Darrell Kelley - Unity

Darrell Kelley’s Unity is typical of the modern gospel music world. The artist seems perfectly positioned to be become a leading independent artist in this highly competitive environment. The irony with gospel music today is that it is rarely done well at the major label level. You have your mainstays, with high fidelity studios and highly trained musicians who tend to add little real soul, or honesty, to the recordings they play on. This tends to produce many slick productions that seem more about the record company bottom line than the message the preacher is charged with delivering. The music on Kelley’s single, Unity, is very competent, but it still maintains a heartfelt innocence that cannot be achieved when you get paid to do sessions every day.

DK’s Unity is a song that self-critiques on the part of holy hip-hop. That stresses their evangelistic responsibilities as well as the demand for lyrical dexterity and “flow” within holy hip-hop performance. Kelley sings the biblical model of David “playing skillfully,” but he also can be pleased that he can avoid the danger of holy hip-hop emcees of not properly studying scripture and over-relying on talent. A literate and thoughtful man, Kelley praises the Lord while repeating his calls for the flock to raise their voices in unison.

Division for mankind is not the ideas that spring forth from the bible. It is division that is a dark specter that the artist spends much time warning against. He clearly wants all people to find some common ground in an area that all can generally agree on. Loving one another as Americans, and humans around the world. In keeping with the tradition of the church and the lifestyle of professional gospel artists, the final verses in the song are a series of invitations by Darrell directed at the listener to submit their lives to God through Jesus Christ. All in all, a very good single for people both in and out of the gospel hip hop genre.