What Would Jesus Rap?
LABASH, MATT
What Would Jesus Rap? On the road with Junkyard Prophet, apostles to the public schools BY MATT LABASH Minneapolis When the history of Christian rap-metal music is finally written, I pray to the...
...That must've been hard, I suggest, since I don't make him for a guy with lots of Chubby Checker records around the house...
...What people do is use Christ as a cover just to be a loser...
...Bradlee as Olga's dad: Ingalls, I told you not to meddle...
...I sympathize, but say it's too bad I wasn't around—it would've been good for the story...
...They take the stage in a veil of smoke, made by their belching fog machines, which frequently set off school fire alarms...
...Which is not to say I didn't listen to it...
...When I ask him why it matters—after all, he's just playing for a bunch of high-school kids in a gym—he fires back, "I don't want to be okay...
...After telling it, minus all the Jesus-talk, he speaks about how prevention is better than cure, about how we reap what we sow, about how we are not "sick" when we fall into alcohol and drug abuse, but rather "making bad choices," about corny notions like right and wrong and the Ten Commandments, and about how our culture is afraid to state the obvious...
...He regards our two-party system as "professional wrestling," and says if he had to commit, it would be to Howard Phillips's Constitution party...
...If you have fallen behind in your reading on the Christian "rapcore" and "nu-metal" scene, you might have missed the announcement in Heaven's Metal magazine a decade ago naming them the second best unsigned band behind PO.D...
...At Baldwin-Woodville High School in Baldwin, Wisconsin, the kids stay pie-eyed and glued to their chairs, seemingly overwhelmed and slightly frightened by the screaming Jesus rockers who are setting off sound bombs at 8:30 on a Monday morning...
...How dare Junkyard Prophet preach to our children, sometimes getting paid out of Department of Education funds provided to cash-strapped schools—funds that could more usefully be spent on federal initiatives like anti-bullying programs, workshops on why kids shouldn't construct crystal-meth labs, and free condoms for students who need to work out pent-up sexual frustrations after being bullied by their meth dealers...
...Stephanie teaches the young ladies "Virtue" class at the assemblies, and also sings a few pop-ish sexual-abstinence-themed numbers with the band...
...That's amazing," I exclaim...
...Mercifully, it doesn't...
...One teacher tells me that it's not the public school's place to parent the kids, but since the parents aren't doing it, somebody should...
...Jake as Olga: But Papa, he made me a shoe...
...Massey dredges up the funky bottom, while the lead-footed Bradlee works his kick drums like a steady cinder-block rain is falling on his double-bass pedals...
...He actually wants to sic his wife on them to give them a good talking-to about virtuous behavior...
...He came to Christ, and the band, after a troubled adolescence that included overdosing at his senior prom and getting fired from his security-guard job at a Perdue plant after he was found stealing the chicken scales to weigh the drugs he was selling...
...Along with five or ten other peripheral issues (from Rosie O'Donnell's anti-gun hysteria to the hypocrisy of Madonna, who won't let her own children watch her slutty videos), he hacks off across the spectrum like a duffer on a driving range...
...We disagree so vehemently on this last point that he starts polling his assemblies on the subject just to settle the dispute...
...If he doesn't listen the first time," Bradlee says, "that second van might not stop...
...He showed me who I wasn't, and who He was, and that's what He's been doing since that day...
...The reaction varies from school to school...
...You have to make a choice...
...The former Marine, who can crank out five one-armed pull-ups faster than you can click a television remote, actually sleeps in the gym of whatever school Junkyard Prophet is playing the next morning, not just for the sound check before first bell, but so that he can get in a workout...
...God used him, dude...
...As evidence, they'd whip out their highlight reel, in which Yoko Ono's "Kiss, Kiss, Kiss" played backwards purportedly hissed "6-6-6...
...It left us Christian kids disillusioned, confused, and wondering who in their right mind would listen to Yoko Ono forward, let alone backwards...
