Every now and again, a gospel song crosses over from the church halls to the mainstream but because of the innate distrust for anything secular, crossovers in the opposite direction are often few and far between.
At the peak of its popularity, I remember hearing the chorus to P Square’s “No Be Lie” being re-purposed in a Pentecostal church to be more praise and worship friendly. More recently too, Korede Bello’s “Godwin” mentioned God and exalted His name for all His good deeds and interestingly, that was all it took for many choirmasters to encourage their members to learn the lyrics by heart and perform the catchy chorus in church.
Now the Gateway International Church in Port Harcourt have embraced the biggest record in the country (and Cape Verde and Burkina Faso), Phyno’s “Fada Fada” and recently performed an accapella version on the church’s altar.
But in being so progressive and open-minded, they have inadvertently also opened Pandora’s box.
A song can be many things at once, “Fada Fada” is a popular rap song by as rapper who usually makes secular music and will likely move on to do so after this songs fades, but “Fada Fada” can also be seen as gospel song, it can also be seen as motivational music. The boundaries created for music – gospel, hip-hop, Afropop – are made to make it easier for man to differentiate one sound from the other or to relate one sound to the other. But God didn’t make music genres, so when folks say gospel dance records like Kirk Franklin’s “Stump” or Winans Phase 2’s “It’s Alright (Send Me)” shouldn’t be played in bars and nightclubs and that motivational pop songs like “Godwin” and “Fada Fada” have no business being sang in church, I just see it as their personal opinion and that it has little to do with the Big Man’s will.
That said, the church building isn’t Ambode’s house Quilox, it’s the house of God. There has to be a boundary somewhere, else the building will lose its sanctity. There is a grey area between inspirational/motivational music and gospel music that R.Kelly is famous for calling his home, but I do not think that the boundaries should exist with the type of music as much as it should with what that music stands for. Yes, “Fada Fada” primarily stands for being thankful to God but if you listen intently to the lyrics, and ignore the fact that Phyno ran out of things to say on the chorus and repeated the same word 10 times, you’d find a line or two that your choirmaster probably wouldn’t want you to repeat in church if he knew what they meant.
I’ma na ndi akpo gbalu’m boot nga ese ha ese (Ndi okpoloo) [Translation – You know that the wicked girls that gave me the boot are prostitutes]
/
Asa ahu kpalu’m boot nga ako ha o (Asa okpoloo) [Translation – That girl gave me the boot, I’ll never talk to her again – she’s a prostitute]
This is where it gets really tricky. The questionable part isn’t that Phyno is chasing women, he doesn’t explicitly say he was trying to get them to sleep with him, it’s that he insulted the women that turned him down. Which sounds okay at 8:00PM when you’re playing snooker with your boys and calling out all the girls that left you because you hadn’t made it yet but sounds super crazy in the house of God on Sunday morning. I doubt any band or choir worth its salt would perform this part of the song but still, it is a part of the song – we can pick the parts that appeal to the angel on our right shoulder but we can’t pick the parts that appeal to the devil on the left shoulder of others. This is important because those singers are ministering to an audience of people, not just singing amongst themselves.
If I’m the 0.05% of those people that paid too much attention to the 0.05% of negativity that “Fada Fada” stood for, hearing any part of it – from the verses to the chorus to the bridge – in a Holy Place could leave me disillusioned about the conflicting messages within the music and potentially have the reverse effect of what this bold, progressive church in Port Harcourt is trying to have.