“The day will come when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’ language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Introduction
These prophetic words of Bonhoeffer, penned from a prison cell in Nazi Germany, come from the depths of his anguish and despair over the German church’s utter loss of credibility during his time. Though on the surface they continued their liturgy and baptisms, they had sold their soul to Hitler and the Nazis and failed to live as authentic disciples of Christ. When God is honored in name during worship services, but injustice, hatred, violence, racism, and oppression go unquestioned and unchecked by those claiming to be God’s people, the prophets boldly announce God’s hatred of our worship and reiterate God’s call: “Take away from me the noise of your songs…but let justice roll like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:23-24). Amos shows us that when our words about God (theo-logia) become worn-out expressions, emptied of practical meaning and ethical consequences, not only is this displeasing, but God actually hates this (v. 21). Thus, when this happens, God raises up prophets to speak the Word anew, powerfully and profoundly addressing the pressing concerns of the current time. This is why prophecy is so intimately connected to poetry—it becomes a vehicle for transcending language through language itself, of getting beyond the restrictive rigidity of common and conventional expression and point to a greater truth and to pronounce God’s word anew.
Thus, there is much more at stake in the theological exploration of hip hop than merely a way of making theology more “relevant” to contemporary youth, reaching the “unchurched,” or using its aesthetic idioms simply as an evangelistic tool and a ready-made cultural container into which we can insert church doctrines and scripture verses. While these approaches represent the vast majority of previous attempts by the church to engage hip hop culture, they are insufficient because they fail to truly listen to the community they seek to reach out to. What is needed is an approach that hears and accepts the voices of the hip hop community in their own right. To do this, we must first understand that hip hop is more than just a kind of music, a subculture, or a set of aesthetic principles; it is all of that and more. We must explore the poetics of hip hop how all of these aspects are interwoven to construct meaning and intelligibility. Only then can we begin to grapple with its theological content. I will begin by outlining a basic understanding of the essential historical, cultural, and poetic roots of hip hop. After establishing the hermeneutical context of hip hop theology, I will articulate three key aspects: God’s solidarity with the suffering of the oppressed, the prophetic denunciation of hypocrisy in contemporary Christian worship, and the prophetic denunciation of the dominant American culture. Each section will include direct examples of contemporary hip hop artists who take up this prophetic-poetic tradition to speak to contemporary circumstances.
Part I: Defining Hip Hop
Hip hop is, in a sense, a cultural dialectic; it functions as a bridge to merge contrasts in aesthetic and cultural convention. Theodore Adorno defines art as “a critique of praxis.”
Hip-hop, in this sense, is a critique of conventional linguistic, cultural, religious and aesthetic practices. The dialectic of hip hop is fundamentally acheived in the “mix”—a re-contextualization of the artist’s surrounding elements, including musical and nonmusical sounds, religious and philosophical ideas, conventional and subversive language, popular culture, politics, history, and community—all of which are “sampled” from their disparate sources and mixed together into a new cohesive unit. The new context of these elements is aimed at deconstructing conventional dichotomies through juxtaposition. This juxtaposition is what allows hip hop to function as a dialectic of literary and musical tradition, of sacred and profane, of noise and music, and of originality and reproduction. While hip hop is, in a sense, a part of Western culture, it is imperative that hip hop be understood primarily as a specifically African-American type.
Its unique situation in both the local community and within the wider context of musical and cultural tradition creates the hybridized dialectic through which hip hop critiques convention and constructs new meanings out of sampled material.
If hip hop is ever to be properly understood academically, then a convergence of multiple disciplines is need—these include musicology, history, sociology, economics, political science, theology, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies. Any one-dimensional academic approach will fall short of a full account of what hip hop truly is. For example, Music theory, in its attempt to focus solely on the musical aspects of hip hop, will also neglect the way that historical and cultural themes are so deeply saturated into the music itself; and even music history will run the risk of reducing hip hop to a postmodern musical development out of a linear progression instead of seeing it as a musical dialogue between past and present. Though exceedingly difficult to define, hip-hop is primarily about finding a crossroads, or a convergence somewhere in the mixture of differing elements.
