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Tonéx is an acquired taste. One you have to be somewhat motivated to attain, but one worth fighting for. Oak Park, Tonéx’s brilliant masterpiece, is a horrendous, hateful disc that most pastors would set fire to. But this may be the most powerful, intuitive and effective youth ministry tool ever recorded. It’s something you simply have to experience. Pain all over the place. It’s like Tonéx has been in our homes, in our secret places. He’s confessing for all of us. For our secret moments, our secret addictions. A seminal work and, yes, I’ll go ahead and use the word—masterpiece. So why is Tonéx quitting now?
We don't cover the Gospel music industry.
The way we see it, there are any number of websites out
there, some quite good, that cover the Gospel music business.
Any number of places you can go to read about who's hot and when
the new Fred Hammond CD's going to drop. Our passion, on the
other hand, is for ministry—real ministry. With building up the
Body of Christ, provoking us to think, to debate, to pray. To
fight if we have to, but to get off our butts and stop lounging
around being entertained by Fred Hammond and worrying about when
the new Kirk Franklin album is coming. More than secular music, we must require standards of the personal example of the music makers themselves. I have a great deal of trouble receiving most anything from Hezekiah Walker, who sneers on four out of five CD covers, and I refuse to pay money for Kurt Carr's latest, where his attempt to butch up stumbles badly, Carr coming across like a startled moose on the cover. It's a turn off, all that ego, all that stupidity, all that whoring of the Gospel. And black church folk, in our ignorance, readily and eagerly pay for it, flocking to these sites in heated anticipation while idolizing these brothers who are clearly and sadly lost.
All of which is to say no, we don't cover the Gospel music
industry. But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. For every man shall bear his own burden. Let him that is taught in the word communicate unto him that teacheth in all good things. Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith. —Galatians 6:4-10
“Sometimes with Christianity, people are so busy trying to convince others that they are saved that they do not deal with the real issues that happen when you leave church. I don't want to do this because it looks right, I wanna do this because it is right but I need God to help me and that's what the song speaks about.”
Back when José used Afro Sheen:
“As a child I was spared from a lot of sadness because of the faith my parents instilled in me, and so I say in the song give me one good reason why, I can't praise God. I mean there are people my age dying of AIDS and honestly if it hadn't been for God's mercy it could have been me. I could be another black brother statistic... in jail or on crack. So how you gonna hare on me when I'm doing what I do, for the right reasons?”
Tonéx was born into musical family.
dollars. I want to buy 500 copies of
Oak Park and pass them out to every kid in the
district. There’s only a couple of problems with this idea.
First of all, no church is ever going to give me ten thousand
dollars for any reason whatsoever. Black churches, most
especially, are penny pinching nickel and dime affairs, having
moved from frugal to cheapskate generations ago. Second,
no church is going to give me ten thousand dollars to buy a CD
they’d be incapable of understanding, let alone one with an
explicit content label on it. The first universal law of black
church folk is they are intrinsically self centered and tunnel-visioned,
fearful of things they do not understand and, in large measure,
hostile towards progress and change. Oak Park, Tonéx’s brilliant
masterpiece, qualifies on all of those fronts. It is a
horrendous, hateful disc that most church mothers would rush to
set fire to and Frisbee out of their Cadillac window on
Interstate 25. You're not going to shout off of this record. This record may not make you throw up your hands and run around your house hollering (although it just might). If you are over 35, you probably won't like it at all. Then again, if you're over 35, I have serious doubts you're reading this (or any other) website. This record should not be confused, in any way, with what we normally consider Gospel music. This album is, frankly, too real to be consider Gospel music, as most Gospel music is terribly ineffective preaching to the choir. Tonéx, here, could care less about the choir. He's talking to those left behind and ignored by the church—youth and young adults clustered in the back pews playing PSP and Game Boy and feeling each other up during service. The people no one ever speaks to—this is the audience for this CD, a work desperately needed and long overdue.
Oak Park stands as a genre landmark and will
undoubtedly become a reference point and benchmark for urban
Gospel music. It is a must-own for anyone—saint or sinner—and a musical work that
transcends labels and categories. Is it a “Gospel” album? Yes in
that it clearly proselytizes and proclaims. Is it a praise and
worship album? Depends on how you look at it. The album
certainly praises and worships God, but its purpose is to pierce
the hearts of people who have either given up on God or who have
never given Him a shot.
