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Ebony Utley. Rap and Religion: Understanding the Gangsta's God. New York: Praeger, 2012. 190 pp. $37.00.
When Reverend Calvin Butts initiated a crusade against "gangsta rap" in 1993, he was understandably expressing concerns about the violent and misogynist qualities of this burgeoning genre. In interviews and sermons, Butts contended that the lyrical content and video iconography associated with artists like Tupac Shakur and Snoop Lion (formerly Snoop Dogg) were inimical both to the values of the black church, and the black community more broadly. Following the cultural common sense at the time, he suggested that gangsta rap and religion were incompatible. Since Butts's widely publicized attack on hardcore rap, scholars like Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Anthony Pinn have attempted to complicate the relationship between rap and religion, highlighting the religious sensibilities of artists like Tupac. Ebony Utley's provocative and engaging new book, Rap and Religion, is the most recent effort to uncover the myriad ways that rap artists invoke and converse with God, thereby refuting ongoing criticisms of hip-hop culture as utterly nihilistic and despairing.
Rap and Religion argues that we can make sense of artists' ostensibly contradictory tendency to "include God in their raps about murder, misogyny, and mayhem" (7). God-talk within gangsta rap, according to Utley, signifies a quest for meaning, power, and respect within a world replete with debilitating constraints and hardships. It becomes a way for racialized subjects to ascribe meaning, sense, and significance to inherited social inequalities, personal tragedies, and various forms of loss. To better understand the ways in which rap artists develop an intimate relationship with the divine, Utley introduces a distinction between God "out there" and God "down here." Whereas the former points to God's ubiquity and God's distance from humanity, the latter quality indicates the possibility of intimacy between God and humanity. If God "rides" with gangsta rappers, if he empowers them to face and overcome painful contradictions and obstacles, this is because rappers underscore the immanent, earth-bound quality of divine existence.
The first five chapters of the book identify sites within hip-hop culture where religious imagery and rhetoric are invoked as modes of empowerment. The final chapter reveals the results of a survey that Utley designed for students in her hip-hop and popular...