...To this day, he still screens old episodes on the band's tour-bus VCR...
...The band's drummer and leader, Bradlee Dean, calls Bush a "punk, lyin' stinkin' kid," and says Dick Cheney is a "straight-up liar" who he expects "will be in Hell pretty soon...
...He calls me a vulture, but doesn't get excited, saying they always hemorrhage money on the road, "but it all comes around somehow...
...With no provocation, Bradlee is likely to run dialogue from favorite Little House moments with the band's crew member Jake MacAulay...
...The little ones are called Pickle and Buggy, and they love the band's thoracic-cavity thumping sound...
...They're another story...
...It will come as a great disappointment to Junkyard's leftist critics, who've assumed they're propagandistic Bush puppets, that the strongly pro-military band is also more antiwar and anti-Bush than most of the Chomsky-spewing cyberdorks who pilloried them...
...Ranging in age from toddler to 17, he brings them on tour...
...Junkyard Prophet opens every assembly with an hour-long set from their latest CD, The Price...
...I about started crying like a fat baby...
...They take it to the unsaved (Gonna burn in hell if it's not God you pleasin' / What you gonna do when your lungs stop breathin' / Reign with the King or burn with the heathen) to Christian hypocrites (Playin' the game / Blasphemin' His name / For the gain and fame / Your claim is vain / Your walk is lame) to the current presidential administration (Homeland plus security / Equals nothing but democratic slavery / Exposin'your conspiracy / Pack your bags, get your butt back to Germany...
...But Junkyard Prophet...
...He finally hit bottom, then cried out to God...
...and Pillar on the Christian one...
...I worked at Taco Bell for nine months, but only ate there once...
...He toured the country with his Pentecostal evangelist father, cranking out their accordion-rich Norteno and cumbia music at revivals...
...Rather, the lessons Bradlee imparts to students are from the school of hard knocks, from which he graduated with honors, and which is also the name of one of his many websites...
...Junkyard's critics disparaged them as right-wing rockers in the tradition of Foghat, Ted Nugent, and the Right Brothers, the last of whom are responsible for the worst song in the history of recorded music, "Bush Was Right...
...It doesn't want people to go over the cliff and crash...
...He also ran afoul of the law when some stranger robbed a cab, then took police on a foot chase that randomly snaked through Wayne's house...
...He talks straight to the kids, without pretense or euphemism...
...Their music was said to "suck monkey balls," and one of their abstinence-themed songs was said to do the trick: "Seriously...
...If he had a father figure at all, it would have to be Pa Ingalls, played by Michael Landon on Little House on the Prairie, a show young Bradlee watched religiously...
...Since then PO.D...
...It's their lullaby," says Stephanie...
...But in real life, he's a humble sort who doubles as the band's bus driver...
...Consequently, Bradlee and friends have elected to turn their music and ministry over to bringing kids hard truths...
...The same school also features a baby-changing station in the boys' restroom...
...It's not right, dude...
...But it's not all fun and crazy talk...
...In his room, where he's supposed to be," he tells me...
...At one assembly, Bradlee calls his own children up and tells a story about how he spanked one of his "boys that I love so much" for running out in the road and almost being creamed by a van...
...Dude—it did...
...God convicted him about his eating habits, and he began taking seriously the scriptural injunction to treat your body as a temple, even though his temple potlucks are necessarily catered by Ponderosa, Bonanza, and other slop troughs where they stamp the charbroils on the meat...
...We're on the King's Highway, dog...
...They're mostly afraid not to pay attention, since he often singles out a too-cool-for-the-room disrupter early on, promising to embarrass them during the first warning, then bounce them during the second...
...I fought urges every stinkin' day of my life," says Massey, proudly...
...He's gigged around the world with everyone from Fishbone to Gigi Hamilton ("she's, like, the Whitney Houston of Sweden...
...Their sound is grease-bucket funky, with miter-saw guitar work over a tight, bass-heavy rap/rock hybrid, in the vein of Rage Against the Machine and Limp Bizkit on the secular side, PO.D...
