Old School vs New School Gospel: Is the Anointing Still There?

Before comparing eras, it's worth being precise about what we're actually comparing — because 'old school' covers a much longer and stranger history than most people realise.

Nigerian gospel music's recorded history goes back to the 1920s, when J.J. Ransome-Kuti — yes, that family — became the first Nigerian to record an album, travelling to the United Kingdom in 1922 to lay down 43 tracks of his compositions. By the 1930s, Ikoli Harcourt-Whyte was creating the first Igbo-language choral music. Through the 1950s and 60s, Pentecostal churches were exploding across the country, and a new sound emerged that blended Yoruba musical traditions with Western gospel structures — a genre now retroactively labelled Contemporary Christian Music, shaped by figures like Bola Are, Ebenezer Obey, and Panam Percy Paul.

What most people actually mean by 'old school,' though, is something narrower: the 1990s and 2000s. The era of Panam, of Tope Alabi, of Sam Okposo and Broda Martyns, who emerged when Nigerian gospel began modelling itself directly after the new wave of American gospel stars — Kirk Franklin, The Winans. The era of cassette tapes and CDs sold after Sunday service, of church choirs in matching uniforms, of songs that lived primarily inside the four walls of a church building before slowly leaking into weddings and burials and birthday parties.

If you grew up Nigerian and Christian anytime in the early 2000s, you know exactly what I mean even without me naming songs. White gloves. Choreography at the end-of-year party. The Saturday morning chores soundtrack your mother controlled completely. That's the 'old school' everyone is actually arguing about.

What Changed, Concretely

The shift from that era to now didn't happen because anyone made an announcement. It happened the way most cultural shifts happen — gradually, then suddenly, driven by technology more than by theology.

The internet did most of the heavy lifting. Independent artists like Greatman Takit and Limoblaze can now reach millions through YouTube, Spotify, and TikTok without ever signing to a label or pressing a single physical CD. That's an entirely different economic and creative reality from the one Panam Percy Paul or Tope Alabi operated in, where reach depended on church networks, cassette distribution, and word of mouth that travelled at the speed of physical movement.

Sound changed too, and not subtly. Afro-gospel emerged as a genuine subgenre — Christian lyrics and explicit doctrine delivered over production that borrows directly from mainstream Afrobeats. Limoblaze is probably the clearest example: the beats could sit comfortably next to any secular playlist, but the lyrics are unambiguously about Christ. A more recent and more controversial wrinkle has artists like Asake and Seyi Vibez sprinkling prayer and scripture into records that are otherwise built for the club — something writers have started calling Afro-adura, prayer meeting percussion. Whether that counts as gospel music at all is its own separate argument, and a genuinely difficult one.

The business model changed most visibly of all. Gospel concerts now run premium seating tiers and brand sponsorships. Gospel artists do high-production music videos with the same visual language as any Afrobeats star. Tim Godfrey collaborating with Oxlade, or Ehis 'D' Greatest's gospel record getting a remix featuring American rapper Gunna — these aren't isolated experiments anymore. They're evidence that the wall between gospel and secular music in Nigeria has gotten a lot thinner than it used to be.

The Case for 'Yes, Something Was Lost'

I want to take the old-school argument seriously, because I think it contains a real point buried under a lot of nostalgia.

There is a textural difference between a Panam Percy Paul concert recording from the 1990s and a contemporary gospel music video shot with cinema cameras and colour grading. The older recordings often have a rawness — congregational, unpolished, sometimes literally just one microphone and a packed room — that puts the emphasis entirely on what's happening spiritually rather than what's happening visually. When 24,000 people showed up to a 3,000-seat hall in Adamawa for a Panam concert in 1997, there was no algorithm pushing that crowd there. No marketing push. Just word that something real was happening, travelling person to person.

There's also a legitimate question about incentives. When your music's success is measured by streaming numbers, brand partnerships, and ticketed VIP sections, the commercial machinery becomes genuinely indistinguishable from the secular industry it once stood apart from. That doesn't automatically mean the substance is gone — but it does mean the pressures pulling at an artist's choices are different, and possibly more numerous, than what shaped someone writing songs primarily for their own congregation in 1995.

