"Colors don't hate. People do!" Released 30 years ago today, this is the only album from Nashville-based group The Gotee Brothers. Comprised of Toby McKeehan aka. TobyMac (dc Talk), Joey Elwood and Todd Collins, they also founded the Gotee Records label a few years before. The album title stands for "Eliminating Racism And Creating Equality", and well, I'm not sure if one professional artist and two professional music producers who are all white men are the best people to solve racism, but I guess it's cool they tried. It's clear from this album that the group loves lots of styles of music as this is very eclectic in sound. The core sound is an early '90s hip-hop, but there's also clearly some samples or beds with many other influences like country, jazz and rock, as you might expect from Nashville residents and southerners. Lyrically, these are Christians who are trying to focus on loving people of all races and maybe bringing some hip-hop influences to the white masses. It's an interesting mix of poetry, hip-hop, and often sung choruses, kinda like dc Talk was in the early '90s but a bit more experimental. I've only recently acquired this album but had the track "New South" on some old sampler, and it's definitely not something I listen to often, but it's an interesting look at the more obscure mid-'90s Christian music. It seems like it's not currently on streaming, unfortunately, so you can listen to clips on YouTube or something or find a used CD like I did.

Release Year: 1996