Rap and Religion

Rap and Religion PDF Author: Ebony A. Utley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This book provides an enlightening, representative account of how rappers talk about God in their lyrics—and why a sense of religion plays an intrinsic role within hip hop culture. Why is the battle between good and evil a recurring theme in rap lyrics? What role does the devil play in hip hop? What exactly does it mean when rappers wear a diamond-encrusted "Jesus" around their necks? Why do rappers acknowledge God during award shows and frequently include prayers in their albums? Rap and Religion: Understanding the Gangsta's God tackles a sensitive and controversial topic: the juxtaposition—and seeming hypocrisy—of references to God within hip hop culture and rap music. This book provides a focused examination of the intersection of God and religion with hip hop and rap music. Author Ebony A. Utley, PhD, references selected rap lyrics and videos that span three decades of mainstream hip hop culture in America, representing the East Coast, the West Coast, and the South in order to account for how and why rappers talk about God. Utley also describes the complex urban environments that birthed rap music and sources interviews, award acceptance speeches, magazine and website content, and liner notes to further explain how God became entrenched in hip hop.

Rap and Religion

Rap and Religion PDF Author: Ebony A. Utley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides an enlightening, representative account of how rappers talk about God in their lyrics—and why a sense of religion plays an intrinsic role within hip hop culture. Why is the battle between good and evil a recurring theme in rap lyrics? What role does the devil play in hip hop? What exactly does it mean when rappers wear a diamond-encrusted "Jesus" around their necks? Why do rappers acknowledge God during award shows and frequently include prayers in their albums? Rap and Religion: Understanding the Gangsta's God tackles a sensitive and controversial topic: the juxtaposition—and seeming hypocrisy—of references to God within hip hop culture and rap music. This book provides a focused examination of the intersection of God and religion with hip hop and rap music. Author Ebony A. Utley, PhD, references selected rap lyrics and videos that span three decades of mainstream hip hop culture in America, representing the East Coast, the West Coast, and the South in order to account for how and why rappers talk about God. Utley also describes the complex urban environments that birthed rap music and sources interviews, award acceptance speeches, magazine and website content, and liner notes to further explain how God became entrenched in hip hop.

Religion in Hip Hop

Religion in Hip Hop PDF Author: Monica R. Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472507223
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Now a global and transnational phenomenon, hip hop culture continues to affect and be affected by the institutional, cultural, religious, social, economic and political landscape of American society and beyond. Over the past two decades, numerous disciplines have taken up hip hop culture for its intellectual weight and contributions to the cultural life and self-understanding of the United States. More recently, the academic study of religion has given hip hop culture closer and more critical attention, yet this conversation is often limited to discussions of hip hop and traditional understandings of religion and a methodological hyper-focus on lyrical and textual analyses. Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the Terrain provides an important step in advancing and mapping this new field of Religion and Hip Hop Studies. The volume features 14 original contributions representative of this new terrain within three sections representing major thematic issues over the past two decades. The Preface is written by one of the most prolific and founding scholars of this area of study, Michael Eric Dyson, and the inclusion of and collaboration with Bernard 'Bun B' Freeman fosters a perspective internal to Hip Hop and encourages conversation between artists and academics.

The Hip Hop and Religion Reader

The Hip Hop and Religion Reader PDF Author: Monica R. Miller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780415741019
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first of its kind, The Hip Hop and Religion Reader brings together essays from leaders in the field, offering a single text useful for classrooms, scholars of religion and hip hop, and anyone interested in the many points of convergence between hip hop, religion, and how they are studied.

Muslim Cool

Muslim Cool PDF Author: Su'ad Abdul Khabeer
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479894508
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

Street Scriptures

Street Scriptures PDF Author: Alejandro Nava
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226819167
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
"The world of hip-hop is saturated with religion, but often this element is glossed over as secondary to hip-hop's other dimensions. In Street Scriptures, Alejandro Nava focuses our attention on this relationship in a fresh way, combining his profound love of hip-hop, his passion for racial and social justice, and his deep theological knowledge. The result is a journey through hip-hop's deep entanglement with the sacred. Street Scriptures examines the reasons behind the rise of a religious heartbeat in hip-hop, looking at the crosscurrents of the sacred and profane in rap, reggaeton, and Latinx hip-hop today. Ranging from Nas, Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Lauryn Hill, and Cardi B to St. Augustine and William James, Nava examines the ethical-political, aesthetic-spiritual, and prophetic in hip-hop, probing the pure sonic and aesthetic signatures of music, while also diving deep into the voices that invoke the spirit of protest"--

Noise and Spirit

Noise and Spirit PDF Author: Anthony B. Pinn
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814766994
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Rap music is often seen as a Black secular response to pressing issues of our time. Yet, like spirituals, the blues, and gospel music, rap has deep connections to African American religious traditions. Noise and Spirit explores the diverse religious dimensions of rap stemming from Islam (including the Nation of Islam and Five Percent Nation), Rastafarianism, and Humanism, as well as Christianity. The volume examines rap’s dialogue with religious traditions, from the ways in which Islamic rap music is used as a method of religious and political instruction to the uses of both the blues and Black women’s rap for considering the distinction between God and the Devil. The first section explores rap’s association with more easily recognizable religious traditions and communities such as Christianity and Islam. The next presents discussions of rap and important spiritual considerations, including on the topic of death. The final unit wrestles with ways to theologize about the relationship between the sacred and the profane in rap.

Representing Islam

Representing Islam PDF Author: Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253053056
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
How do Muslims who grew up after September 11 balance their love for hip-hop with their devotion to Islam? How do they live the piety and modesty called for by their faith while celebrating an art form defined, in part, by overt sexuality, violence, and profanity? In Representing Islam, Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir explores the tension between Islam and the global popularity of hip-hop, including attempts by the hip-hop ummah, or community, to draw from the struggles of African Americans in order to articulate the human rights abuses Muslims face. Nasir explores state management of hip-hop culture and how Muslim hip-hoppers are attempting to "Islamize" the genre's performance and jargon to bring the music more in line with religious requirements, which are perhaps even more fraught for female artists who struggle with who has the right to speak for Muslim women. Nasir also investigates the vibrant underground hip-hop culture that exists online. For fans living in conservative countries, social media offers an opportunity to explore and discuss hip-hop when more traditional avenues have been closed. Representing Islam considers the complex and multifaceted rise of hip-hop on a global stage and, in doing so, asks broader questions about how Islam is represented in this global community.

The Soul of Hip Hop

The Soul of Hip Hop PDF Author: Daniel White Hodge
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830861289
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
What is Hip Hop? Hip hop speaks in a voice that is sometimes gruff, sometimes enraged, sometimes despairing, sometimes hopeful. Hip hop is the voice of forgotten streets laying claim to the high life of rims and timbs and threads and bling. Hip hop speaks in the muddled language of would-be prophets--mocking the architects of the status quo and stumbling in the dark toward a blurred vision of a world made right. What is hip hop? It's a cultural movement with a traceable theological center. Daniel White Hodge follows the tracks of hip-hop theology and offers a path from its center to the cross, where Jesus speaks truth.

That's the Joint!

That's the Joint! PDF Author: Murray Forman
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415969192
Category : Hip-hop
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description
Spanning 25 years of serious writing on hip-hop by noted scholars and mainstream journalists, this comprehensive anthology includes observations and critiques on groundbreaking hip-hop recordings.

The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop

The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop PDF Author: Justin A. Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107037468
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This Companion covers the hip-hop elements, methods of studying hip-hop, and case studies from Nerdcore to Turkish-German and Japanese hip-hop.