FLAME

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Marcus Tyrone Gray (born September 16, 1981), known as Flame (often stylized as FLAME), is an American Christian hip hop recording artist with Clear Sight Music. He has released nine albums including: the self-titled Flame, Rewind, Our World: Fallen, Our World: Redeemed, Captured, The 6th, Royal Flush, Forward, and God Knows. Flame has been nominated for several Dove and Stellar Awards throughout his music career and Our World: Redeemed was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Background Story

Marcus Tyrone Gray took care of his schizophrenic mom while his dad was in the streets, binging on drugs in the projects of St. Louis.

“I had the responsibility of really overseeing my mom,” -Marcus told CBN.

“There would be times where she wouldn’t even recognize me. She could curse me out or call me names or just start treating me as if I’m her enemy or something like that. My dad would be gone days on end, blowing time, you know, getting high. Everything was just unstable.”

Until her death, his grandmother was the only solid foundation in his life. But with her untimely passing, 16-year-old Marcus began acting out, picking fights at school. It was a way of asserting control over a reality that was out of control.

It got him arrested and expelled.

“When (Grandma) passed away, I felt like I lost a part of my own soul, a part of my being had been cut off. Because she was my everything. I just remember trying to be strong, but not having the ability to. My natural bent was to check out and to retreat, you know, stay in the clubs, do whatever would distract me, block me, numb me from reality.”

His life was spiraling quickly toward becoming a hardened criminal and drug user, a pariah of no use to society.

Then he developed a crush on a girl, and she invited him to church.

“I decided to go because of the hopelessness. I felt like I’m trying all of these different things to bring about what I actually want,” he says. “I was overwhelmed with the Gospel message of Jesus’ love. Jesus loves you. And I was so overwhelmed with this love, you know, Jesus’ love, and I remember thinking like, he does love a bad person. And it sounded exactly like the things that my grandmother would tell me.”

As the Word and Spirit touched his heart, he was born again.

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The next thing you know, Marcus was on fire for God. He would take his Bible to school and stand up on the desk in middle of class and preach to his fellow students (for this he wound up in the principal’s office). He would invite people to church incessantly and fill up a whole pew of 15 needy kids headed towards a life of crime if Jesus didn’t intervene.

From death and destruction, his life became an intense flame. So that’s his stage name today, Flame.

A Billboard topper and Grammy nominee who launched Clear Sight Music, Flame has nine albums. He was offered a million dollar contract from a secular label, with only one condition: no mentioning Christ. He turned it down.

Flame does outreach in the streets of St. Louis constantly. After a shooting on the dangerous west side, Flame was praying with sinners and handing out Bibles when he met gang member Travis Tremayne Tyler. The hardened criminal wound up accepting Jesus and became a fellow Christian rapper star, Thi’sl.

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Today Flame is married to Crystal, who helps him run Clear Sight Music, home to V. Rose.

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Flame fights for racial harmony. When a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Flame joined forces with the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team chaplains sharing hope and prayers afterward.

“Satan has done a fine job of finding these pockets and these different ways to divide us, and racism is one of those things,” Flame told the Billy Graham news. “This is a fallen world. There’s racism here, there’s corruption here, there’s hatred here on both sides. And unless God works in us, there’s always going to be chaos.”

CHH has been panned for being an insipid knockoff of secular rap. But this suit may prove to the contrary that CHH is a source of creativity admired and imitated by the greatest players in the game. Flame’s video “Start Over” with fellow Christian rapper NF has racked up 26 million views.

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“My heart is really to walk with people throughout the long haul, side by side, helping them process what has happened in their life, so I take my life experiences, I take my theological training, and I get to smash it all together and make it rhyme,” he says. “He’s loved on me in a unique way by dying for the world and the church, but in particular, for Marcus Gray. And when I think about that and he’ll invite me to his heaven, that’s what really rocks me about the Lord.”

Early in his career, Flame worked with a manager and recorded more than 20 songs at a studio. He says the manager never paid for the studio time, and Flame’s masters were withheld.

“It was my first traumatic experience,” Flame says. “I spent months of writing, experimenting, articulating and making it rhyme, and it was taken away.”

The music was later returned to Flame when the studio owner’s wife handed it over after her divorce. Some of the music ended up on his debut album; he used concepts, hooks and other pieces for subsequent songs.

As the album’s title implies, Flame references God, Jesus Christ and the Bible at a time when some faith-based rappers have downplayed their spirituality. (Lecrae, also an early Christian rapper at Cross Movement Records, is now only referred to as a rapper. He performed last year at LouFest.)

“I definitely understand the paradigm he (and others) are working out of,” says Flame, who thinks downplaying the “Christian” label is a way to exist in mainstream culture. “People are trying to get away from the misconceptions that come with being a Christian rapper. Personally, I don’t feel the need to shy away from it. But I’m also OK just being considered a rapper.”

While this conversation continues to swirl, he notes an increasing number of popular rappers such as Chance the Rapper, Drake, J. Cole, Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar have been showing their spiritual sides.

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“They’re being upfront about their religious affiliations, and it doesn’t prove to be a hindrance,” he says. “They’re articulating it, putting it in their songs. We live in a hip-hop culture now where being yourself unapologetically is a trend. This is a part of me, a part of my childhood. I want to talk about all of who I am. I live in a generation where we’re tired of hiding things and of being fake and afraid.”

Credit: God Reports, Wikipedia, stltoday