“Say the Words” (Now) by dc talk, Saturday, April 29, 2023

 

It’s time finally to name one of my biggest musical influences from middle school. It’s not a cool ‘90s band by today’s standards, but they certainly influenced Christian music and evangelical thought until today and have given many former church kids enough trauma to unpack. We’re finally talking about DC Talk’s greatest hits album intermission, via the radio hit that comes from the remix of a song “Say the Words” from their breakthrough album Free At Last. While the band called their greatest hits record an intermission, the group have only reunited on rare occasions and have not recorded a record since 1998’s Supernatural. 

I’VE GOT SOMETHING FOR YOU, MAN. When you’re 12 years old in the year 2000, nothing could be cooler than owning a copy of DC Talk’s intermission. The boys from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University were known for changing styles. Coming from embarrassingly bad white-boy Hip-Hop on their eponymous debut record to less-embarrassingly bad Hip Hop thanks to The Doobie Brothers’ “Jesus Is Just Alright” being their biggest hit on Free At Last, the band changed their sound to Hard Rock on their iconic 1995 record Jesus Freak. Most critics of Christian music in the ‘90s and ‘00s points out that music takes a distant second to the message of the songs, and DC Talk has definitely faced this scrutiny. While Toby McKeehan, better known by his stage name Toby Mac may have really “Luv[ed] Rap Music,” it was grunge and modern rock that took the band to MTV with “Jesus Freak” and “Between You and Me.” But in 1995, at the age of 8, I wasn’t listening to “Jesus Freak,” and when that music eventually entered my house, I had to hide it from my mom because it “sounded evil.” My first exposure to DC Talk was around 1998 from a tape of light CCM songs called Songs 4 Life and their song “Between You and Me.” Later, I heard DC Talk’s “Consume Me” on the local Christian radio station.

BACK IN THE ‘70S IT WAS ABUSED. But my first DC Talk album was intermissions. It was a way for me to get all the band’s greatest hits—not just the ones played on the light rock Christian radio station. It would be the last of DC Talk before the band members went solo to varying degrees of success. The radio single “Say the Words” (Now) went straight to number on Christian radio and everyone was craving more from Kevin Max, Michael Tait, and Toby Mac. “Say the Words” was a song about the need for Christians to show love to a fallen world. The remix offered a fresh, of-the-time electronic pallet, auto-tune fills, and a chill beat. The sound was fresh, sounding like the boy bands of the day with a dash of rock guitar, hip hop, and dance music. I misheard the line “Brothers and sisters,” an overdubbed line as either “better than Sisqo” or “Better than disco.” Sisqo was most famous for “Thong Song,” which was a major hit around the time of “Say the Words.”  Even though the lyric isn’t “Better than Sisqo,” the emphasis of the song is about “real love” and not “abusing” the words “I love you.” Love, in the context of today’s song, comes from God and is not sexual. The Jesus Freak revival of the ‘90s and ‘00s may have been using hippie-styled advertising, but it was very important that everyone knew that although they looked like “Jesus Freaks,” they basically believed the same thing as the televangelist on TV except they had better music. But a lot changes in twenty years. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.