Religion in Rap Music

Hip hop music, also called hip-hop,rap music or hip-hop music, is a music genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted. It developed as part of hip hop culture, a subculture defined by four key stylistic elements: MCing/rapping DJing/scratching, break dancing and graffiti writing. Other elements include sampling (or synthesis), and beatboxing

While often used to refer to rapping, “hip hop” more properly denotes the practice of the entire subculture. The term hip hop music is sometimes used synonymously with the term rap music, though rapping is not a required component of hip hop music; the genre may also incorporate other elements of hip hop culture, including DJing and scratching, beatboxing and instrumental tracks. For hip hop culture in general and rap music in particular as important source for the study of religion and an important source of reflection on religion in America. Traditional notions of religious engagement lodged, for example, within the rhetoric and structures of black churches are called into question by the religious rhetoric and existential posture of artists who claim a relationship with the divine, but whose activities on the surface might suggest a lack of the ethical posture; one might assume such a commitment might entail. Connoted here is a paradigm shift that impacts cultural studies, religious studies and African American theological reflection in different ways, a conceptual alteration of African American theological reflection that promotes a turn towards a fuller arrangement of organic source material. Theology, then, moves away from apologetics for the supernatural, an affirmation of the self-understanding of parti...

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... conceptualisation of life. Yet where does one place hip hop culture within this conceptual framework? Does rap music really entail a complex religious posture or disposition? Put another way, how do we avoid the realisation that rap music borrows from the very structures and assumptions Miller seeks to challenge? Yes, the religious landscape projected within rap music is complex, bumpy and conceptually rough, but how much of the substance of this reality is ‘captured’ in our analysis? How much of the complexity and messiness of religion are ‘captured’ in a precise and vivid manner in the portrayals offered by rap artists? Does the rap artist present the material of religious life, or only a modified representation of that life? What is the ‘religious’, and how is it named?

Works Cited

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14755610902786361#.U00KPqRD9-A