Rap music, culture and religion: Concluding thoughts

Abstract

In this brief essay, I argue that the type of attention to rap music suggested by the various contributors to this special issue requires a rethinking of the shape, content, and proper vocabulary and grammar for marking and describing the religious. That is to say, when critically examined for their take on religion and religious experience, rap artists force theoretical complexity and methodological comfort with tension. They express this desire for a fuller sense of meaning through the felt reality of their bodies, as they take up time and space and force their recognition. It is through this forced recognition – involving a certain hold on the world – that they express the renewal of self that marks religious life. Rap music as a terrain for the articulation of religious struggle and redemption forces a re-examination of the assumed cartography of religious engagement.

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