to hear a group of voices lifted in song. It is a call for the return of the Gospel sound in its fullness—carrying with it the harmonies that hold our history, the call-and-response that confirms our presence, and the testimonies that rise mid-song without permission or planning. It is a call for the foot stomps and hand claps that become their own form of praise, a liturgy written on the body. When we call for choirs, we are calling for a return to depth, to a sound shaped by sorrow and sanctified through survival. We are calling for the joy that knows its name only because it first met struggle.
This music holds our theology, our culture, and our healing. It makes room for grief, rage, hope, and celebration, all in the span of a song. CCM, while sincere in its devotion, often offers a thinner soundscape—one that does not carry the weight of ancestral memory or the sacred improvisation of the Black experience.
There are at least four dangers in this drift:
- Cultural Dislocation and Erasure: Gospel music is a sonic archive of Black memory. Its rhythms, call-and-response patterns, and improvisational genius are rooted in West African musical traditions and the spirituals of the enslaved. To replace this with the more homogeneous, often emotionally flattened terrain of CCM is to unwrite the story of a people who sang their way through bondage and beyond.
- Spiritual Alienation: The Gospel sound resonates not just in the ear but in the marrow. It calls the Black body into full participation—hands raised, feet dancing, tears falling, voices shouting. In contrast, CCM often centers a quieter, more restrained affective experience, which can spiritually disembody a congregation whose worship has historically included all of the senses.
- Theological Dilution: Gospel music names injustice, calls down deliverance, and sings hope into suffering. It is often Christocentric and liberationist, rooted in eschatological joy and present-tense struggle. CCM, while rooted in worship, can sometimes lack the theological depth and cultural specificity needed to address the material realities of Black life.
- Appeasement to Whiteness: The migration to CCM can reflect an unconscious, or overt, desire to be seen as more palatable, more marketable, more “universal.” But to universalize whiteness is to colonize the sacred. This shift too often mirrors the politics of respectability, which asks Black people to mute their brilliance for the comfort of the dominant gaze.
And that is how erasure begins: quietly, respectably, with good intentions and subtle pivots. A song here. A new worship leader there. A soft comment that Gospel is “too loud,” “too emotional,” “too Black.” And before we know it, the sanctuary begins to sound more like Hillsong than Hawkins. And the people who once felt seen in the sound begin to disappear with it.
We’ve seen this before.
Respectability politics, born from the trauma of systemic racism, taught us that if we dressed right, spoke right, and sang right, maybe we’d be safe. Maybe we’d be accepted. But assimilation has always demanded too high a cost: our dialect, our joy, our rhythm, our truth. And the church was never meant to be a stage for approval; it was meant to be a sanctuary for authenticity.
Yet even in the midst of this, Black people have always resisted. We’ve kept singing our songs, dancing our dances, testifying in keys that white supremacy cannot comprehend. From the pulpit to the protest line, we have made it clear: we are not interested in becoming more acceptable; we are committed to becoming more ourselves.
So yes, there is room in our worship for CCM. There is room for innovation, room for shared songs across cultures, room for new expressions of faith. But let us never forget that the room was built on a sound that already held us when nothing else did. Gospel music is not a relic of the past; it is a portal to our liberation. And any evolution that asks us to mute that sound is not evolution. It is exile.
And let us also be clear: while Gospel music continues to inch toward the sonic profile of Contemporary Christian Music, the reverse is not true. While many white CCM artists have borrowed the vocal runs, rhythmic complexity, and expressive depth popularized by Black musicians, their work rarely evolves into overtly Black-sounding music. They sample the style without centering the story. What we are witnessing is not mutual transformation—it is cultural extraction. It is the adoption of Black sound without the weight of Black suffering, Black theology, or Black communal memory. In this way, Gospel is asked to assimilate while CCM remains untouched—sounding the same, looking the same, centering the same audience.
We do not evolve by forgetting. We evolve by remembering so deeply that our growth carries the sound of every ancestor who hummed a hymn through pain, who shouted glory in defiance of despair, who taught us that worship isn’t about performance; it’s about presence.
And we will remain present. Loud. Unapologetically Black. And faithful to the sound that brought us through.
Let the record show: we were never saved by silence. We were saved by a sound.
Some may ask: who is driving this shift toward CCM in Black churches? The answer is layered. It is shaped by a mix of pastoral leadership eager to reach broader or younger audiences, by worship trends influenced by predominantly white evangelical aesthetics, by the marketing strategies of Christian music industries, and, often, by deeply internalized messages that whiteness is the standard of excellence.
Others might wonder: how do we discern when CCM is being included versus when it’s replacing Gospel? The distinction lies in intention and frequency. When Gospel becomes the occasional exception rather than the rooted norm, when its presence is seen as optional or outdated, that’s replacement—not inclusion.
