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Abstract
Hip Hop scholarship has overlooked and separated emcees who publically identify themselves as Christians who exist to make God famous. This deficiency contributes to an inadequate understanding of Hip Hop and places Hip Hop in a dangerous position of alienating ostracized voices. This paper aims to draw attention to these shortcomings by analyzing Lecrae's contribution to Hip Hop. Influenced by his worldview, Lecrae leads a socially conscious movement and helps to bridge the "sacred" and "secular" gap. Lecrae redirects Hip Hop back to its roots. I will examine Lecrae's lyrics, websites, social media and interviews. Interviews of Lecrae will come from several mainstream Hip Hop websites and videos found on YouTube. The combination of all these areas of inquiry will present a holistic view of Lecrae. The goal of this paper is to provide one article about Christians in Hip Hop with the hopes of spurring more discussion around such a vast field of study.
Eh, they don't know about us, they don't, they don't know about us
They think we dum, dum diddy dum, dum
But they gon' know, they gon' know about us - Lecrae and Tedashii, "Dum
Dum"
Introduction
Out of the dust and ashes from apartment buildings burning in the streets of the Bronx, New York, among the disenfranchised Black and Hispanic youth rose Hip Hop. Hip Hop provided an identity and a voice to the voiceless; therefore, the exclusion of certain voices in contemporary Hip Hop is antithetical to the genre's foundation. Particularly, the voices of Christians in Hip Hop, whose focus is to make God famous, are rarely included in discussions by academic and Hip Hop communities. On September 4, 2012, Lecrae Moore released Gravity, his sixth studio album. Gravity debuted as the number one bestselling album on the overall iTunes chart and number three on the Billboards 200 chart. Despite the success of this album, the academic community has not given adequate attention to Lecrae. If Hip Hop scholarship does not pay attention to Lecrae and other Christians in Hip Hop then it will contribute to the very illegitimacy it fights against. American society has misunderstood, misrepresented and wrongfully accused Hip Hop. Hip Hop is notorious, not only in America, but around the world, for...