...When not playing with Junkyard Prophet (the band doesn't perform when school's out for summer), Rene plays hotel revues and Vegas shows and is conversant in nearly every style of music...
...On bass and vocals is Mass Dogg, a former welder and 25-year-old Mexican American who's been playing since he was five...
...His final pre-Christian tally (which he mentions without belaboring the point in a self-published bio made available to students) looked like this: six emergency room visits for drug overdoses, stabbed once in the head with a screwdriver, nose broken twice, gun pointed at his head and chest in various conflicts, one DUI, two DWI's, three trips to detox, and three trips to jail...
...Landon really raised a fatherless generation," says Bradlee...
...Chubby only had two hits—'The Twist' and 'Let's Twist Again.'" Rene is an odd fit no matter where he goes...
...Bradlee would rather stress that it's morally wrong to do drugs, and that their lives are headed for destruction if they persist...
...It was the hand of God, dude," he says of the incidents that led him to get help...
...Unless you're one of the students, teachers, or custodians sweeping out the gym at the public high school assemblies where they play and speak as part of their "You Can Run But You Cannot Hide" ministry, you've likely never heard of the Minneapolis-based quartet...
...I sort of had to...
...No, no...
...We used to do that in this country, to love each other enough to get in each other's faces...
...Bradlee's hard on himself and his band, watching playbacks of their school-assembly performances in which even his compliments are barbs: "You look great up there Wayne-O—too bad you can't sing...
...Rene strikes rock-star raised-arm poses while his guitar wails like an amplified hyena...
...On the road with Junkyard Prophet, apostles to the public schools BY MATT LABASH Minneapolis When the history of Christian rap-metal music is finally written, I pray to the Lord of Hosts that I don't have to read it...
...Where's the Rev...
...He recently left his teeth at the Red Lobster," says his wife Stephanie, who used to do television commercials for places like Costcutters hair salon, and who has the blonde perkiness of a Liberty U. head cheerleader...
...But when I read all these pejorative pronouncements about these Jesus-wheezers who had vaulted over the church/state palisade under the guise of character education to rail against everything from premarital sex to overmed-icating kids, who advocated taking responsibility for your bad choices, who implied that homosexuality and abortion are sins, and who apologized for none of it, I had no desire to apply for the cowbell player position in the Praise Allah Band...
...But Pa Ingalls's television guidance wasn't enough to keep Bradlee out of serious trouble...
...Favoring shower shoes, short sleeves, and gym shorts even when it's cold, Bradlee's body looks like a booth at a tattoo artists' trade show...
...He keeps us entertained by making fun of the physical peculiarities of his bandmates: "Massey, I'm not trying to be mean, brother, but your breath smells like somebody crapped...
...Luckily, the high-school dropout doesn't teach English...
...To what should be the chagrin of us all, apparently about 35 percent of public school students and teachers believe Neil Armstrong deserves an Oscar for his star turn in that NASA movie...
...Rather, I worried that the band's music would suck...
...That's why we do what we do...
...There are endless hours on the bus, made passable by Bradlee's unique personality...
...Junkyard ranked number seven on the Democratic Underground's list of "Top Ten Conservative Idiots," and would probably have landed higher had George W. Bush not held down three separate positions on the list...
...If it's any consolation to the band's critics at the watchdog group Freedom From Religion (which Bradlee says is "like a fish starting Freedom From Water"), it's impossible to understand the lyrics, except when Stephanie joins them for an acapella gospel spiritual where the chorus mentions "my sweet Jesus...
...Buncha goofballs...
...He speaks with almost painful directness...
...But if that fate should befall me, I'd feel gypped if it didn't include an extended encomium to the boys from Junkyard Prophet...
...One school has the Coke machines unplugged to keep kids away from dangerous soda...
...You'd go in and watch the band, and the drummer had these big, thick glasses on...