The greatest composers of hip-hop are master synthesizers; artists who are able to create harmony out of sounds and ideas that seem to have no interrelationship. Thus, to fully understand them will require a thorough explication of their “poetics”—here taken in the widest possible sense, so as to include any meaning constructs, whether musical, linguistic, or otherwise.
African-American Language tradition
It is often said that hip-hop is a hybrid form. Much of what is called hybridization in hip-hop arises out of the unique cultural dynamic resulting from the tension between a minority African-American subculture and the dominant mainstream American and Western culture. In 1903, African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term “second sight,” in order to depict this unique intra-cultural dynamic. Du Bois asserted that the black minority understood the white majority to a much higher degree than the obverse; often, according to Du Bois, the minority even understands the majority better than they understand themselves.
The concept of second sight can be applied to many aspects of African-American culture as a means of understanding its intersection with the majority culture. Second sight opens the possibility for a discursive subtext, wherein the dominant culture can be challenged and subverted without the majority’s comprehension. An extremely significant manifestation of such a subtext is the usage and development of African-American Vernacular English.
Linguistically, it is an admixture of Southern English with some grammatical elements remaining from the West African language family, and the incorporation of continuously formed slang expressions. Its origin is in preserving some degree of linguistic autonomy from slave masters; African-American vernacular culture has always been, and continues to exist as a discursive challenge to dominant cultural forces.
For AAVE to continuously function as a medium for cultural identity and subtext, it relies on the constant invention of new words and phrases as older expressions become absorbed by the mainstream. While new words preserve a degree of obscurity on a grammatical and semantic level, AAVE harbors much greater cultural depth as a discourse based on how African-Americans use language, what they use it to say, and what verbal routines are used in this communicative practice (Perry, 25). The way in which AAVE remixes conventional linguistic expression into a creative trope to heighten the meaning imparted to those familiar with this process is at the aesthetic core of hip hop.
Thus, more must be understood about African American linguistic practice than a merely semantic comprehension of slang terms. The distinction between literate and oral dissemination of linguistic culture is also important. The preference for oral culture gives African American language a uniquely performative character. The use of print in literate tradition tends to freeze concepts as they are written, whereas oral tradition, by virtue of its “actionality,” maintains a much looser paradigm for communication and perception alike. Barbara Christian elaborates in her essay “The Race for Theory,” that, “people of color have always theorized, but…our theorizing…is often…in the play with language, since dynamic, rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.”
Though often judged and misunderstood by those outside the hip hop community, the use of coarse and abrasive creative language to avoid physical violence has long been important feature of African-American culture.
Henry Louis Gates identifies one example, which he dubbed signifyin’ —a form of verbal affront distinguished by the use of an indirect sub-textual delivery through double-entendre and metaphor. Signifyin’ is further characterized by its use of humor, irony, rhythmic fluidity, subtly didactic imagery and wordplay to introduce the semantically or logically unexpected.
In keeping with the Du Boisian concept of second sight, signifyin’ can be used in two basic ways: it can be directed at a fellow minority who understands its implications, or it can be used more subversively to target a member of the dominant class so that the minority group understands the insult, while the receiver remains ignorant. Hip hop similarly employs these techniques of subversive poetry, which requires artists to constantly coin new words and idioms so they never lose their poignancy.
Hip Hop Is Born
In the mid 1970s, a time of marked economic downturn, there was very little funding for musical education in inner-city school districts. As disco clubs also began to decline, due in part to their negative association with gang violence, there was a glaring absence of musical opportunity for young African-Americans. The youth of Brooklyn, New York began to fill this artistic void with an emerging outdoor block party scene. They would plug in to light posts outside to play recorded music and dance.
As it became evident that the dancing crowds loved the highly syncopated drum breaks of funk records more than the rest of the music, DJs began the practice of looping these drum breaks. With two turntables, a DJ could either use two copies of the same record to loop a break as long as was desired, or he could superimpose two records into one sound.