The thing that speaks perhaps loudest about Oak Park: 92105 is
the parental warning label. Oak Park is the first Christian CD
ever released with a parental warning label, which may be a
brilliant marketing move. In fact, Tonéx, quitting, his feud
with Verity, and even Verity’s lawsuit may all be part of some
unimaginably brilliant marketing campaign, as the more
controversial Tonéx seems, the more popular Tonéx gets. I can't imagine why nobody is talking about this CD. Other than sporadic mention of it as being “controversial” because of its labeling, I have not, at this writing, read any in-depth discussion about Oak Park or its significance in the industry and in youth ministry. This puzzles and disappoints me, that so important a shot can be fired and nobody who actually covers the Gospel music industry for a living seems to notice. This is a tremendously important work, one I pray will not be followed up by the sneering likes of Walker and Carr but instead opens the flood gates for artists as anointed and intuitively gifted as this one.
On January 22, 2006, Tonéx posted
“I can’t take the fakeness no more,” he wrote. “I’m wide open
and now I’m like y'all take a hit cuz I ain’t got nothing to
lose. I’ve lost everything so you really can’t hurt me anymore
than I’ve already been hurt. And that’s what hurts. So many
people call themselves ministers but they don’t minister they
COMPETE.” How do you “retire” from a “religion”? “I’m all about kingdom now. And in my pursuit of the real Jesus I leave your fictitious, vindictive country club and cancel my membership to the industry and denounce it. I don’t fit in and I don’t want to. Whatever my mission is for God I wanna do it with the right heart and the right spirit.”
This was pretty much the shot heard ‘round the Gospel world, as
it triggered a feeding frenzy of speculation about what this
rant meant and what it signified. Out The Box, Tonéx’s 2004
release, was a huge step forward for both Tonéx and urban Gospel
music as an industry. Verity records, the Gospel arm of the
Zomba Label Group (essentially Jive records), had gobbled up
GospoCentric Records (an independent label and home to major
artists like Kirk Franklin) and become the 800-pound gorilla of
the Gospel music industry. Tonéx, a curious also-ran, had
exploded with Out The Box, becoming a major name in the business
and gaining respect and acceptance beyond the Gospel industry.
It seemed win-win: Verity gains another valuable artist, Tonéx
continues to challenge and expand the arty form, and we all get
great music. What could be wrong with that?
“It was over 136 tracks that were mixed. There were so many hard
drives that had to be put together through ProTools. This
recording had the largest number of tracks ever recorded in
gospel music history. They usually only use that many tracks for
John Williams scoring “Jaws” or something like that…so this was
a monstrosity of epic proportions not only for the production
value but the whole mix process. That’s why the project took so
long. If there were cost overruns and production delays, those were certainly charged back to Tonéx along with penalties and interest and anything else Verity might come up with. “I went WAY over budget,” Tonéx said. “The more they saw as I kept turning stuff in, they were saying, “He needs more. He needs more.” They just keep supporting it. The radio support has been incredible….” But he goes on to praise his record label, with whom he was happy at the time, “…the label let me do exactly what I wanted to do this time. It had a lot to do with the corporate change….just really capturing the brainchild of Tonéx. It took a risk. It took [guts] to really go out and support something that has really never been done before and just know that this guy knows what he’s talking about and trust him and fund it.”
“I had many offers to do pop and R&B, but I never went through with it. There are a lot of people who do similar things to what I do in R&B but I wanted to use gospel lyrics. I address issues that many other Christian artists don't' address. For instance in a sexual context, I don't sing about what I'm going to do to a woman. I sing about what I've already experienced and the pain that it caused me. So, on a song like ‘Taxi,’ I'm talking about the downside of premarital sex, but it's still a pop song.”
So, is Oak Park Tonéx’s final curtain call? Regardless, his vision, his very inaccessibility, has doubtless opened doors for future generations. While certainly misunderstood or, perhaps, understood only on a surface level at the moment, Tonéx's music will doubtless endure for generations, and many artists yet to come will trace the roots of their ministry back to some guy few people of that future time will have ever heard of, and to the landmark recordings that changed and evolved an art form forever.
Christopher J. Priest
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Excerpts From Oak Park: 92105 Copyright © 2006 Nureau Ink. All Rights Reserved. |
In 2003, I bought Tonéx’s landmark double-disc set
Out The Box
because Wal-Mart had a lot of them. A head-to-floor rack full of
them, they broke Tonéx’s last album like a secular album. Which
I found curious considering Wal-Mart’s Christian selection is
rather thin and, as is the case with most secular stores, relegated to the
ghetto area of the CD bins. My curiosity at finding this
Christian work up front, near the counter, and in enormous
quantity—like the guy was Usher or something—helped me overcome
my initial dislike of Tonéx.