...He hasn't cut it in 13 years, and once, when playing the Iron Horse, a now defunct Minneapolis rock club, his stick became entangled in his mane mid-song...
...Payable on Death...
...He is also a gold-plated conspiracy theorist who will readily hold forth on the mysterious plane crashes of Paul Wellstone and John Kennedy Jr., how Oswald didn't act alone, how O.J...
...Checking the Drudge Report, I spy headlines in which public school teachers have taken bribes from students, given wedgies, given hickeys, and had sex with a 13-year-old 28 times in one week...
...Though the church often portrays a passive, pansy Jesus, Christ didn't run from the fight, He went to it, delivering the truth not only with love but with ferocity...
...His bandmates have to remind him not to leave the thing behind when he takes it out to eat...
...They call it 'offensive' now, then wonder why the world's doing what it's doing...
...As the product of an evangelical upbringing, I can best describe my own relationship to Christian rock as love-hate, with heavy emphasis on the latter...
...When I blasted them from my basement, my wife, who has a stomach for Christian praise music, descended the steps to complain, which I took as a good sign...
...His grasp of current-events minutiae is somewhat tenuous...
...Well, Kid Rock did it," protests one aspiring groupie...
...Their songs do without the secular genre's f-bombs and pimp-talk...
...Their mother was always off with some abusive boyfriend, leaving them at home, even on holidays, to eat Shredded Wheat for dinner...
...I tend to subscribe to the writer Joe Bob Briggs's definition of Contemporary Christian Music as consisting of "bad songs written about God by white people...
...Love warns, bro...
...Most of us like country," one kid nervously explains...
...Better stick with Wayne," I agree...
...While the words "Christian rap" can cause the involuntary skin prickling of a bad peanut allergy, Junkyard doesn't make your teeth hurt with candy-apple, love-ya-Jesus lyrics...
...Bradlee calls him "Bose," as in the speakers, though he tells me to spell it "Boise...
...He even went to China for a last minute fill-in with Chubby Checker...
...One contributor at the Huffington Post wrote that they'd rather their tax dollars go toward buying Junkyard Prophet enough booze to "drink themselves to death...
...My reaction was quite different: I had to party with these Junkyard guys...
...It was a common phenomenon in the churches of my childhood after guest-speakers armed with Power-Point presentations would mount the pulpit at your local youth retreat...
...But we had a picture of Mickey Mouse giving the finger...
...A few days later, their bus's engine blows up in Manassas, Virginia...
...His nickname is a play not only on his real name (Massey Campos), but also on his former size...
...He seems to suffer from some kind of cleanliness-next-to-godliness Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, growing nearly violent if people don't remove their shoes before taking even two steps down the plastic runner in his bus aisle...
...There's no reason for it...
...Poop works," he insists...
...I love these babies with my life...
...He used to be in a family band...
...It pretty much got Him crucified, says Bradlee...
...To not just look at those smirky adolescents wearing their DARE shirts ironically, and tell them it's okay to say no to drugs as they've been told thousands of times before, many of them so overeducated from drug awareness seminars that they could cook up a batch of crank in chemistry class...
...It's a corporate-looking strip mall office, adorned with a cherrywood conference room, a kitchenette, a foosball table, and framed portraits of their favorite theologians, men like John Knox and Charles Spurgeon...
...and how the moon-landing was faked in a television studio...
...After the concert, Bradlee typically grabs the mike and works a crowd of rapt teenagers over for another hour...
...He has Disney characters, Chinese writing—so many, he's lost count...
...But his meat'n'potatoes is his personal story...
...It's nearly unthinkable to even speak of spanking children in public these days, but the kids and teachers listen, and nobody's face melts...
...Early on, he had a taste for violence, first taking up boxing, then Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee's martial art system...
...Junkyard Prophet's music is the only explicitly religious part of the program...
...When I tell Bradlee he's nicknamed his son after the Idaho capital, he admits, "God speaks through the heart, not the head, and my head's not into my spelling...