And there's a real, uncomfortable copyright and credit problem that has surfaced repeatedly as the industry has scaled — disputes over who actually wrote and owns songs that have become massive hits, the kind of conflict that simply didn't have room to happen at the same scale when gospel music wasn't generating serious money. Bigger industry, bigger fights over ownership. That's not a coincidence; it's a direct consequence of the commercialisation old-school defenders are worried about.

The Case for 'No, You're Just Nostalgic'

Now the other side, and I think it's actually the stronger one.

Every generation that grew up with a particular sound experiences new sounds as somehow less legitimate. This isn't a gospel-specific phenomenon — it happens with jazz, with rock, with literally every musical tradition that has ever existed long enough to have a 'classic era' and a 'new era.' The feeling of decline is often just the feeling of no longer being the target audience.

More importantly: the 'old school' itself was once the new school, and it received exactly the same criticism. When Sam Okposo, Tope Alabi, and Broda Martyns started modelling their music after 1990s American gospel stars, spreading the message beyond the literal walls of the church, there were certainly older Nigerian Christians at the time who thought that was a dilution too — too Westernised, too commercial, too far from the choral hymn tradition they'd grown up with. Every generation's gospel sound is somebody's 'they've lost the anointing' moment.

And the testimony evidence doesn't support a decline narrative at all. Nathaniel Bassey's Hallelujah Challenge — built entirely on smartphone livestreams and social media, the most 'new school' delivery mechanism imaginable — has produced thousands of documented testimonies of healing, breakthrough, and genuine spiritual encounter since 2017. Moses Bliss's Afrobeats-inflected praise anthems are filling churches and arenas with young people who would otherwise have very little gospel content in their daily listening at all. If anointing is measured by what it actually produces in people's lives — and I'd argue that's the only honest measure — the new school is producing plenty of it.

There's also something worth saying about reach. Sound and Bola Are's generation worked largely within the church and the immediate diaspora around it. Today's artists, partly because of the very commercialisation that worries critics, are reaching audiences the old school structurally could not reach — global streaming platforms, international collaborations, algorithmic discovery that puts a Nigerian gospel song in front of a stranger in Texas or Toronto who would never have encountered it any other way.

Where I've Landed

Here's my honest position, after going back and forth on this for longer than I probably should have.

I think the question 'is the anointing still there' is the wrong question, because it assumes anointing is something that gets used up or diluted by production value, marketing, or modern instrumentation — as if the Holy Spirit has a preferred bit rate. It doesn't work that way, and treating it that way flatters older generations while being genuinely unfair to younger artists who are, by every honest account, leading real people into real encounters with God.

The better question is whether an individual artist, in any era, is writing and singing from genuine conviction or from calculation. That question has nothing to do with whether the backing track has a trap hi-hat or a live choir behind it. Panam Percy Paul wrote some songs from deep conviction and probably wrote some others because an album needed a tenth track. The same is true of every gospel artist working today, old school or new. The format has never been the determining factor. It never will be.

What I will say, without hedging, is that we should resist letting the commercial machinery become the whole story on either side. The old-school defenders are right that something genuinely valuable existed in music made primarily for a congregation rather than for an algorithm — there's a kind of focus that comes from writing for the twelve people who'll be in the room on Sunday rather than the million who might stream it on Tuesday. And the new-school defenders are right that gatekeeping anointing by decade is exactly the kind of cultural snobbery the church should be most suspicious of in itself.

My honest advice, for what it's worth: keep both playlists. Let Panam Percy Paul's raw 1990s congregational recordings remind you what unhurried, unproduced devotion sounds like. Let Moses Bliss and Limoblaze remind you that God is not allergic to a good beat. The anointing was never really about the decade. It was always about whether the person singing actually meant it.

Which side of this debate do you fall on — and is there an old-school song that still hits you harder than anything modern? Tell me in the comments, I genuinely want to know.