Free at Last, the big breakthrough album that launched dc Talk into mega-CCM-stardom in 1992, should come with the Fisher-Price brand name and a subtitle that says, "My Very First Rap Album!" That's pretty much the role it served for me, a clueless teenager just getting into Christian music, being assured by my youth pastor that "If you like rap, you'll like dc Talk". Well, I didn't know if I liked rap, but I was open to pretty much any style of music at the time, and I wanted to be all hip and cool, so sure, I'd check out what these guys had to offer. Hey, can you blame me? This was back in the days when dc Talk was the premiere Christian rap act, with Dove Awards in the category going to either them or (shudder) Carman most of the time. This disc didn't really tell me diddly squat about whether I actually liked rap - it was a pastiche of extremely poppy melodies, smooth and fun-loving East Coast R&B type beats, all manner of sampling and cheesy keyboard effects, and a truckload of fun but often ridiculous rhymes, all spat out by Toby Mac, who was more or less the second coming of Vanilla Ice in those days. Yep, this was whiteboy rap at its early 90's pinnacle (late 80's in the maintream, but Christian music was always playing catch-up in those days).
Yeah, Free at Last is one of those albums that I'd consider to be a laugh riot today if I didn't love it so much back then. But let's set aside the cheesy elements for a minute and pretend that we don't have impress any modern-day hip-hop aficionados. This is classic material, after all. Dc Talk may not have had a clue how to be relevant to the world of mainstream rap in the early 90's, but they sure as heck worked wonders for Christian radio, slamming it upside the head with some strong hooks and sweet backing vocals, courtesy of Michael Tait and Kevin Max (he went by Kevin Smith in those days, but I'm kind of glad he changed it, given the potential confusion with the film director of the same name). Honestly, I don't know if Toby realized how good he had it when he stumbled across those two guys at Liberty College. While Toby was the main creative force behind dc Talk in those early days, and Mike and Kevin played a background role, I certainly think the different tastes of the three members were causing dc Talk's music to become a unique, mutating, creative thing, even at this early stage of unabashed cheesiness.
Knowing the transformation that the group would undergo on Jesus Freak helps to put an album like this in perspective - they could have just as easily been a flash-in-the-pan novelty act that faded away. But listen to Free at Last carefully, and underneath the sometimes desperate attempts to be hip and cool are the seeds of the genre-bending brilliance that they would perfect later in the group's career.
As much as I try to spin it as an important chunk of history, the truth is that Free at Last is mostly a nostalgic guilty pleasure that I pull out every once in a while. The reason that it still scores so highly with me after all these years is simply because that amount of pleasure, however guilty it may be, is a massive amount that more than offsets the embarrassment I might feel upon admitting that I actually like it. To put it quite simply, it's a trip, yo.
Luv Is a Verb Thinkin' of a way to explain-o
Cause ya' know when I'm flowin' like a bottle of Drano
Simple and plain, L-O-V-E
Ain't all that junk that ya see on TV...
"Take this mo' fo' a ride!" That's my best attempt to make out what the odd sample at the beginning of this song is saying, though I'm sure I must be wrong. Anyway, dc Talk kicks off this classic album with a funky little number drenched in fuzzed-out bass, fake horns, lots of random shouts of "Boom!", and the unforgettable question, "Are you down with the dc Talk?" The song is a great microcosm of Toby's rhyming tendencies - he'll take a solid point (in this case, that love is a word which requires action to be believable) and spell it out in an almost humorous manner, mentioning all manner of odd things like soap on a rope and Drano along the way. What brings it all together is the hook, sung smoothly and authoritatively by Mike and Kevin - "Hey, tell me haven't you heard? Love is a serious word. Hey, I think it's time you learned, I don't care what you say, I don't care what you heard, the word love - HA! - love is a verb." Oh yeah, I forgot about the little Toby interjections in there. The guy doesn't really sing on this record, so he has to make himself known during the choruses somehow.
That Kinda Girl Too hard I've been scarred by the ones of the past
So put an APB out on the one that will last
A little longer than a roll in the hay for sure
But a bona fide lady's what I'm prayin' for...
