Beyond Christian Hip Hop

A Move Towards Christians and Hip Hop

Erika D. Gault, Travis Harris, Erika D. Gault, Travis Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367185114
• eBook ISBN: 9780429589652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Music

Christians and Christianity have been central to Hip Hop since its inception. This book explores the intersection of Christians and Hip Hop and the multiple outcomes of this intersection. It lays out the ways in which Christians and Hip Hop overlap and diverge. The intersection of Christians and Hip Hop brings together African diasporic cultures, lives, memories and worldviews.

Moving beyond the focus on rappers and so-called "Christian Hip Hop, " each chapter explores three major themes of the book: identifying Hip Hop, irreconcilable Christianity, and boundaries.There is a self-identified Christian Hip Hop (CHH) community that has received some scholarly attention. At the same time, scholars have analyzed Christianity and Hip Hop without focusing on the self-identified community. This book brings these various conversations together and show, through these three themes, the complexities of the intersection of Christians and Hip Hop. Hip Hop is more than rap music, it is an African diasporic phenomenon. These three themes elucidate the many characteristics of the intersection between Christians and Hip Hop and our reasoning for going beyond "Christian Hip Hop."

This collection is a multi-faceted view of how religious belief plays a role in Hip Hoppas' lives and community. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of Religion and Hip Hop, Hip Hop, African Diasporas, Religion and the Arts, Religion and Race and Black Theology as well as Religious Studies more generally.

1 A history of Christians and Hip Hop

Travis Harris

Introduction

The most startling revelation of the church’s interaction with Hip Hop comes from the first female soloist, pioneer, and possibly first Hip Hoppa to earn a doctorate, Deborah “MC Debbie D” Hooper. Rev. Dr. Hooper’s life exemplifies the cipher between the church and Hip Hop. Prior to earning her doctorate, Hooper, a Bronx native, grew up in the church. The small church she attended molded her into being a pioneering Bronx emcee. Singing in the choir taught her how to “sing with soul and spirit” and move the crowd. Hooper also ushered, helped with whatever was needed around the church, and passed out tracts. She credits her early church activities with preparing for her later work of setting up “jams in the park” and passing out flyers. Passing out tracts made passing out flyers an easy task. She poignantly stated in our interview that people always ask how she is so “prolific on the mic,” and she gives credit to what she had developed in the church.

As such, the beginning of the intersection between Christians and Hip Hop in the early 1970s can be traced back directly to Hip Hop’s interaction with the Black church. The Black church’s investment into this intersection included the “invisible Black church’s” African aesthetics and being actively involved in a local Black church. Based on this conception, the commencement of the relationship between Christians and Hip Hop, instead of providing more answers, actually leads to more questions and reveals the amount of research that needs to be done in order to uncover the history of the intersection of Christians and Hip Hop. What is the religious faith of Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Crazy Legs, and first-generation B-girls and B-boys? Are any of the first graffiti artists Christians? Instead of focusing generally on the “Civil Rights generation” and “Hip Hop generation,” what is the specific relationship between Hip Hoppas and the Black Church?¹ Therefore, “A History of Christians and Hip Hop” argues that a fully developed picture of the relationship between Christians and Hip Hop throughout Hip Hop’s history and Christians who also claim to be a part of the Hip Hop culture does not exist. Moreover, the scholarly and practitioner discussion focuses too heavily on the emcee and does not adequately address all of the elements of Hip Hop.