...But his highlights include his twin forearm tattoos: one of Abraham sacrificing Isaac with a crucified Jesus looking on, the other of the archangel Michael's fist "knocking the snot out of Satan...
...The repair will cost $26,000...
...He makes lots of poop jokes...
...He sank deeper into a personal morass...
...To the untrained ear, it sounded more like "cyst, cyst, cyst...
...But nobody had the gall to get in my face and tell me 'no.' You're somebody's babies too, and don't ever forget it...
...Rene favors head-wrap bandanas and hoop earrings, making him look like a pirate with no body fat...
...I guess so," says Bradlee, though he adds that small miracles such as this greet them all the time...
...Perhaps I've read too many backstage tell-alls or seen Almost Famous one too many times, but the traveling rock'n'roll circus isn't all trashing hotel rooms and hitting naked groupies with lunchmeat...
...The three schools we hit in Wisconsin and Indiana are all now a blur, each of them indistinct in the way of public schools...
...Or at least they did until last winter...
...They'd ruin your good-times vibe by telling you how rock'n'roll was Satan's soundtrack...
...For instance, I was unable to find anything substantiating his claim that "Communist dictator" Mikhail Gorbachev is somehow behind Bush's diabolical No Child Left Behind (though the teachers seemed to enjoy this one...
...They smell of ammonia-based cleaning solvent and bad cafeteria food...
...I was supposed to hook up with the band in January, but their tour was cancelled the day before my scheduled departure after Bradlee drove his ATV into a snow bank, flipping over the handlebars and busting out six teeth...
...Play it to someone you've got the hots for and they'll never come near you again...
...Overseeing the entire enterprise is 39-year-old Bradlee Dean, the band's skipper and drummer...
...Thank you for having me...
...Though with his swollen jaws and missing teeth, it sounded more like, "I eel oooo uuuuiiiddd...
...We're not coming in with boxing gloves saying we're going to knock your teeth out," he says...
...The halls are adorned with photos of yesteryear's conquering heroes from the 4th-place volleyball team, their tube socks pulled so high and their Kristy McNichol-haircuts so unstylish that they have actually come around again...
...Bradlee says they were forced to rent a couple vans at rape-me prices...
...In song, he calls himself "the cornfield gangster" from "the hood made of wood" (that would be the small town of Salisbury, Maryland...
...If you're at peace with the world, brother," Bradlee warns, "the Book of James says friendship with the world is enmity with God...
...Someone even vowed to counter-program them with "an Islamic Praise-Allah band...
...But at another high school in New Washington, Indiana, the kids rush the stage, crowd-surf, and even form head-banging circles (the band once had to stop a Minneapolis show when the principal got trapped in the mosh pit...
...Massey used to be about 70 lbs heavier...
...If Junkyard Prophet is ever properly discovered (something the business-minded Rene is working on, by, for instance, getting everybody instrument endorsements, which he says was long overdue), Bradlee stands to go down as one of the most singular men in rock'n'roll, Christian or otherwise...
...There are, however, random signs of the times, of misplaced priorities...
...Along with beef jerky, Cup-a-Soup, and Little Debbie snack cakes, it's how the band has to find sustenance on their rips through small Midwestern towns (Rene just sticks with a salad usually...
...I honestly don't even know what that meant," he blushes...
...God loves you...
...They've had injuries (Wayne once tumbled off the drum riser in the middle of a song) and breakdowns, such as when the wheels came completely off their equipment trailer—a $4,000 repair on the way to play a $200 gig in Tennessee...
...I wanted to see if it worked in a real fight," he says...
...I finally meet Junkyard Prophet at their headquarters about an hour outside of Minneapolis as they pack up their bus to hit the road...
...When not playing schools, members of the band and their crew, all of whom consider themselves "independent missionaries," man these stations six days a week to raise funds...
...The lead guitarist is 42-year-old Rene Benton, who just joined the band last year, and who commutes from his home in Las Vegas...
