A Skeptic’s Journey Through Hip-Hop

Hip-hop has a really bad name in the circles where I grew up. When my chapel teacher wanted to exemplify everything “bad” with American culture, she would point to Kanye West. But there is so much more happening under the surface here, even with Kanye. Hip-hop is the most influential genre at this moment in time; it eclipsed ‘rock’ as the most consumed sphere of music earlier this year. Beneath the vulgarity and baseness apparent in a lot of hip-hop are ideas and themes that everyone should try to understand.
A year ago, I wouldn’t touch hip-hop at all. The constant profanity was really jarring, and in the Christian school I attended, I resentfully looked at my peers blasting this stuff like they were flaming hypocrites. Of course, I was too, but that wasn’t the point.
I made new friends about a year ago who would just rag on me for not being familiar with hip-hop on any level. They said it was absurd that I hadn’t heard a single hip-hop album when hip-hop is at the top of the world.
I don’t think they wanted me to love hip-hop so much as to understand it, to really dig in to see where so many people are coming from. So I listened, and it was very jarring for a long time. But eventually, I began to see recurring themes of redemption and hope, and of pain and suffering in deeply ragged places.
There is a tension in hip-hop between the thoughtful and the really thoughtless. There’s “gangsta rap,” which really does glorify violent urban street culture. I once thought, and I think many people still think this, that this kind of rap is wholly representative of what hip-hop has to offer. But some of hip-hop’s most powerful messages stand tall not in spite of these themes, but because of them.
Kendrick Lamar’s “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” is a 12-minute lamentation of the random violence and dehumanization that comes with a life on the street. As he sees his brothers and sisters shrivel at the tip of a bullet, fall into prostitution, and become chained to gangs, Kendrick shrinks inwards in despair.
He was once the kid who was living a ‘street life,’ but a redeeming twist comes in the form of Christ after Kendrick looks back at the life he has lived so far. The album’s climax lets the listener eavesdrop on a woman leading these young men through the sinner’s prayer. They were “dying of thirst,” but she shows them something Kendrick sees as a redemption from a twisted life.
Songs like this and many others have turned my opinion around about the entire genre. So much of hip-hop is a lamentation of things that are afoul in black communities; to say hip-hop only glorifies violence and is ‘everything wrong with American culture,’ as my chapel teacher once did, is a gross oversimplification of a complex cultural art form.
I didn’t grow up on the street, but I can empathize with Kendrick when he talks about how his own vices are his “next grave.”
A lot of hip-hop is popular because it sticks to people at a basic level. Thundering beats, sexy lyrics, vibrant personalities: these are staples in hip-hop.
I would be lying if some of that doesn’t appeal to me too. But this cannot define a genre. Hip-hop is a cultural zeitgeist for a reason, and part of it I think is because young people more than anyone before them do not write people off because of their vices. In much of hip-hop there is the vulgar and baseness, but also the holy and redeemed and upright.
I guess I just didn’t get it, at all. Hip-hop felt so fundamentally foreign that I didn’t even have a place to put it in my brain. I had zero context for the vulgarity, the street terminology, the weird names, any of it. To an extent, I don’t fully ‘get it.’
I still view a lot of the messages in much of popular hip-hop as dangerous and harmful. But don’t do what I did and write hip hop off completely. It has something to offer, even if that something isn’t for you.
Why shouldn’t we seek to really understand the things around us? When I ridiculed hip-hop, I was basically saying that I was better. But I’m not, and I urge everyone to give it and other things you might have written off a chance.