The techniques of these early DJs effectively transformed them from mere consumers of recorded music into creative producers in their own right.
Thus, from its inception, hip hop has been a community-centered movement devoted to liberating and empowering marginalized and disenfranchised young people and to give a voice to the voiceless.
Hip Hop’s Poetics
There are several ways in which the poetic conventions of hip hop create and strengthen bonds of community and identity among its marginalized progenitors. Most immediate is an MC’s “flow”—the rhythmic delivery of rhyming lyrics. Flow is an admixture of originality (without which an MC would be dismissed) and stylistic convention (without which an MC would fail to identify with an established listening community). In the hip hop community, for example, the rhythmic style of flow by itself can inform listeners of its historical period and geographical origin. Since identity is an immensely important aspect of hip hop music, locality must be explicitly manifested in an MC’s style.
The emphasis on identity construction in particular local communities is thus underscored by the fact that sound characteristics that may be authentic and accepted in one city may be considered disingenuous or unpleasant in another.
Community representation thus occurs at a purely aesthetic level, as mediated by cultural interpretation, in addition to what the MC alludes to in the lyrics of a song. Such emphasis on cultural authenticity, or realness in hip-hop is unprecedented in other forms of popular music; not because other popular musics are inauthentic, but because authenticity is less critical to the creation and reception of the music.
This is evidenced by the fact that, from the perspective of hip hop artists and listeners, there
appears to be more poetic/stylistic variation along regional lines than any other means of classification.
Another aspect of hip hop poetics and construction is “sampling.” It is simultaneously one of the most important and controversial elements of hip hop. One of its functions, and precisely the reason for this controversy, is to contest conventional capitalist notions of property and proper citation.
It is the use of samples that gives hip hop music its unique dynamism, by allowing contrasting, and often quite disparate sounds to converge in a musical dialectic. These sounds are brought into dialogue and archived within a hip hop composition, so that the historicity of the sampled sound is both contrasted against and brought into a contemporary context, calling into question conventional concepts of authorship, creativity, and originality.
The intersection of the aesthetic and economic implications of sampling have problematically led many to dismiss it as a means of recycling old material. This conclusion, however, ignores the role sampling has of disseminating material to a new audience, as well as the heightened semantic poignancy achieved by using literal sounds in addition to mere allusion or reference. As rapper Chuck D describes it:
Our music is filled with bits of information from the real world, a world that is rarely exposed. Our songs are almost like headline news. We bring things to the table of discussion that are not usually discussed, or at least not from our [urban African American] perspective.
Evoking a sense of realness, and giving a voice to an often neglected and marginalized life experience is central to hip hop; sampling as such is a highly useful means of bringing pieces of reality into the music.
Part II: Hip Hop Theology
This emphatic insistence on realness and authenticity, when manifested as a window into the violent and unjust conditions of inner-city life, has led to its unique admixture of the sacred and profane and its inclusion of imagery that strikes the dominant culture as offensive, grotesque, and perverse. Yet, as Daniel White Hodge demonstrates in his own hip hop theology, the Bible itself bears witness to a history of God engaging, embracing, and working through profane contexts in order to love and liberate the marginalized.
Consistently, the biblical injunction is for us to redirect our disgust and righteous indignation from “sinners” to the conditions which lead to their sinfulness. Hip hop theology, then, becomes a way for us to recover the profanity and hostility of our scriptural tradition which boldly calls the circumstances of injustice into question, and reintroduces us to the Jesus who embraced and uplifted prostitutes, drunks, diseased people and tax-collectors and rebuked those who ignored and disdained these profane people. It will indeed be a vulgar theology, because, as the etymology of that word indicates, it is a theology of and for the common people. In this sense, it is precisely the theologies which are not vulgar that are perversions of the gospel. Hip hop theology seeks to offer a valid alternative to the problem in contemporary American Christianity that, as Hodge puts it, “We continue to want a G-rated savior in an NC-17 world.”