...You can call Junkyard Prophet many things, but "light touches" isn't one of them...
...It wasn't some Joel Osteen-style, blow-dry-your-hair and pass-the-plates gospel...
...He stands 6'5" with hair so long he could wrap it around himself and use it as a loin cloth...
...You guys rock, big time...
...Blessed is the man who the Lord chasteneth," he says, forever the scripture Gatling gun...
...But, as Rene says, "If God calls you to do something, do it, and ask questions later...
...And they seem to respond, from the buckets of testimonials the band shows me, and from the "You rock" and "Thanks for being honest" attaboys that I witness firsthand...
...Though a high-school jock who was voted best looking in his class, he has none of the typical prima donna lead-singeritis...
...It was terrible, dude...
...He says to their teachers: "Now you understand what your parents felt like when you listened to Elvis Presley...
...After a non-Junkyard show, he packs up his guitar, and leaves...
...I had to yank it out," he winces...
...There's a lot of tedium involved, especially when you're not just a ride-along journalist, but out of necessity a roadie (my apologies to the band for breaking the rivet on their projection screen...
...They have done this for the better part of a decade, laboring in the vineyards of near total obscurity...
...You smell me...
...He and his older brother Bryan nearly raised themselves...
...Not too hard, man," he laughs...
...In order to maintain control of their content and to ensure they can keep playing schools instead of clubs or more marketable venues, they've turned down label offers, electing to put out their own CDs...
...But I'm gonna tell you the truth and show you how much He loves you...
...It is a rare sentence that Bradlee doesn't end with "dude," "brother," or "dog...
...Stereotypical drinking, drugging, and womanizing ensued, all of which was exacerbated when Bradlee got into rock'n'roll...
...He didn't come here to people-please, dude...
...Bradlee declines, and tells them to email his organization to "tell me what you think of the show...
...A few days more, and it does...
...His band and crew have had to sleep in frozen cars in South Dakota, and were once run out of town by police in the Ozarks after school administrators decided they didn't like Junkyard Prophet's brand of character education...
...Afterwards, girls in tight American Eagle baby-T's approach the band to sign their body parts, as their favorite secular bands do at their concerts...
...The cops lost track of the perp but ended up noticing Wayne's drug paraphernalia...
...Believing in the short attention span of teenagers, he feeds them with a fire hose, hitting every issue from the media and politicians lying to us about nearly everything, to talking about the moral relativism of our society, in which movie theaters put out special warnings to parents who bring their children to see the Passion of the Christ, when there're none for the usual R-rated smut...
...He promised you trials and tribulations, persecutions and afflictions, brother...
...His father, whom he barely knows, spent most of their childhood in jail...
...But he's used to being the outsider, as one of the few black guitarists in the game...
...Simpson might've been framed ("He's driving down the freeway, all of the sudden there's this helicopter on his truck—how convenient...
...Wayne sports a black backwards-cap and a Chinese-character neck tattoo, which he's been told means either "God's sacred soldier" or "mentally ill...
...Though the quality's gone way up since I was a kid, it's always seemed that those who embrace Christian rock resemble tofu-burger eaters or near-beer drinkers—people in search of pale substitutes for things they once found pleasurable...
...My devout parents were briefly body-snatched by a pair of legalistic Pharisees, the kind of people who put the "duh" in "fundamentalism...
...To supplement their $1,500-per-school fee, which they often reduce or waive if schools can't pay, they fund their ministry by putting out music and literature vending tables in gas-station and Wal-Mart parking lots...
...I should've won," he says bitterly...
...The oldest is Torrey Lee, who mixes his own atonal music on a Macintosh laptop, and who threatens to start a band called the Heimlich Maneuvers...
...Indeed, anyone worrying that some oversized hair-band refugee and flame-snorting moralist might get a crack at their high-school kids for two hours should ponder the daily news-of-the-weird emanating from public schools...
...There was metal in the oil, always a bad sign...
...He has healed up now, and enjoys the cosmetic benefits of falsies melded to a retainer...