Some random female vocals usher Toby in to lay down a humorous introductory rap about a date gone horribly wrong with a girl who "loves to smoke and drink while cursing like a sailor" and who says "I have an apple, would you care to take a bite". Against a bass-heavy, East Coast-style beat that sounds like something I must've heard from Boyz II Men once upon a time, the guys explain the virtues of a Proverbs 31 woman, "the kind of girl you meet behind the doors of the church". While somewhat preachy, it's a fun song about the guys longing for the future wives (I don't think any of them were married at this point - Tait actually still isn't and Kevin has recently rejoined him in bachelor-land). And what girl wouldn't swoon as Kevin and Michael croon, "When I finally meet her, I'll know how to treat her, by fulfilling all her needs, love her and respect her, cherish her forever, she's the kind of girl for me?" (Rhetorical question. Please don't answer that. I'd swoon if I were a girl, and that's all that matters.)
Greer
The last line of "That Kinda Girl" brilliantly cuts into an answering machine message - apparently one of Toby's favorite interlude devices - in which Todd Collins (one of Toby's production crew and side project, The Gotee Brothers) imitates the voice of an annoying friend who is shocked over some of the copyrighted material that he thinks is being plagiarized on dc Talk's new record.
Jesus Is Just Alright To the ones that think they heard
I did use the "J" word
Cause I ain't too soft to say it
Even if DJ's don't play it...
Oh, man. This song brings back so many memories. Where do I even begin? Let's start with all the sampling. My Lord, is this thing swimming with samples! It's like, half song and half Looney Tune, and my favorite would have to be the scratched-out "H-h-h-how do they do that?" during the bridge. But that's not all. There's the thumping dance beat, which caused me to be the object of ridicule when I brought this song in to my music appreciation class in high school, thinking it would wow all the rap fans, and I promptly got told, "This isn't rap, this sounds like funky techno!" There's the fast-paced, and often clever, rap interludes, during which Toby tells us how he's gonna talk about Jesus and he won't let anyone censor it. I didn't know any better when I first heard dc Talk, and I just assumed the black guy (Tait) was doing the rapping, and then I saw the sepia-toned music video for this song (fly girls and all), and I was shocked to see that it was one of the white guys. But wait, I bet the black guy does that fast part... nope, that's Toby too. Wow, that's really fast. (I then set about memorizing it, and to this day I can spit it right back at my CD player almost flawlessly before I run out of breath near the last line). Of course, the thing that surprised me most about this song was when I found out that it was a remake of a much older song by The Doobie Brothers. Toby just pulled a Puff Daddy on it before any of us knew who Puff Daddy was, and threw in rap verses and that funky beat. It came at the expense of the chilled-out bridge (we'll get to that eventually) and the sweet guitar solo from the original, but hey, they made it their own.
Say the Words But still we choose to hide behind the face of pride
Pretending we are blind to the calling
This is my point and case, if hate can be erased
With such a simple phrase, why are we stalling?
A slower, more R&B-influenced song, but still very slick and bass-heavy, became one of dc Talk's first shots at more conservative radio stations, simply because there was more singing than rapping to this song. The group kind of posed it as a song that balanced out "Luv Is a Verb", because here they're singing about how people are afraid to actually express love verbally, even though they may show it with their actions. It's actually one of the dc Talk songs that has aged the best, since Tait and Kevin's vocals will never go out of style, and it's only Toby's middle eight (which is still pretty savvy in comparison to some of his sillier outings on this record) and the "Brothers and sisters!" sample which keeps popping up that make it easy to pin it down to a particular point in music history. Ironically, the band had the song remixed for their greatest hits collection Intermission, and it ended up being a weird, syrupy synth thing that I didn't really care for. Sometimes you just have to avoid colorizing those old films, you know?
WDCT
Another interlude uses the tried-and-true "radio announcer" method to introduce the next track.
Socially Acceptable Ethics sure to be missing the punch
No count morals that are out to lunch
They're sliding away cause everything is okay
It was taboo back then but today ya say, "What the hey"...
This song walks an uneasy line between social consciousness and blatant dogma, since it sounds the old battle cry against a society where all sense of morality is supposedly being blown to hell. Looking back, I kind of have issues with that notion, 'cause you know, we're so much worse now than we were back in the days when women couldn't vote and coloreds had their own bathrooms and stuff. (Insert eye-rolling emoticon here.) I guess it's a favorite scare tactic of modern-day Evangelical groups , but I always thought dc Talk was a little smarter than that, so it's really weird to hear someone like Kevin belting out "Human rights have made the wrongs okay", but I'll try to rise above that. Kevin and Tait turn in some solid backing vocals once again, including a nice little breakdown near the end, and we've got another kickin' beat to work with - I have no clue how current those beats were at the time, but I like the sound of most of 'em even today. Toby's central point that "everybody's doing it" is not an acceptable excuse for doing whatever you feel like is a good one. Probably not one of dc Talk's best (what on Earth was it doing on Intermission, anyway?), but it's passable.
