This piece was originally featured in Cogitare’s Spring 2023 Print Edition.
Within the past couple of decades, a new form of music has emerged, attracting attention from artists and audiences alike: rap. Errol A Henderson explains the significance of this genre of music, writing that rap “has become a conduit for African American culture to a greater extent than even jazz.” Henderson also points out the “nuances and jagged edges of the collective Black experience” that are conveyed by both jazz and hip-hop but asserts that the lyrical emphasis of the latter is better able to “energize the national ethos” in ways that jazz could not. Thus hip-hop, especially its lyrically dense subform rap, is intent on the expression of African American culture, the narrative of its victories and losses, and the highlights of its heroes and villains alike.
I recently noticed a growing interest in rap music amongst my friends and contemporaries. Although I never took an interest in it, rap seemed to be the music that everyone listened to, Christian and non-Christian alike. One reason for my lack of interest, and soon-to-be aversion, was rap’s tendency towards sexually explicit and profane lyrics. Most of my friends, however, overlooked these for various reasons that I never found entirely compelling or satisfying.
Roger Scruton, a 21st-century philosopher, wrote that “Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter; and we live that way because we have lost the habit of sacrifice and are striving always to avoid it.” This nihilistic disposition towards beauty that Scruton identifies in the whole of society can be particularly found within the culture created by hip-hop. Jeanita W. Richardson—reflecting on the lyrics of Tupac Shakur (a noteworthy rapper) and the condition of African American society—asserts that
deprivation and unequal opportunity nurtured the hopelessness, distrust, and early death depicted in Tupac Shakur’s lyrics. A sense of powerlessness to change conditions grounded in complex social, political, and economic issues has led artists to seek ways to express their discontent. Rap music has become a cathartic outlet.
Perhaps this is because our culture has lost all desire and inclination towards sacrifice. There is no longer, in our minds, anything worth sacrificing anything for. It is an every-man-for-himself anarchical power struggle within which sacrifice is vanity and survival is the only realistic pursuit.
Modernity’s desecration of beauty denies the sacred nature of beauty by denying the existence of the sacred – that which might provide any sort of hope in a world of distress. Desecration is the move from doubt to rejection of the supernatural. It is the abandonment of all hope. It appears that this nihilistic and despondent sentiment is ubiquitous in rap music and thus in the culture it represents. Christians should note, however, the existence of other subgenres of rap that do not share these negative characteristics and do promote good values. Good, beneficial rap music certainly does exist. My contention here is that this type of “good” rap is not as prominent and that the majority of mainstream rap shares the negative tendencies outlined above.
What is greatly distressing about mainstream rap, however, is not just the depressing lyrics, but the cultural and lyrical move from desecration to profanation. Scruton explains this phenomenon by writing that
One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total profanation: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing of the world, and not just a thing in the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it.
Profanation reveals such deep trauma that the individual is intent on destroying the sanctity of something by objectifying it, lest one take interest and develop a love that might be lost. Profanation is the cynic’s response to a jealous love that has been betrayed. The cynic is too afraid of loving once more.
It appears that African American culture, in all of its distress, has produced in rap a deeply cathartic genre of music that seeks nothing more than the destruction of all that is sacred and beautiful.
The sexualized, violent lyrics that have become associated with rap reveal this profanation. Similar to Marcel Duchamp’s infamous Fountain–a ceramic urinal signed “R. Mutt” – rap seems to embrace the unorthodox tastes of the avant-garde: breaking boundaries by ignoring them. Rap music has become symbolic of a culture that has lost hope and found superficial respite in catharsis that rejects God’s moral standards.
To those who may listen to rap–particularly “gangsta rap,” which includes sexually explicit and profane lyrics–the question is simple: what is the ultimate purpose of music? Traditionally, music has been for the purpose of identifying and pursuing hope in hopelessness. Rap, with all of its profanity (which is ultimately profaning the existence and name of God), provides no hope. Rather, it denies the possibility of hope and profanes its existence. Thus, as Christians, we should think twice before we listen to this specific type of music.
