This Time

Kirk Franklin has spent three decades being the person most responsible for gospel music’s willingness to borrow secular production without losing its subject matter, and “This Time” – his second pairing with Memphis rapper GloRilla, following an earlier collaboration – is as confident a recent example as he’s made. The track interpolates Mandrill’s 1976 funk classic “Children of the Sun,” built on joyous horns and handclaps that owe as much to a block party as a church service, with Franklin’s lead vocal carrying the song’s gratitude-and-testimony core while GloRilla’s verses bring an energetic, unmistakably hip-hop cadence that never feels bolted on. It’s the lead single from Franklin’s fourteenth solo album, I Am What I Am, arriving October 30.

What makes the pairing work, beyond the obvious generational and genre contrast, is that neither artist is performing a watered-down version of themselves to meet the other halfway. GloRilla’s rap verses don’t get cleaned up into something safely church-appropriate, and Franklin’s gospel foundation doesn’t get buried under a guest verse treated as a commercial concession. The “Children of the Sun” sample is doing real connective work here too – Mandrill’s original was itself a message of unity and joy dressed in funk, and Franklin’s version doesn’t just borrow the groove, it extends the original’s actual thesis into an explicitly worship-oriented context without the seams showing.

The chart result backs up how well the combination has landed: “This Time” debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Gospel Songs chart, making Franklin the first artist to notch double-digit No. 1s on that chart – a genuinely significant piece of gospel-chart history, not just a streaming blip. For an artist thirty years into his career, that’s a rare thing to still be setting records on.

7.8/10 – a genuinely unforced gospel-hip-hop crossover, and a real chart milestone to go with it.

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