ABSTRACT
When rap music and hip-hop culture first emerged from the South Bronx in the late 1970s, critics dismissed it as a superficial fad that would quickly fade and be relegated to the dustbin of history. Over the course of the past three decades, however, this kind of pejorative assessment has been proved wrong time and time again, as rap has consistently dominated the music industry and hip-hop sensibility has become part and parcel of mainstream American popular culture. A case in point is the enormous success of female rapper Lauryn Hill’s album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), which topped the charts at number one for weeks, sold several million copies, and won numerous Grammies. Or perhaps one might channel surf the television to find rap music and hip-hop styles in commercials for everything from McDonald’s hamburgers to Pringles potato chips to Mervyn’s department store. This is an extraordinary trajectory for an African-American musical subculture that began in what is arguably the most economically and culturally marginalized neighborhood of the country. What is even more remarkable about the success of rap and hip-hop is
that it still contains a powerful and distinctive African-American religious world view that runs directly counter to the religious world view of the mainstream culture it has come to permeate. Faced with the oppressive historical circumstances of African Americans’ marginalized status, this religious world view refuses to take refuge in the hope of otherworldly salvation but, rather, tells the truth about the harsh reality of this oppression and transforms the impulse toward anger and violence into empowerment, creative expression, spirituality, and positive change. Here I will look at the contradictory dynamics of hip-hop’s rise to mainstream success-its historical and cultural development, its West African and African-American roots, and its spiritual dimensions-and explore the important implications for the larger landscape of religion in American popular culture.