I despised the album for more than two weeks. But, being a black
man who’d spent his money, I played it and played it, trying to
figure Puzzle Man out. The live stuff sounded pretty terrible. Not sure if it was the mix or if it was the compression (it
sounded overly compressed at the mastering stage), which made it
sound harsh and brittle, tough to deal with those Jacksons
samples and all of that crowd noise.
Criticized for the length of many of the songs on his landmark
Songs In The Key of Life (an album so long they needed to shrink
wrap a special 33RPM single with it to accommodate the extra
songs), Stevie Wonder once said, “Look, I do it first. Then
somebody else can come along and do it neat.” He records what
he’s feeling and he pursues his artistic statement, even if it
doesn’t conform to established commercial guidelines. This
applies also to Tonéx’s Out The Box, an utter mess of noise and
more noise that you really need a kind of decoder in your head
to understand. But, once that decoder has been installed, Out
The Box becomes a wonderful ride (and real value; I love it when
artists give you all that bang for the buck; Tonéx shoe-horning
in 36 songs for a reasonable price, although
that shoe-horning may account for the brittle harshness of the
compression. That, or, the mastering engineer didn’t think to
create different profiles for the live and studio stuff, which
were clearly recorded and mixed differently).
Having listened to the album a number of times, now, I do have
the smallest suspicion that the self-imposed label—which is
likely to bar Oak Park from most Christian bookstores—is,
indeed, some kind of gimmick. That or an over-reaction. If you
don’t count a handful of utterances of the word, “nigga,” there
really isn’t any notable profanity in Oak Park. Which was when,
on closer examination, I realized the label doesn’t say
“explicit lyrics” but “explicit content.” Okay, that there is on
Oak Park. But there is nothing on Oak Park that is any more
explicit than anything most kids are saying to each other every
day at school, and nothing that comes even remotely close to the
average parental-labeled pop CD. In
It is possible he signed a lousy boilerplate contract, as many
bands anxious for a record deal do, and now that he is rising
toward the top echelon of the Gospel industry, the strident
rookie contract—which tends to leverage heavily in favor of the
record company—may seem unfair. Additionally, provisions for
rate schedule upgrades were likely not built into the
entry-level boilerplate contract.
It’s possible Tonéx is indeed broke. It is also possible he is
crying broke because he’s stuck in a lousy contract. A contract
he may have realized was lousy when he signed it, but one he
wants to renegotiate now. It’s possible Zomba, who, according to
a May 2nd press release from Tonéx’s camp, filed a $1 million
lawsuit against the singer, is trying to coerce Tonéx back to
work (and get their hands on Tonéx’s new Oak Park: 92105, one of
the most important Christian albums ever recorded).
Tonéx’s Prince-like “exit” from the music business, followed by
a Prince-like renaming (he is releasing albums under the name
“N8ion”) followed by a Prince-like independent label startup
(Tonéx is now releasing projects under his underground Nureau
Ink label) could all be tactics to force Zomba into
renegotiating a fairer contract. In fact, it seems inevitable
that, despite Tonéx’s newly-set up legal defense fund [see below], the
two parties will, indeed, arrive at some fair (or fairer) deal.
Additionally, Verity released Out The Box wide—extremely wide
for a Gospel album—and pushed it like a secular CD, which
inevitably meant promotional costs and shipping costs for all of
those CD’s shipped out—and shipped back to Verity after the
promotion ended. Sales through record clubs are traditionally
excluded from artist royalties (they are considered promotional
copies), and online sales continue to have negligible impact on
overall sales. By shipping these huge numbers of CD’s during Out
The Box’s initial release, Verity surely charged the
manufacturing and shipping (both directions) costs to Tonéx as
well as any other promotional efforts (Tonéx’s numerous Bobby
Jones appearances and so forth), and I’ve no doubt some other
book cooking was going on.
Updated
08.08:
(from Wikipedia) In March 2007, a reconciliation with Zomba Label Group was announced, which would be
a joint venture for his Nureau Ink label. The deal was struck
under the auspices of new Zomba president Jazzy Jordan (who has
previously guided the careers of R. Kelly and Salt-N-Pepa).
However, as of June 2007, another split with Zomba was
announced. In the wake of leaking the vitriolic and
profanity-laden song "The Naked Truth" along with several
similarly themed blogs and videos, the artist faced much
scrutiny within the conservative Gospel arena.
