I love hip-hop!
I love hip-hop music. I love hip-hop fashion. I love hip-hop culture. A multi-racial, multi-lingual, international phenomenon, hip-hop is arguably the most significant cultural and artistic movement of the last forty years.
I am a proud member of the hip-hop generation, defined by Bakari Kitwana, former editor of The Source Magazine, as the population of black youth born between 1965 and 1984 (although a redefinition is likely merited to reflect hip-hop's aforementioned diversity and longevity). When I first heard the poignant inquiry of the hip-hop coming-of-age love story Brown Sugar (2002), "So, when did you fall in love with hip-hop?" it arrested my consciousness and caused me to reflect upon the origins of my own love affair with hip-hop. (For the record, I fell in love with hip-hop when I heard A Tribe Called Quest's classic album Midnight Marauders (1993). It literally changed my life!)
I am also a part of an ever-widening group of young, seminary-trained clergy who closely identify with hip-hop culture: pastors, ministers and even professors of religion for whom hip-hop was never a passing fade but an ever-present reality. It is my two decades-old love of hip-hop that presently fuels my doctoral study on the contextualization of hip-hop spirituality for the church.
But at the risk of sounding out-of-touch, outdated and even uncool, a significant risk in the realm of hip-hop, I am increasingly troubled by certain contemporary moves in hip-hop culture that embrace the occult and make a mockery of faith. I understand freedom of speech and expression. I even subscribe to the belief that what others might perceive as vulgarities can actually be an authentic witness to the truth. But I find recent attacks in hip-hop against religious faith and God to be, well, wack!
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