For those navigating multicultural or predominantly white worship spaces where CCM dominates, the question becomes one of agency and belonging. Are Black worshippers invited to bring their sound, their shout, their testimony? Or are they expected to adjust, to assimilate? True worship invites everyone’s full humanity. Assimilation demands selective silence.
And finally, is coexistence between Gospel and CCM possible? Absolutely. But it must be intentional. Coexistence does not mean flattening Gospel’s power. It means creating worship that is expansive enough to hold multiple expressions of reverence without erasing the particular Black theological and cultural genius that Gospel music carries.
To those who would dismiss this reflection as mere preference, I offer this: this is not about taste. It is about truth. It is about memory. Gospel music has always been more than a sound; it has been our survival strategy, our theological map, our altar call in the wilderness. I do not speak against CCM; I speak against the cost at which it is often centered.
This growing presence of CCM in Black churches raises deep tensions for me. It often rings hollow to my ears, not because it fails to name Jesus, but because it so often names Him from a posture disconnected from the deep ancestral memory that Black people have carried for centuries. Long before the horrors of enslavement, there were Africans who called on the name of Jesus, who sang His praise, who wove their faith into rhythms and melodies that would later find new expression on these shores. Gospel music, though formally birthed in North America, is infused with these African musical traditions: the call-and-response, the layered polyrhythms, the sacred urgency that refuses to let suffering have the final word.
Gospel music calls on Jesus with a fire, a tenderness, and a defiant hope that few other forms have ever touched. It is not the naming of Jesus that is missing in Contemporary Christian Music; it is the soul behind the name, the embodied testimony of a people who have clung to the cross not as a mere symbol, but as a lifeline, a declaration of survival, and a cry of victory in the face of terror.
There have been occasions where I have selected Contemporary Christian Music songs to sing, either in worship or in ministry spaces. Yet even then, I feel a tremendous tug, almost a reflex, to bring the song home: to weave in call-and-response where none originally existed, to ask the band to thread Gospel chord progressions into the music, to gently steer the drumming away from the typical CCM pattern toward a rhythm that feels like the heartbeat of our tradition, to make melodic ad-lib choices that anchor the song in the sacred sonic language of my people. It is in these moments that I realize: it is not merely what we sing that matters. It is how we embody it, how we honor the river we stand in when we open our mouths to praise.
What Sinners exposes, and what I have long named in my spirit, is this: when our worship loses its roots, when it seeks whiteness as its audience rather than God and community, it ceases to be worship. It becomes spectacle. It becomes seduction. It becomes yet another tool of our spiritual disinheritance.
But there is another way. There has always been another way.
It is the way of those elders who knew how to call down heaven with a hum before the first note ever left the piano. It is the way of the congregations who broke into holy dance not because it was programmed, but because the Spirit moved and the body could not stay still. It is the way of a people who, even under the lash and the law, declared: “We are somebody. We are God’s beloved. We will not be consumed.”
And so, in the face of cultural theft and spiritual dilution, I do what our people have always done: I remember. I reclaim. I rejoice.
Our music, our true music, is not just entertainment. It is emancipation. It is covenant. It is the living memory of a God who sides with the oppressed and a people who refuse to die quietly.
So what can we do with this awareness? How do we begin to examine the motivation behind leaning away from Gospel toward CCM? The first step is honest self-inquiry. Worship leaders, pastors, musicians, and congregants must ask: What is shaping our choices? Are we making musical decisions based on spiritual discernment or cultural aspiration? Are we being led by the Spirit, or by a silent hope to be seen as more acceptable, more marketable, more “professional”?
Black churches, especially worship leaders, must cultivate a practice of both prayerful and critical discernment. This means taking time to reflect not only on what is trending, but on what is true to the people, the place, and the presence of God that the church embodies. It means asking not just, “Does this sound good?” but “Does this sound like us?” and “What does this sound produce in us?”
We must consider the theological weight of our music, the cultural lineage it carries, and the communal formation it invites. Before every set list is finalized, every rehearsal begins, every worship plan is put into motion, let us pause and ask: Are we building altars or stages? Are we bearing witness or blending in? Are we remembering the sound that held us, and still holds us, or are we slowly letting go of something we didn’t realize we needed until it was gone?
This is not about nostalgia. This is about fidelity. This is about remembering that Gospel music is not simply a preferred style. It is our story sung aloud. It is sound theology. It is cultural witness. It is prophetic resistance. It is the soundtrack of our becoming.
Dr. Rob J. Thrash IV is a worship leader, educational leader, and advocate for equity, belonging, and well-being across educational and professional spaces. He leads worship at The A.R.M.E.D. Church and Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood, CA while advancing initiatives that honor cultural identity and collective flourishing. His work is rooted in the belief that radical love, sacred tradition, and community-centered leadership are the foundations of true transformation. Dr. Thrash is the Cultural Artisan Editor at ReelUrbanNews.com.