Since Hodge has already profoundly articulated a theology of the profane, in which biblical exegesis is brought into conversation with the hip hop cultural context, I will attempt to cover new territory and explore hip hop as a prophetic-poetic theological type. This will take on three important assertions of hip hop theology: announcing that God identifies with the oppressed, marginalized and downtrodden, denouncing the hypocrisy of dominant Christian theology and practice, and denouncing the injustice and lack of freedom in this “land of the free.”
Rap as Prophecy
As Walter Brueggeman thoroughly demonstrates in Out of Babylon, the struggle of the poetic-prophetic tradition primarily concerned community and identity; the poetic idiom in which the prophets uttered God’s word anew was a way of preserving their local community’s identity in the midst of the challenges posed by living under the oppression and powerful influences of exile in the empire. He relates this preserving poetic capacity of the Hebrew people in Babylon to the contemporary need to recovery this capacity to maintain allegiance to Christ in the midst of the demands to pledge allegiance to the American “empire.” He argues, “The task is not simply to reiterate old poetry, but to learn from its cadences what now needs to be uttered. Both the distorted chosen people and the imperious empire run roughshod over such utterance.”
Thus, the poetic-prophetic tradition Brueggeman describes is intimately connected with each of the three key aspects of hip hop theology. Furthermore, the prophets, like rappers, were “uncredentialed utterers with no social standing,” whose authority thus came exclusively from “imaginative, playful utterance…facts on the ground connected to human bodily reality, and the claim to be connected enough to speak the truth of YHWH.”
Though hated and killed by their contemporaries, these poets are vindicated by God for their boldness and courage to speak truth where and when it was desperately needed (cf. Lk. 6:22-3). In hip hop theology, as in the biblical prophetic tradition, this poetry is not merely an aesthetic convention, literary art form, or flight of imaginative fancy. On the contrary, the very articulation of the poetic imagination is liberating, both in speaking and in hearing. Over against the dominant picture of reality which reinforces the injustice of the status quo, “It imagines otherwise; it invites its listeners to walk boldly into the world it creates. It authorizes courage, summons defiance and lines out resistance, all in the interest of legitimating the compelling force of the local tradition.”
This imagination and liberation, however, can only be available to those who maintain an authentic identity rooted in the local community; it is lost on those who have “sold out” to the prevailing imperial reality and ideology.
Similarly, in hip hop music, legitimacy and authenticity can only be maintained by “representing” (sometimes abbreviated “reppin’”) and staying true to the ‘hood from whence you came. This is why one of the most serious charges that one rapper can lay on another is that of being “fake,” when one’s ‘hood identity is overcome and lost through the preoccupation with one’s own wealth and success. The “commercial” rappers who parade on MTV and BET with expensive cars, jewelry, mansions, and women are often accused of leaving and forgetting the downtrodden ghetto communities they were raised in and for exploiting their previous experiences for personal profit. A few lines from the opening verse of Common’s song “Chi-City” suffice to illustrate this trend:
Too many rape the culture
Leave rappers with careers and they faith over
It’s a war goin’ on, you can’t fake bein’ a soldier
In the basement, listening to tapes of Ultra-Magnetic,
to the fact the messiah is black
I’ll turn the TV down, we can take it higher than that
I wonder if these whack niggaz realize they whack
And they the reason that my people say they tired of rap
Represent
The main question of God in hip hop theology concerns who God “represents.” Hip hoppers have not found a place in the church, because they do not hear about a God who loves them and identifies with their struggles there. What they need to hear, as the rapper Nas says in his song “God Love Us,” is that, “God love[s] us hood niggaz/Cause next to Jesus on the cross was the crook niggaz…Cause he be with us in the prisons/And he takes the time to listen.”
