Stomp

“Stomp” is built almost entirely out of other people’s music, and that’s not a knock so much as the whole strategy laid bare. The track loops Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” underneath God’s Property’s youth choir — substantial enough a lift that George Clinton, Garry Shider, and Walter Morrison all ended up with a co-write credit — and the remix version, the one most people know, layers a rap from Salt-N-Pepa’s Cheryl “Salt” James over a further sample of Busta Rhymes’ “Woo Hah!! Got You All in Check.” Three secular records feeding one gospel single is an aggressive amount of borrowed material for a song trying to prove gospel could hold its own on mainstream radio. It largely earns the gamble: the groove is genuinely infectious, the choir’s call-and-response energy translates the church experience without diluting it into generic pop-gospel, and Salt’s verse gives the remix a crossover credibility a purely in-house version wouldn’t have had.

It worked commercially in ways gospel rarely had before: a No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart, and a parent album, God’s Property from Kirk Franklin’s Nu Nation, that became the first gospel record to top the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, eventually certified triple platinum. It also got Franklin nominated for two mainstream Grammys — Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group and Best R&B Song — categories with no “gospel” qualifier attached, a real marker of how far outside the genre’s usual lane this single traveled. It won Urban Song of the Year at the Dove Awards, gospel’s own ceremony, which tells its own story about how the industry’s insiders and its traditionalists split on the record.

That split was loud. At a 1997 New Orleans church conference, a preacher reportedly told a crowd of 40,000 to 50,000 that Franklin’s music “is not of God.” Franklin has never fully stopped answering for it: “My spiritual integrity has been questioned my whole entire career. From ‘Stomp’ onwards, there have been questions about my heart before the Lord,” he’s said, alongside a consistent defense of why he works with secular artists at all — “I’m trying to reach out to lost people.”

The song’s one real weakness is that it’s more curator’s ear than composer’s — the hooks are largely inherited, not written. But recognizing a groove this good and building a genuine crossover moment out of it, against real resistance from his own community, is its own kind of skill.

7.8/10 — a sample-built crossover that earned its radio spins and its controversy in roughly equal measure.

Hero image: Kirk Franklin performing at JoyFest, 2017, by CL Holly, licensed under CC BY 2.0.