Gospel and faith merge with rap, in song
CHICAGO — Chance the Rapper’s most significant new song doesn’t even appear on his acclaimed new mixtape, “Coloring Book.” On the jazzy, gospel-influenced outtake “Grown A- Kid,” left off the project due to difficulties with sample clearance, the Chicago MC affirms what he’d been hinting at for years: “Everybody can finally say it out loud/ My favorite rapper a Christian rapper.”
It may not have seemed like a big deal but there it was, out in the open, possibly the most overt declaration of Christian faith from a secular rapper since Kanye West’s seismic single “Jesus Walks.” Since that song’s release in 2004, hiphop and Christianity have been inching their way toward each other, though, until now, progress had been fitful: Christian influences have penetrated the music of secular hip-hop, typically as samples of gospel choirs, but “Coloring Book” celebrates Christianity in both its music and, perhaps more crucially, its message, in a more explicit way than anyone can remember.
Rappers have been publicly flirting with Christianity for years, from national acts like Kendrick Lamar and ASAP Rocky to local artists-turned-major-label signees Sir the Baptist and BJ the Chicago Kid, whose song “Church” (“She say she wanna drink, do drugs, and have sex tonight/ But I’ve got church in the mornin’”) includes a Chance feature, but “Coloring Book” is the trend’s high water mark. “It’s like there’s no rules anymore,” says BJ the Chicago Kid. “It’s like, if you love the music and it feels right, they don’t care if it says ‘God’ in it.”
Gospel influences have been evident in secular pop and soul music as long as those genres have existed; hip-hop, though partly rooted in black gospel, was in its early days more closely connected to the Nation of Islam. “Jesus Walks,” a hit single from West’s 2004 debut, “The College Dropout,” changed everything. A frank declaration of faith erected around a choir sample, the track “really broke down some walls,” says Chicago-based MC Mick Jenkins, who is featured on “Grown A- Kid.” “You could take it back to Ray Charles, that was really just gospel music, and he put it right into what he was doing. It can always be taken back to another place.”
Almost single-handedly, “Jesus Walks” made the intermingling of Christian themes and secular hip-hop acceptable. “It’s not corny to be Christian in rap right now, which has not been the case for most of the hip-hop tradition,” says Cray Allred, who writes about hiphop for the blog Christ and Pop Culture. “Typically, you could keep it at arm’s length. You could mention God, respect the church, or even give Him thanks at an awards show, but actually rapping about the Christian faith was pretty much an anomaly when Kanye first did it with ‘Jesus Walks.’ “
Older generations of rappers had avoided Christianity, for fear of seeming preachy. But to a generation of millennials too young to remember life before “Jesus Walks,” there’s no reason not to combine the two.
“Millennials aren’t afraid to talk about these things,” says rapper Bernard “Bun B” Freeman, a former member of the rap duo UGK who now lectures at Rice University (his class, Religion and Hip-Hop Culture, is available online for free). “There’s a lot of great artists that aren’t scared to share all of themselves, and if religion is a part of their life, they’re sharing that as well.”
For millennials raised in the church and weaned on rap, it feels natural to use the language of hip-hop to grapple with thorny personal and spiritual issues. “From personal experience, being a ‘90s kid who lived on the South Side of Chicago, whose mom and grandma took him to church a lot, I would think that would come out some way, in what you create,” says Peter CottonTale, a member of the Social Experiment, the artistic collective to which Chance also belongs, and a key figure in the production of “Coloring Book.” “In the story of (Chance’s) career, he’s always rapped about nostalgic things, or things that are currently happening to him, so I would
guess his spirituality would come to the surface.”
Churchgoers are just as likely to be hip-hop heads as anybody else, figures BJ the Chicago Kid. “Singers that don’t come from church, they want to be from church, or study church singers,” he says. “And if a preacher takes his wife on a date, he’s not going to be playing choir music, I think he might play Luther Vandross, let’s be honest. It’s not as stunning as people would think.”
Some denominations officially reject all hip-hop as worldly and sinful, while more liberal denominations still chafe at artists like Chance or West, who curse profligately (“You’ve gotta say what a preacher would say when he’s at home,” advises Sir the Baptist, a pastor’s kid), and, at least in Kanye’s case, generally lead lives that can be described as flagrantly secular. “It’s more a case of hiphop absorbing Christian content than Christianity conquesting the mountain of hip-hop,” observes Allred.
Not all hip-hop artists absorb Christian content in the same way. West’s recent album “The Life of Pablo” was described by the rapper as “a gospel album with a whole lot of cursing on it.” But “adding a choir to a song doesn’t necessarily make it a religious song,” points out Freeman, and “TLOP” can occasionally seem superficial, especially in comparison to the spiritual deep dive of “Coloring Book.” (In a fortuitous bit of product placement, Chance appeared on its splashy opening track, “Ultralight Beam,” alongside gospel stars Kirk Franklin and Kelly Price.)
Released a few months after “Pablo,” “Coloring Book” is a secular album full of religious songs, or vice versa. A joyous, gospel-choir-heavy throwback to a time that never actually was, it’s a prime example of what BJ the Chicago Kid calls “putting the cross on the street pole.”
Even after “Jesus Walks,” a lot of stars had to come into perfect alignment for it to exist: Chance spent years building a reputation for sterling, increasingly-more-devotional mixtapes. Drake, who prizes genteel introspection over songs about popping bottles, and Kendrick Lamar, who approaches theological issues with great seriousness, became famous. In Chicago, particularly fertile ground for rappers experimenting with Christian music and themes, the abidingly dark drill movement came and went, leaving an appetite for music with more uplift.
Saba, a Chicago rapper who appears on the “Coloring Book” track “Angels,” also credits “post-mainstream” artists, who value soul-searching over commercial posturing, for the project’s success. “Coloring Book,” which debuted in Billboard’s Top 10, was a streaming-only release. “When you’re not focusing on trying to make a hit record, you’re a lot more subject to being vulnerable, and bring real life aspects into your music,” says Saba.
According to CottonTale, no one seemed nervous that the mixtape’s undisguised religious messages would turn off mainstream audiences. “I don’t think there was a sense of fear,” he says. “I always thought, like, my grandma would love it.”
Despite the key phrase in “Grown A- Kid,” many involved stress the difference between being a Christian who raps and a “Christian rapper.” The implication: No one wants to be a Christian rapper. In the hip-hop hierarchy, to be a Christian rapper is to be consigned to perpetual uncoolness, to otherness. “That’s the feeling you get, like it’s high school,” says Lecrae, one of the most popular Christian hip-hop artists of all time. “The fans see genres as passe. There’s still boxes, (created) by the gatekeepers, and they need to figure out what category you belong in.”
But fans can be gatekeepers, too, and while Chance can refer to Jesus as much as he likes, Lecrae, although he doesn’t say as much, is more hemmed in. He must refer to Jesus enough to satisfy his Christian listeners, but not so much that he alienates secular audiences. His newest mixtape, “Church Clothes 3,” which contains love songs and songs about social issues, is one of his more secularminded. Newcomers “downloaded it and they loved it,” says Lecrae. “They said, ‘I think this guy’s a Christian, but it’s all good.’”