Nas echoes the familiar strain of liberation theology with the final words of the song, “Our lives are the worst, on top of that, we broke/That’s the main reason why God love us the most.” The clearest example of who God represents in hip hop theology, however, comes out in the spoken word poet Malik Yusef’s song, “I Spit.” To “spit” means to rap, or to prophecy poetically, but it also conveys the image of speaking out with so much vulgarity, vigor, and passion that spit issues forth from the mouth. The whole song is thus a passionate manifesto of solidarity, and a declaration of the specific local community who has access to the poetic-prophetic imagination:
I spit for the benefit of those who was told they was never ever gonna be shit
I spit for all those that wish to God they could just ball legit
I spit for every little ghetto boy and ghetto girl that have to beg, cry, fight and pray for each and every thing he or she get…
I spit for those that can’t speak without cursin’,
puttin’ body piercin’s and tattoos on they person,
who wanna talk to you, but them things do all the conversin’…
I spit for babies born as “pimps” and “soldiers”,
little black kids with no money, but big-ass chips on they shoulders,
I spit for those at fed joints fightin’ time,
and that’s the reason I’m writin’ rhymes
and recitin’ lime-green nouns and verbs
and slangin’/slingin’ that shit like pounds of herb just to elevate you
…
so outa all the gods claimin’ to be God, Yusef is the closest;
I spit the most lovely to the most ugly, the most beautiful to the most atrocious…
Life’s a gamble—we just roll the dice,
prayin’ that we don’t blow the heist
and if we do, let us go to Christ
and come back to raise our seeds as poltergeists
Here we get the clear picture that solidarity with the marginalized and voiceless is very important for hip hop theology. Hip hop identifies with the Jesus who cared less about his own reputation than about loving and embracing sinners and Samaritans—who were, as Hodge puts it, “the ‘niggas’ of Jesus’ day.”
Like the Hebrew prophets, the hip hop community uses poetry to create bonds of solidarity and to partake of what Brueggemann terms “emancipitory imagination.” Solidarity is a ministry of presence that loves and affirms the other as he or she is and which humbly listens to others in their own terms. Hip hop can be a tremendous vehicle for this ministry of solidarity which fights the individualistic tendencies of our culture by building community. As rapper Lupe Fiasco says, “You see the tears of fire run out my cryin’ songs/Now the world’s shoulders is what we cryin’ on…‘Cause it’s never cyclops; it’s never I alone/I’m tellin’ you story wherever I perform.”
The laments and cries that once fell upon deaf ears now have a global audience, thanks to hip hop. The challenge for rappers like Lupe Fiasco is to continue to represent these folks by “keepin’ it real” and telling their stories.
Denouncing Religious Hypocrisy
One of the major reasons that the church has had difficulty accepting hip hop has been the perception that rappers are irreverent, sacrilegious and even blasphemous. Even in African-American churches, hip hop is often seen as something to convert out of, rather than something to dialogue with.
Many Christians simply do not want to encounter the deeper messages of hip hop music, and perhaps rightly so; at the core, they will likely find a critical denunciation of their own tightly held theology and ideology. Hip hop is vociferously critical of the “white Jesus” of American Christianity and the images of Jesus as an authoritarian figure, a judgmental moralist, and a timidly docile and unquestioningly obedient son—images that have been used either overtly or subliminally by the church to control and maintain the status quo.
While this domesticated Jesus imagery demands acceptance of an unacceptably unjust status quo, hip hoppers reject it in favor of a less tame and more hostile gospel—the gospel of the Jesus who is so enraged at what is going on that he violently throws over the tables of the moneylenders in the temple. Talib Kweli, as a matter of fact, takes up this theme in his song appropriately titled “Hostile Gospel.” The repeated chorus of the song sums up quite well:
This is the hostile gospel
I’m reaching through the fire (please deliver us)
I’m preaching to the choir (please deliver us)
Just keep it real with us, you scared to spill your blood
Your words rung hollow, we need someone to follow
In fact, Kweli’s entire Ear Drum album is wrought with this kind of prophetic address, clearly illustrating that the criterion for differentiating between the real, “hostile” gospel and the “hollow” one being preached in the churches is whether and to what degree solidarity is established with the marginalized people of the ghetto. Thus, in another song, he says:
I’m not a judge, but I’m handing out sentences
To political prisoners, regular inmates with no visitors
Niggas in the streets outside to reach up for ministers
Not those that say they spiritual but actual parishioners—rap listeners
Kweli’s words here are reminiscent of those of Jesus Matthew 25, where he chastises those who call him “Lord” but fail to love and serve his people. Far from being irreverent or blasphemous, the prophetic denunciation of Christian hypocrisy in hip hop is akin to Christ’s own words, “Woe to you…hypocrites!” in Matthew 23.
