What Do You Think of Your Influence On Christian Hip Hop?
00:00:00.000 | Michael in St. Paul, Minnesota asks, "Pastor John, are you aware of the influence your
00:00:08.760 | ministry has had and is having on the Christian hip-hop scene?"
00:00:14.680 | I have seen some of my words show up.
00:00:21.720 | I doubt that I could say I'm aware in any kind of formal way of any extent of influence,
00:00:27.720 | I don't really know, but what I've seen, I saw, for example, in Tadashi's "Make War,"
00:00:36.520 | I knew that was my voice I just heard, and yes, that was my phrase, and then I watched
00:00:41.800 | what he did with it and I thought, "Whoa, that's pretty powerful."
00:00:45.560 | I know that Lecrae's "Don't Waste Your Life" video was related to the book "Don't Waste
00:00:51.840 | Your Life," and I'm honored by that.
00:00:55.320 | I've listened to those and many, many others.
00:00:58.800 | So here's just a few thoughts, mostly positive and a couple of cautions.
00:01:04.920 | I just rejoice that so much truth in our day from evangelical guys, I guess it's mainly
00:01:13.720 | guys, I don't know if I've ever heard a woman do rap, are pouring so much truth into this
00:01:20.800 | form.
00:01:21.800 | I just love it when glorious truth gets poured into different cultural forms, because I care
00:01:29.840 | about the truth way more than I care about the forms, even though I know we can't be
00:01:35.540 | indifferent to forms.
00:01:38.520 | There's something about this form that enables it to be very dense with the Bible.
00:01:45.040 | And it has the advantage of being, in large part, narrative.
00:01:49.080 | A lot of hip-hop lyrics are stories.
00:01:52.760 | They move with a narrative, which gives it an advantage of telling a story about someone's
00:01:58.880 | experience or the movement of the history of redemption.
00:02:05.840 | Another factor about it that gives it remarkable clout, I think, is that I would call it almost
00:02:12.360 | linguistic energy.
00:02:16.920 | At least all the hip-hop I see or listen to is phenomenally energetic.
00:02:23.520 | It's just drivenly energetic.
00:02:26.400 | And when I think about that, I think, "Well, life is war, and that sounds like the kind
00:02:33.280 | of energy that it's going to take to push back the enemy."
00:02:37.880 | And I have thought, I'll just stick this in, because I thought of this a little while ago,
00:02:43.080 | it may be that one of the limitations is that particular energy.
00:02:47.880 | I would like to challenge hip-hop artists to record a rap lullaby to help their child
00:03:00.240 | go to sleep.
00:03:01.240 | See what that would sound like.
00:03:04.240 | My guess is it's doable.
00:03:05.920 | I've just never heard anything like it.
00:03:08.120 | So there's my little challenge to throw out there.
00:03:10.240 | And you might try one for the funeral as well.
00:03:14.440 | Try a rap for the death of your seven-year-old.
00:03:20.000 | And what would change about the drivenness of it, the loudness of it, the forcefulness
00:03:26.960 | of it, if you're trying to put your baby to sleep with the truth of Jesus and you're laying
00:03:33.280 | your baby in the ground with the truth of Jesus?
00:03:37.040 | That's not a criticism.
00:03:38.120 | It's just saying, "Is the form adaptable to that?"
00:03:43.120 | And if it is, let's do it.
00:03:45.160 | And if it's not, we just own that.
00:03:48.120 | There are lots of other kinds of music you don't play at a funeral too, besides rap,
00:03:52.080 | and you don't use for lullabies.
00:03:54.680 | It's an interesting kind of test to see what's the nature of the form.
00:04:01.360 | I would also say this.
00:04:03.240 | At its best, there is a poetic effort going on in hip-hop that sometimes is remarkably
00:04:11.760 | shrewd.
00:04:12.760 | It's good.
00:04:13.760 | It's striking.
00:04:14.760 | It's smart.
00:04:15.760 | It's awakening.
00:04:16.760 | It's surprising.
00:04:17.760 | And that's the way I think we should do language.
00:04:21.280 | We should surprise people with turns of phrase.
00:04:25.080 | And rap artists, it seems to me, are doing that pretty much all the time at their best.
00:04:31.320 | Just a couple of cautions and dangers, and everybody's thought of these.
00:04:34.520 | There's nothing fresh or new here, but I find the words hard to understand regularly, which
00:04:40.680 | is why I don't listen to much of it.
00:04:42.520 | I'm 67 years old, and I just can't understand it.
00:04:47.360 | I need the words written in front of me in order to know where they're going, because
00:04:51.440 | it goes by so fast and so complicated that I usually miss three-fourths of it, and then
00:04:56.760 | it's not helping me very much.
00:04:58.960 | That's one downside for me personally.
00:05:02.120 | Second is, of course, the associations are bleak.
00:05:06.560 | The origins, I suppose, I don't know this with anything other than anecdotal evidence,
00:05:12.880 | the associations and the origins of rap are pretty ugly, and a lot of foul stuff has been
00:05:19.760 | sung to that medium.
00:05:21.680 | And that means for a lot of people, it's probably going to be hard for them to get over that
00:05:28.480 | while pouring the purity of the sinless Christ into a medium that for them might be very,
00:05:35.760 | very associated with something utterly inimical to the purity of Christ.
00:05:41.720 | And the third thing is that, will it for those who are being drawn to Christ through it,
00:05:49.400 | will it lead them on to a fuller, richer, wider experience of forms and music?
00:05:57.400 | We would hope that that's the case, because all of us come in somewhere, right?
00:06:00.480 | We come into the faith through some cultural medium, and all of us want, I hope we want,
00:06:08.240 | to broaden our experience and not limit ourselves to one form of art.
00:06:15.680 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:06:20.520 | Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.
00:06:24.300 | You'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper.
00:06:27.600 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:06:28.600 | Thanks for listening.
00:06:29.480 | [BLANK_AUDIO]