Numerous scholars have provided a historical account of “Gospel Hip Hop,” “Holy Hip Hop,” and “Christian-Themed Rap,” including Josef Sorett’s “Beats, Rhymes and Bibles: An Introduction to Gospel Hip Hop” (2006/2007) and “ ‘It’s Not the Beat, but It’s the Word that Sets the People Free’: Race, Technology, and Theology in the Emergence of Christian Rap Music (2011),” Cassandra Thornton’s “Isn’t Loving God Enough?: Debating Holy Hip Hop” (2011), and Erika Gault’s “My Soul Knows How to Flow: A Critical Analysis of the History of Urban Black Christian-Themed Rap” (2013). In Sorett’s essays, he started the history of “Gospel Hip Hop” with Stephen Wiley’s Bible Break and foregrounded its emergence within the context of “novel musical forms” that were “at the center of struggles within Christian churches.”² These struggles were the introduction of gospel blues by Thomas Dorsey and contemporary gospel music by the Edwin Hawkins Singers to the church. Sorett also presented a list of “Christian rappers” and contended that they mirrored “the stars and styles of its secular counterpart.”³ Thornton provided a list of what she identified as three generations of Christian rappers. These patriarchs included Wiley, Michael Peace, Dynamic Twins, LPG, Danny “D-Boy” Rodriguez, I.D.O.L. Kings, Preachers in Disguise (PID), and Soldiers for Christ (SFC).⁴ Some of the first generation of “Christian rappers,” according to Thornton, after the patriarchs were Gospel Gangstaz and T-Bone. Thornton posited that the second generation brought the Holy Hip Hop movement with Cross Movement, New Breed, and others. The third generation included Reach Records, Lamp Mode Recordings, and more.

Gault’s contribution tremendously shifted the discussion of the history of “Holy Hip Hop.” She situated the historical account within the landscape of American religion starting in the 1950s. First, Whites moved to the suburbs. Then Billy Graham popularized individual salvation, and the shifts in church membership made way for the rise of Christian evangelicals in the 1980s. As a result: “The rise of conservative neo-evangelicalism in America by the 1980s can account for the early style and content of Christian rap.”⁵ Her thorough discussion of the influence of evangelicals on “Christian rap” helped scholars and practitioners make better sense of DC Talk, who formed at Liberty, and the popularity of “Christian rap” or “Jesus music” to a White audience. One of DC Talk’s most popular songs, “Jesus Freak,” fell in line with Sparrow Records’ description of their core audience. They described it this way: “Jesus Music began to catch on with record buying suburban teens and college kids.”⁶ Moreover, Gault highlights “the Christian strain” within rap music at its inception, something that had not been explicitly mentioned in the history of “Gospel Hip Hop.” She also added to the history the ways in which “Christian rappers” as early as the 1980s influenced later “Christian rappers.”

In light of the scholarly work on the history of “Christian-themed” rap, “A History of Christians and Hip Hop” expands the conversation beyond solely focusing on emcees and examines this history through the lens of Christians and Hip Hop rather than “Christian Hip Hop (CHH)” or “Holy Hip Hop.” Therefore, I analyze all the elements of Hip Hop: emceein’, deejaying, breakin’, and graffiti art. I also look outside the U.S. borders and research the history of Christians and Hip Hop. The methodological approach includes oral histories of Hip Hoppas who had lived in and around the Bronx at the time, oral histories of those who overtly identify as Christian and have been involved with Hip Hop since the 1970s and 1980s, and interviews conducted within the self-identified CHH community. This chapter also examines lyrics, music videos, and books written by rappers who are Christian about their lives and the culture, as well as website articles during the 1980s and 1990s that provide details about contemporary events.

I have uncovered that some who attended the first Hip Hop parties were Christians. In an interview with one Hip Hoppa who attended these parties, he indicated that “Pentecostals” would go to the parties and dance along with everyone in attendance.⁷ Emmett Price, in the edited collection The Black Church and Hip Hop Culture (2012), revealed that Sylvia Robinson, founder/CEO of Sugarhill Records and “Mother of Hip Hop,” after seeing Sugarhill Gang perform, believed getting them to record was a “Revelation from God.”⁸ However, this only portrays a small piece of the picture. “A History of Christians and Hip Hop” presents my findings of the intersection between Christians and Hip Hop. It is evident that Christians were there at the beginning of Hip Hop, their presence influenced Hip Hop, and the church played a vital role in the development of Hip Hop. I situate this relationship within the African diasporas and present a history that is not bound by the “Christian Hip Hop” label. Building on Vincent Harding’s metaphor of a river and Paul Zeleza’s conception of African diasporas that I discuss in the introduction of this book, I trace the river flowing throughout Africa containing an Africanized Christianity and African aesthetics to the freedom struggle in the Americas.