Kweli’s song “Give ‘Em Hell” summarizes the denunciation of religious hypocrisy far more poignantly than anything I could offer:
Every Sunday dressin’ up, catchin’ gossip at its worst
Couldn’t see the difference in the Baptist and the Catholic Church…
If we all God’s children then what’s the word of the reverend worth?
Taught early that faith is blind, like justice when you facin’ [jail] time
If we all made in God’s image, then that means His faces is mine
Wait, or is that blasphemy? It’s logical, it has to be—
If I don’t look like my father, then the way I live is bastardly
Naturally, that’s confusin’ to a young’n tryin’ to follow Christ,
Taught that if you don’t know Jesus then you lead a hollow life,
Never question the fact that Jesus was Jewish, not a Christian
Or that Christianity was law according to politicians…
They say Hell is underground and Heaven is in the sky
And they say that’s where you go when you die, but how they know?
We know that what we reap we sow
But we forget how low we can go
You think it’s bad here on earth but if we can’t get to heaven it’s hell…
So it all sound the same to me
That’s why when they say one [religion] is right and the other’s wrong
It just sound like game
to me
It’s like God skipped past the church and came to me
No, that ain’t vane to me; it’s just a particular way that I came to see…
The poem’s divine ‘cause it coincide with the growin’ tide
Of those who lookin’ for God, knowin’ to go inside
Livin’ in mass confusion, lookin’ for absolution…produce the last solution
Based on an interpretation of what the words were sayin’
Tryin’ to get to God but ended up doin’ the work of Satan,
Religion create[s] division: make the Muslim hate the Christian,
Make the Christian hate the Jew,
Make the rules of faith that you conditioned to and gotta follow
Or God forbid, you go to Hell,
But if you ever walked through any ghetto, then you know it well…
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,”
Just because the Lord is my shepherd don’t mean I gotta be no sheep
You feel me?
More blood is spilled over religion than anything in world history
We sayin’ the same thing
Kweli’s narrative is interwoven with numerous scriptural idioms, which he turns inside out into a critique of the vanity of contemporary religiosity. There is no place for a holier-than-thou, judgmental theology or for fire and brimstone condemnations in the ghetto Kweli comes from; it is hard to instill a ‘holy fear’ of going to Hell in a group of people who already live there and “know it well.” Thus, Kweli and those whom he represents, since they already live in Hell on earth, look for their liberation in a Heaven that is also on earth.
