Big,
bright, sparkly teeth,
and a grin that stretches way across town.
She is a lovely woman, efficiently coiffed and tucked, and she
is, in my eyes, the poster child for what’s wrong with the
“gospel” music business. I recently edited a church dance video
where some kids were dancing to Winans’ arrangement of the
children’s song If You’re Happy And You Know It. Listening to
the track, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the best idea
Winans could come up with. Does she have so little to say that
she’d waste an entire track on her CD with a lightweight and
amateurish faux-hip-hop take on a song that was already
doctrinally bankrupt to begin with? Did the Holy Spirit lead
her to do this? It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the song or with
Sister Winans’ voice—both are fine. It’s that the song,
ultimately, teaches us nothing. Empowers us with nothing, Grows
nothing. Plants nothing. Harvests nothing. It’s a pleasant five
minutes of swaying church folk, but that’s all there is. The entire point of Gospel music is to pierce hearts. To
convict, to challenge, to redeem, to reveal the magnificence and
wonder of God. For the songwriter and the singer and producer to
pour themselves into our very lives.
Winans’ song epitomizes the problem with the music here in
Ourtown: it
merely entertains Church Folk. It is all designed to evoke
emotion and applause, but it teaches us absolutely nothing. The
lyrics have no bite, no lasting effect. As with the preaching,
there is no musical voice here that leads. That challenges, that
inspires. It is, instead, all minstrel show. All Sherman Hemsley’s
Amen sitcom. Many if not most choirs here are simply
not focused and not organized, not dedicated, not electrified,
not plugged in. With precious few exceptions (True Spirit
Baptist Church’s magnificent Voices Of Truth being the shining
example), they seem completely blasé about even being a choir.
The music here, even the best of it, is simply lame. It just
lays there. Not only is the playing bad—the musicians never
seeming to practice together, so there’s just clutter and chaos
Sunday morning—but the overall presentation is a joyless,
dutiful going through the motions. It is a ministry of
obligation because We Need Music At This Section Of The Program.
Nobody sacrifices for music, here. Nobody invests in music,
here. It’s all Vickie and her wonderful teeth.
All of which misses the point
that Vickie Winans is only a Winans by marriage. She’s been
relying on her ex-husband’s name to make a living for more than
a decade. Just as producer and would-be urban star Mario has likewise prostituted his father’s name even while rejecting
his dad’s values. Like the Jackson family, who’ve made and lost
billions by exploiting their third youngest boy, the Winans clan
has made a career out of riding the coattails of the magnificent
Marvin L. Winans. Eminently gifted with a voice that became the
standard bearer of 1980’s contemporary Gospel music, Winans’s
golden fog became The Thing Everybody Wanted To Sound Like.
While modifying that sound in their own way, most popular late
80’s and 90’s Gospel singers fashioned themselves, to one degree
or another, after The Winans Sound, beginning, first and
foremost, with Winans’ own group with his brothers.
BeBe Winans became enormously popular by taking the Winans Sound
and watering it down a bit to become more palatable to secular
audiences where he and sister CeCe eventually overshadowed
Marvin and his other brothers, becoming one of the most popular
duos in Gospel history. The group Commissioned might as well
have been called The Winans With A Harder Edge, as Keith Staten,
Marvin Sapp, Fred Hammond and others took the Winans sound to
an even more urban and relevant level. With all the money made
during that era, it seems to me these artists should be writing
Marvin royalty checks for exploiting the sound he pioneered.
Vickie, however, was not a Winans. She was the wife of a Winans.
But, attach the word “Winans” to anybody’s name, and it seems a
record deal is possible. Osama bin Winans. Divorced now for some
time, Marvin and Vickie appear to still be good friends, as both
Marvin and son Mario frequently produce her typically
lightweight songs, and Church Folk continue to flock to her
silly, unchallenging and uninspiring performances. She is, for
me, the very personification of what's wrong with the black
church here and other places. The emphasis on materialism. The
gaudy, over-accessorized, fried-hair Church Lady diva. The
insignificant preaching to the choir. I've never met this
sister, and pray she is actually more substantial than she
appears, but just looking at her poodle photo above, my eyes
begin watering from her perfume. Her image resonates with many
Church Ladies (and, most especially, "first" ladies) in that she
seems woefully disconnected from reality. Out of touch with the
world she purports to minister to.
This overall level of her craft, this business of seeming to be something
substantial while actually not being anything substantial, is
the bellwether of ministerial effort here. It reminds me of the
Little Rascals/Our Gang classic TV shows from the 1950’s, where
Spanky and Alfalpha would hammer together a boxcar racer out of
old plywood. But, being children whose fathers were likely
overseas fighting a world war,
they had no real guidance. So, while the boxcar racer looked
like it could compete and certainly resembled the real thing, it
inevitably fell apart before crossing the finish line.
This is what Paul is referring to when he speaks about some
people having “a form of godliness” while denying the very power
of that which we claim to believe [2 Timothy 3:5]. God is not
moving because we do not allow Him to move. We do not allow
Him to breathe. We do not allow Him dominion over our lives. We
see through carnal eyes and listen with carnal ears. We elevate
those who seem logically qualified for elevation while
overlooking those with true anointing and vision and voice. We
continue pandering after Saul, who has lost all genuine
connection to God, while keeping David in the field. We’re all
Vickie Winans, using a last name that doesn’t actually belong to
us to make a buck. Cashing checks against a great legacy,
against a great church we neither know nor understand and,
worse, lack the courage to actually be.
Christopher J. Priest
17 June 2007
editor@praisenet.org
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