Which is ironic, because it's a song that's about how dangerous fame and popularity can be.
This is one of those songs that I remember where I was when I heard it for the first time. I was 12 years old, in my friend's dad's minivan on the way to a youth group outing--and where we were going is important, because it gets to the whole point of why DC Talk was so great--to see a minor CCM artist called Praz Jam.
And not to dump on Praz Jam, because for as cheesily earnest as they were, they meant well, but it sounded exactly like what you'd expect. I knew that Christian music, just from a standpoint of musicianship and composition, was usually a pale imitation of what you got from secular artists. It was a smaller pond in terms of talent, and by branding yourself as a Christian band, you limited not only what you could write about but who you could appeal to. Perhaps most important, everything had to be clothed in a veneer of humility, because if you were too into the music, it was seen as taking the focus away from God and putting it onto yourself, even if the song wasn't explicitly meant for worship. (Christian music had extremely complicated norms back then.)
So what you usually got was music that was like what you'd hear on mainstream radio, just not as good and usually pretty corny. Not DC Talk. "My Friend (So Long)" was so transformative for me because DC Talk was a very good band by anyone's standards.
It's not that DC Talk had a signature sound, because in five studio albums it changed four times. A couple months ago, Mallory Ortberg of The Toast wrote a blog post for the 20th anniversary of DC Talk's seminal 1995 album Jesus Freak that included the following: "In six years they went through more musical eras than most bands do in their entire careers – from golden-age-style hip-hop to rap-rock to grunge. For a secular analogy, try imagining a world where Nirvana released Nevermind, Appetite For Destruction, and Black Sunday, all before Bill Clinton won a second term."
Except even that sells it kind of short, because they didn't stop at grunge--it went all the way over to sprawling ballads and world-class power pop in Supernatural, and no matter what DC Talk did, it worked.
You can do that when you've got that much vocal talent in a three-man band: Rapper/producer Toby McKeehan, traditional rock frontman Michael Tait, and ... I don't know how to describe Kevin Max's voice apart from saying it is to this day one of my favorite voices in any genre of music. You'll know him when you hear him.
And these guys just put out solid music in their sleep for about nine years, and singlehandedly ruled CCM in the 1990s. Don't get me wrong--at times, it got weird and cheesy and sort of creepily earnest. (If you've ever been to a Protestant church that aims to attract people born after 1965, you've seen what a friend of mine calls "Riding the Rollercoaster," where during a moment of particular spiritual poigniancy, people will close their eyes and raise their arms, like the guy about 1:20 into this performance of Matt Redman's "Heart of Worship," which is one of the most Ride the Rollercoastery songs ever written. I swear I'm not making fun--I know all this because I used to be one of those overly earnest cargo pants-wearing clean-cut young white people who played David Crowder Band songs in church.)
DC Talk was not without its Ride the Rollercoaster moments is what I'm saying. But this record was one of the few that I felt comfortable playing both in front of my friends and my parents, and it was one of the first that I really made a conscious decision that, yes, this is a song I like, and not just because someone else told me it's good.
That's why certain thirtysmoethings will absolutely flip their shit if you mention DC Talk. Because not only were they the greatest band in 20th-Century CCM, they were, first and most importantly, good.