Denouncing Empire and Injustice
Perhaps the most central and prevalent prophetic mode of hip hop concerns the denunciation of the social and political structures of oppression. Having come from the ghettos and inner-cities of this nation, hip hoppers are well aware that American imperial ideology is rooted in lies and half-truths. The “American dream” and the promise of economic prosperity have never been a reality for the ghetto. In fact, since the 1980s, economic inequality has dramatically increased, as the wealthiest Americans continue to be the profiteers of the wars and economic crises that plague the rest of the nation. This the background out of which Lupe Fiasco says:
Your child’s future was the first to go with budget cuts
If you think that hurts then wait, here comes the upper cut
The school was garbage in the first place, that’s on the up and up
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper crust
You get it then the move you so you never keepin’ up enough…
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist
Gaza Strip was gettin’ bombed, Obama didn’t say shit
That’s why I ain’t vote for him, next one neither
I’m a part of the problem, my problem is I’m peaceful
And I believe in the people
On the same album Lupe Fiasco expounds on his critique of the American media—both its empty messages and propagandistic tendencies in a song called “State Run Radio.” In his view, the corporate interests that control American media are hardly different from the government-controlled media of oppressive regimes. Though the title alone is perhaps indicting enough, he elaborates:
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special message ‘bout the forecast:
The future’s cloudy and it’s rainin’ on the poor class
The roads to peace are closed and the traffic’s on the war paths
Love is ballin’ on a budget,
the military’s stressin’
‘We need more cash to keep fighting for your gas’
Keep us in our ‘hoods and hope we never explore past
‘Stay inside of your half, believe the lies you learn in your class,
That there’s no treasure in/and your/you’re
trash,
And the ceiling has the same feeling the floor has,
And that’s where you should stay,’
This is what they play…over again, and over again, and over again…
The thrust of his argument is thus that there are no uplifting messages for the downtrodden people of the ghetto in mainstream American media, in spite of the fact that their destitution is the result of a process that profits the few and impoverishes the many. Similarly, Brueggemann suggests that the best way to understand the liturgy of prophetic poetry is to contrast it to the traits that predominate in the empire’s own liturgy, which is “all doxology, all praise, all celebration, all self-affirmation, and all victorious confidence.”
Such propagandistic self-delusion is loudly trumpeted in an attempt to drown out the dissenting voices. In Fox News tells us they are “fair and balanced” enough times, while we actually believe them? Nas thinks not, and explicitly seeks to call Fox and other American mainstream media out in his song “Sly Fox.” Disgusted with the double-standards and hypocrisy of the media, Nas says, “I watch CBS and I see BS…make a nigga wanna invest in PBS.” In the same song, he is especially critical of the way in which the American media demonizes hip hop and African-American culture by labeling it gratuitously violent:
They say I’m all about murder murder and kill kill,
But what about Grindhouse and Kill Bill?
What about Cheney and Halliburton—the back door deals on oil fields?
How is Nas the most violent person?
In his song “America,” Nas further elaborates on the hypocritical double standards:
The hypocrisy is all I can see
White cop acquitted for murder, black cop cop a plea
That type of shit make me stop and think we in chronic need
Of a second look at the law books, and the whole race dichotomy—
Too many rappers, athletes, and actors,
But not enough niggas in NASA
Who give you the latest dances, trends, and fashions?
But when it comes to residuals, they look past us;
Woven into the fabric, they can’t stand us
Even in white tee’s, blue jeans, and red bandanas…
Assassinations [=] diplomatic relations,
Killed indigenous people [to] build a new nation [with] involuntary labor…
Ain’t we in the free world?
Barbarity…how far [are] we really from third world savagery?
When the empire fall, imagine how crazy that’ll be,
America…this is not what you think it is
Conclusion
Only recently are theologians and academics of the mainstream beginning to catch on to the prophetic validity of such criticisms that have prevailed in hip hop culture for over two decades. Nas’s closing questions in “America” give us ample food for thought. While it is easy to sell our allegiance to the empire in order to gain wealth, status, and notoriety, the historical and the prophetic witnesses tell us that all empires crumble. To what will we hold fast? Where does our true loyalty lie? With whom shall we identify? These are the questions that hip hop theology will not allow us to evade. We can no longer retreat to a “safe” gospel and the domesticated Christ who protects the interests of the privileged, but then again, we never really could. After all, it was Christ himself, and not any contemporary rapper, who first warned us that we would have to take up our crosses, and lay down our lives. Whether or not hip hop constitutes the way of speaking God’s word that will change and renew the world, as Bonhoeffer hoped for, it cannot be disputed that it is a “quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’ language, so that people will be alarmed and yet overcome by its power.”
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Discography
Common. Be. Geffen, 2005.
Lupe Fiasco. LASERS. Atlantic, 2011.
Nas. Nastradamus. Sony, 1999.
_____ Untitled. Def Jam, 2008.
Yusef, Malik. The Great Chicago Fire: A Cold Day in Hell. Ark 21, 2003.
Kweli, Talib. Ear Drum. Warner Brothers, 2007.
Heretical Rhetoric 