Free at Last Ya see, something's got me jumpin', and I think it's the way
That He can take a hard man and turn him into soft clay...
Sad to say, the album's title track is a bit of a blemish. It starts off with an overlong intro (which really should have been a separate track) featuring a choir director leading a painfully off-key choir in the titular spiritual, and then a fast-paced but dinky-sounding beat, really heavy on the keyboard hits, comes swooping in, and we get a Frankenstein of a song that's half Gospel and half Looney Tune. (I know, that's the second time I've used the Looney Tunes comparison. But it fits.) I like the handclapping and the backing choir and all that (I've actually heard a real Gospel choir do an arrangement of this one sans rapping, and it was pretty decent). But this song has some of the most half-donkeyed rhymes ever to come out of Toby's mouth. "Tomorrow" does not rhyme with star, unless you just lazily cut off a syllable, and "sparked this" to "carcass" is also a bit of a stretch. Of course, given the title, we're going to have a Martin Luther King sample in there (Extreme used the very same sample on the song "Peacemaker Die" during the same year - there's a little trivia for ya!), and I guess his is always a welcome voice, but it's still a bit of a cliched thing to do.
Time Is... We got a mission while we're on this earth
We need to tell people 'bout our second birth
Get busy like a school boy makin' an "A"
Cause time, my brother, is tickin' away...
Now this should've gone on Intermission. One of dc Talk's first forays into the rap/rock hybrid opens with a flurry of sound bytes related to the subject of time, and then a big, echoing chorus of "Time is tickin' away" breaks in, and then we're greeted by a slamming beat and a guitar hook that might be mild compared to "Jesus Freak", but that still packs a wallop. Kevin really gets to wail on this one, hinting at the powerhouse vocals he'd become known for in dc Talk's late 90's concerts and on his solo records, and Toby manages to skewer us with a slippery "tick-tock-tickity-tock, tickity-tickity-tickity-tock" vamp that just screams, "Betcha can't say that five times fast!" This is one of the points where the melody and beats are at their pinnacle, where rap is best integrated with another style so that it doesn't bear the pretense of being straight-up rap, and where the samples really fit into the song instead of seeming placed there just for the heck of it. One of my favorite moments comes right after a sample voice asks, "Is this the last hurrah?", and then the beat speeds up to double time and the song comes careening to a sudden halt with another voice saying, "Whoa, wait a minute!" (Maybe my ears are playing tricks on me, but I always think that last voice sounds a lot like Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation.)
The Hardway It took so long for me to see
That I'm a victim of the nature in me
Left to myself, I realize
I am the maker of my own demise...
A mournful slow song appears here, utilizing another streetwise beat and creating a rather dark and pensive mood. This song is all about making mistakes and regretting not listening to God - "Some people gotta learn the hard way, I guess I'm the kinda guy who has to find out for myself." Probably the most serious moment on the record, this one doesn't ease up on the hook value at all, utilizing a highly singable chorus to jerk a few tears as the guys sing about a desperate moment of repentance. Take back what I said earlier about Toby not singing - he actually attempts it here and doesn't sound too bad. His voice is a bit thinner, but it's a good counterpoint to the more full-bodied voices of his companions. An echoing guitar effect and some sweet "oohs" in the background add a lot of mood lighting to the song - a true dc Talk classic if ever there was one. I had a really tough time swallowing what the group did to this on their live album Welcome to the Freak Show, even going so far as to change around the chord structure, but I'll admit that it was brilliantly juxtaposed with Kevin's poem "Alas My Love". I still see this as the definitive version, though.
2 Honks & a Negro
This is a pointless but a musing vocal interlude in which Mike and Kevin proclaim that "We're just two honks and a Negro serving the Lord."
Lean on Me Many of us just don't know what to do
Well take it here and now from the boy named true
Don't dog a brother out when he stumbles and falls
Just be there to lean on, y'all...
