*Via Chicago Tribune) – Sir the Baptist climbed inside a casket one Sunday afternoon in Grant Park a few months ago at the Lollapalooza festival, and imagined himself as a corpse.
“Would you care if it was me?” he asked, and the crowd of several thousand onlookers stirred. They may have come to the festival to be entertained, but now they were getting a harsh dose of what it feels like to be a young African-American in a city where blood and bullets are as commonplace as bicycles and schoolbooks.
Gospel music is very much alive in Chicago, and thanks to performers like Sir the Baptist, it’s resonating with a new generation of artists and listeners in way that echoes the songs of strife, striving and salvation during the civil rights era.
The stage for Sir’s Lollapalooza set was set up to look like a church with a pew. Donald Lawrence was there to sing, a star of the contemporary gospel scene, with a choir. And Sir the Baptist — a preacher’s son from the Bronzeville neighborhood that gave birth to gospel music nearly a century ago with the songs of Thomas Dorsey — was conflating redemption and reckoning, prayer and pessimism, hope and desperation. He was a rapper with a deep background in gospel music, and he was having what the churchgoers call a Holy Ghost moment.
“We gotta wake up,” he declared as he emerged from his coffin, as if shouting to the oppressed who live only a few blocks from where he was performing. He turned the phrase into a vamp that became a song that built to an ecstatic finish. Then the black-suited artist born William James Stokes 29 years ago on the South Side delivered a fierce, foot-stomping, hand-clapping version of his Internet hit “Raise Hell,” as if to express the decades of frustration that have ensued since the civil rights marches of his ancestors in the ’60s.
Get the rest of this article on Sir the Baptist at Chicago Tribune.
We Publish News 24/7. Don’t Miss A Story. Click HERE to SUBSCRIBE to Our Newsletter Now!
