Rap music, culture and religion: Concluding thoughts

Abstract

In this brief essay, I argue that the type of attention to rap music suggested by the various contributors to this special issue requires a rethinking of the shape, content, and proper vocabulary and grammar for marking and describing the religious. That is to say, when critically examined for their take on religion and religious experience, rap artists force theoretical complexity and methodological comfort with tension. They express this desire for a fuller sense of meaning through the felt reality of their bodies, as they take up time and space and force their recognition. It is through this forced recognition – involving a certain hold on the world – that they express the renewal of self that marks religious life. Rap music as a terrain for the articulation of religious struggle and redemption forces a re-examination of the assumed cartography of religious engagement.

Keywords:

• religious experience
• theological reflection
• Christian centrism
• popular culture

Notes

1. Some of my commentary and insights in this essay draw from arguments I have developed over the course of a variety of publications and presentations: Creating ourselves by Pinn and Valentin (forthcoming); Pinn and Easterling (forthcoming) ‘Followers of black Jesus on alert’; Floyd-Thomas and Harris ‘Hip hop, don't stop… I mean’; Partridge and Christianson 2008, ‘When demons come calling’; Lynch 2007, ‘On a mission from God’.

2. (New York: Dial Press, 2000); (New York: Modern Library, 1995).

3. See Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology was published by Duke University Press. We have in mind, for example, Spencer, ‘The emergency of black and the emergence of rap’; ‘Sacred music of the secular city’.

4. In addition to Kirk-Duggan's work on the spirituals, her attention to rap music is present in publications such as Pinn and Valentin Creating ourselves.

5. For example, see Dyson 2001, Between God and gangsta rap; Holler if you hear me . It seems to me Dyson's scholarship allows popular culture to ‘speak’, to shape the terms and tone of discourse. In this way, he does not fear popular culture for how it might challenge what we have always thought and believed. In short, he seems to value transformation over tradition.

6. I am grateful to Monica Miller and Dr Mary Keller for their insightful comments and questions related to earlier versions of this essay.

7. See Tillich 1954, Love, power, justice; Irwin 1991, E.R.O.S. toward the world.

8. I develop this argument in greater detail in Pinn Terror and triumph.