The aesthetics and desire for liberation are clearly traceable in the manifestation of Hip Hop in the early 1970s. In addition to Grandmaster Flash naming the slip mat the wafer, as I will explain later, the music that DJs sample and utilize to make Hip Hop – soul, rock, jazz, disco, salsa – are clearly influenced by gospel. It is the “river” that entails components of the invisible Black church that acts upon deejays, emcees, B-boys/-girls, and graffiti writers to create. Similar to the conjurers who use what is available to bring healing, deejays, emcees, B-boys/-girls, and graffiti artists use the materials and creative energy available to them, whether that is Bible verses or records, to provide healing and life in the midst of literal burning. In The Hip-Hop Church Efrem Smith, who also pastors a Hip Hop church, reflects on the song “The Message” and shares: “In some weird way, almost like a Negro spiritual sung by a soloist at church, the song brought us relief as we tried to deal with all the pain we felt.”⁹ Based on his experience with spirituals, “The Message” provided the same encouragement as spirituals. Another perspective that I present is that the river that flows from Africa and comes upon African ancestors, that develops the spirituals, is the same river that comes upon Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five that now includes the ancestors of those who made the spirituals (the invisible Black church).

African and African diasporic influences

The global and transatlantic framework of Black life situates the beginning of Christians and Hip Hop’s intersecting in the Atlantic world – Africa, Europe, and the Americas in the fifteenth century. In J. Lorand Matory’s discussion of Afro-Brazilian Candomble, he makes a similar argument as we do in the introduction of this book against African roots and for “the dynamic politics, economics, and long-distance communication that are the lived realities of the ‘folk.’ ”¹⁰ Matory explains:

The 15th- to 19th-century Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism were the founding conditions of the black Atlantic but were hardly the first moments of dynamism or translocalism in African cultural history. Commerce and migration across the Sahara, across the Indian Ocean, and across the diverse regions of sub-Saharan Africa are among the forces that have long made Africa a cosmopolitan and ever-changing place.¹¹

His dynamic description of translocalism in Africa hearkens back to Harris’s notion of flows and ciphas. African ideas and cultures also flowed and ciphered with Europeans through trade and travel. These dynamic African cultures eventually influenced the intersection of Hip Hop and Christians. Michael Gomez, in Exchanging Our Country Marks (1998), captured the variety of African ethnicities: “[T]o give an idea of just how extensive the list could be, the ethnicities include the Bushoong, Ngunde, Kel, Shoowa, Bokila, Ngoombe, Maluk, Kete, Coofa, Cwa, Mbeengi, Leele, and the southern Mango.”¹² Therefore, the variety of cultures from these ethnic groups interacted with other African groups and Europeans and migrated over to the Americas.

By the 1960s, Africans had experienced several forced and voluntary migrations that contributed to the aesthetics and worldviews of African diasporas. Through the transatlantic slave trade, Africans and Africans born in the Americas were sent and migrated throughout the Americas, carrying these new cultures with them. The forced movements included the slave trade to and from British North America and British colonies in the West Indies and the domestic slave trade between the upper South and the lower South. Africans and Africans born in the Americas self-emancipated and created maroon societies – some escaped from the Carolinas to Spanish F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figure
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A history of Christians and Hip Hop
• Section I Identifying Hip Hop
• Section II Irreconcilable Christianity
• Section III Boundaries
• List of contributors
• Appendix A: Bibliography of Scholarly Works that Examine Christians and Hip Hop
• Index