Yep, you guessed it - another cover song. This is almost exactly what you'd think you'd get if you translated the classic "Lean on Me" from the swaying friendship anthem that it is into a heavily programmed old-school rap song, save for a few Toby interludes that are a bit off-kilter and kind of throw the mood off a little bit. As expected, Kevin and Tait were made to tear it up on a song like this, but the song kind of ceases to be believable when the group adds too much of their own hip-hop-isms, changing "We be jamming'" to "Make it funky" and inserting "uhh" wherever they feel like it, and so forth.
Testimony
Toby sets this song up to sound like a freestyle rhyme, about how he came from Washington, D.C. and was influenced by Sugar Hill and all that.
I Don't Want It Safe is the way they say to play
But then again, safe ain't safe at all today
So just wait for the mate that's straight from God
Don't give it up 'til you tie the knot...
Depending on how you look at it, this song is either the album's gutsiest move, or its most embarrassing moment. Such is usually the case when a Christian artist sets out to cover the hot topic of abstinence. (Anyone remember Michael Sweet griping about MTV not wanting to air his video for "Ain't No Safe Way"? Um, yeah, that's because it SUCKED.) To the group's credit, some of the verses offer compelling thoughts on the heat of temptation and what we need to do to resist it, but for the most part, the song turns to dogma instead of actual helpful wisdom, giving us the what without really delving into the why. That's my intellectual reason for not really caring for the song - there's also the personal reason that any teenager is going to turn beet red when they've got this tape playing with their Mom in the car and the guys are West Coast swinging their way through a chorus that loudly proclaims, "I don't want it, your sex for now!" Just in case we didn't catch that, Toby repeats those last four words loud and clear at the end of the song. Yeesh.
Willpower
This is a little commercial jingle, advertising willpower as a product with "Temptation not included, batteries sold separately." Kind of a random, but funny add-on to "I Don't Want It".
Word 2 the Father Once again we're here to drop some science
Standin' up tall in the land of giants
Steadily keepin' our message intact
And the truth is, it's a matter of fact...
PUH-PUH-PUH-PUMP IT UP! One last cheesy song before we call it a day. (I admire any brave souls who didn't have this album as a childhood favorite and who have made it this far upon hearing it for the first time now.) This is your basic upbeat party song, offering shout-outs to the crew (come on, you knew they were going to rhyme "Kevin" with "Heaven" at some point), and offering a "Word 2 the Father" instead of the expected "Word to Your Mother", I guess. Again, we've got some middling rhymes here that are mucking up the verses, and you'd think that they could stay on focus a little better when giving "Straight up propers to the Papa." (I wish I were kidding.) The saving grace here is a clever final verse where Toby strings together the titles of a number of dc Talk's earlier songs (yes, they had albums before this one, and no, don't go back and listen to them), and the fun use of sampling. (By the way, the Beastie Boys called. They want their "It's a trip! It's got a funky beat, and I can BUG OUT to it!" back.)
Jesus Is Just Alright (Reprise)
So, you were wondering where that bridge went? Tait and Kevin polish it off here. No guitar solo, though. Sorry.
Alright, so I've been a little harder on dc Talk than I thought I would be. It's kind of like razzing an old friend for dumb stuff they did in high school - they're still your friend, you still love 'em, and you can still see that they were a good person despite their flaws. I've kind of grown up with these guys over the years, and it's fun to wax nostalgic about their old stuff - I'll always love it, even if I don't think I have the courage to investigate their first two albums that came before this one. While dc Talk newbies would be better off starting with the career-defining Jesus Freak and my personal favorite, Supernatural (ironically, by two albums later, the rap element had all but disappeared from their sound), Free at Last is worth investigating to get a good idea of where these guys came from. No group in recent memory has evolved as drastically and successfully as dc Talk, and for that, this honk's gotta give them some dope mad props, yo.
ALBUM WORTH:
Luv Is a Verb $2
That Kinda Girl $1.50
Greer $.50
Jesus Is Just Alright $2
Say the Words $2
WDCT $0
Socially Acceptable $.50
Free at Last $0
Time Is... $2
The Hardway $2
2 Honks and a Negro $0
Lean on Me $.50
Testimony $0
I Don't Want It $.50
Willpower $.50
Word 2 the Father $.50
Jesus Is Just Alright (Reprise) $.50 TOTAL: $15
Group Members:
Toby MacKeehan
Michael Tait
Kevin Max (Smith)
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
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