...Dressed like a total dork...
...Jake does a particularly skillful impression of Olga, the German immigrant girl for whom Landon makes a special shoe since one of her legs is shorter than the other...
...And so it goes when I leave the band...
...Matt Labash is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...I also hear it in my own conversations with teachers and principals, many of whom prefer the cloak of anonymity as they quietly root for these Christian rockers...
...I want to be, 'Hey, that's Bradlee Dean, representing Christ.' A couple times I went to Christian clubs...
...Then there's the shin tat featuring the heads of his three children...
...Bradlee likes to say that in ministry, "something always goes wrong, bro...
...Bradlee tells me by phone that a Minneapolis contact they hardly know heard of their troubles, and volunteered to pick up the entire repair tab—nearly 30 grand...
...But the new everything-in-moderation Massey is a testament to the band's message that we tend to medicalize our worst habits, from alcoholism to obesity, instead of facing our own culpability...
...These days, he slap'n'pops Junkyard's funky basslines, then listens to their cuts "hundreds of times" to see what they can do different or better...
...He says he kicked around "White Chocolate" or "Vanilla Fudge," but those were already taken...
...The road is a difficult place...
...He spent the '80s and early '90s working in hair bands like Surprise Attack and thrash-bands with names like Hooker and Amaryst...
...It was a life he figured he was suited for upon copping his first real attention fix, finishing second in a "Saturday Night Fever" dance-alike contest...
...Boy, was it hard...
...he says other musicians ask...
...And that was just over the six-day period in which I traveled with the band...
...During these wilderness years, the folks removed my worldly music (mostly old soul records), forcing me into the near-beer parallel universe before they came to their senses...
...That's the way it works out here...
...Wayne, our affable, unassuming bus driver, is transformed into the Cornfield Gangster, spitting rhymes and stalking the stage like it's a prison yard and a lesser inmate has misplaced his favorite dumbbell...
...Your life is an endless loop of tribulations and deliverance...
...My biggest fear, therefore, when riding along with Junkyard Prophet for a week's worth of shows in their 14-school, month-long tour, wasn't that I'd be proscribed from using profanity on the bus, though I was (I haven't been encouraged to use the Nerf curse "stinkin'" since 6th grade...
...That's when the left-wing blogosphere discovered them, and grew apoplectic at the notion of their existence...
...Instead, he settled on "G Money Funk Master Grizzup in Da Hiz-zouse," though he rarely uses it...
...The lead singer, or lead rapper rather, is 30-year-old Wayne Ruark, who only took up the sport in his late twenties, but who sounds like he's been doing it his whole life...
...If someone would've told me what I just told you, it would've stopped a whole lot of pain and destruction in my life...
...He vehemently rejects the modern-day, superchurch prosperity gospel, which he calls a farce...
...Another said that they too disputed evolution "after hearing some of this group's music...
...I feel so stupid," he said on the phone at the time...
...Bradlee expects such transformative work to be difficult, understanding literally Christ's bit about taking up your cross to follow Him...
...has been signed, has crossed over to the secular side, and has become a multiplatinum MTV darling...
...He talks about how the media bend over backwards to promote the gay agenda, and how preposterous it is that it is unlawful to pick flowers in state parks, but that it's legal to abort babies every day in this country (to demonstrate the value of life, he shows a photo of a baby's hand leaving the womb to grab a doctor's finger, a photo that once got his session shut down by a principal who mistook it for one of those anti-abortion snuff stills...
...But the group makes up for it by sounding like saggy-pants Elijahs standing on Mount Carmel, summoning down Jehovah-thrown firebolts...
...His secular bandmates call him "The Reverend," since he doesn't engage in their reindeer games, like drinking, drugging, and groupie-rutting...
...When I ask Wayne why Massey gets a cool name like "Mass Dogg," but he's just plain Wayne, he shrugs nonchalantly...
Vol. 11 • May 2006 • No. 33
