Category Archives: Music
Hip Hop Started out in the Heart
I have become convinced that people in my line of work have a lot in common with rappers. You see, I am a pastor. I have discovered that much like rappers, pastors often face a societal expectation to be some sort of one dimensional character. Perhaps this is true for all religious folks. Perhaps it is true for people in general, regardless of race, religious creed or profession. Perhaps we all have a hard time seeing outside of our own narrow cultural context and even narrower inner world of personal experience. We often encounter the “other” on a superficial level. We have a difficult time trying to seeing the world through the other’s eyes or feeling the world with another’s heart.
I recently fielded some “constructive criticism” from well meaning family and friends who complained of me writing about Hip Hop here on this blog and posting Hip Hop videos on my Facebook timeline. Their “concern” was that it seemed “inappropriate for a pastor to listen to that kind of music.” I get this a lot actually. My conservative Christian friends often complain that Hip Hop is too full of colorful language, braggadocios egos and explicit references to sex for them to engage or take very seriously. My more progressive religious friends often lament Hip Hop’s long standing reputation as a medium for expressing (and sometimes even defending) misogyny and homophobia. Their complaints sound an awful lot like Donald Miller in his book “Blue Like Jazz.” Miller writes,
“If you believe something, passionately, people will follow you. People hardly care what you believe, as long as you believe something. If you are passionate about something, people will follow you because they think you know something they don’t, some clue to the meaning of the universe. Passion is tricky, though, because it can point to nothing as easily as it points to something. If a rapper is passionately rapping about how great his rap is, his passion is pointing to nothing. He isn’t helping anything. His beliefs are self-serving and shallow. If a rapper, however, is rapping about his community, about oppression and injustice, then he is passionate about a message, something outside himself.”
I make no denial that there is some validity to Millers claims and those of my friends. A lot of Hip Hop is overly vulgar, sexist, homophobic, etc. But that is certainly not the all there is to Hip Hop. I think part of the problem is that there is a lot of snobbery these days about what really counts as true art. It seems popular music in general, gets a bum rap and perhaps Hip Hop gets the worst of it. People will sit down with a Novel or a movie with plenty of disturbing parts and take the good with the bad in their entertainment. In many religious circles, and especially in the Reformed tradition, which I am a part of, people almost make a sport of looking for the redeeming qualities of Catcher in the Rye or the latest Wes Anderson film. But people treat popular music – and especially Hip Hop – like it doesn’t tell the same stories of broken lives, shattered dreams and redemption. But it does. Oh it certainly does.
We just have to be willing to listen. We have to know how to listen. And we have to treat rappers/emcees like real artists, more importantly real human beings and not one dimensional characters or worse caricatures. In contrast to Miller, rapper Jay Z invites us to think of the rapper as an authentic “other” a real human being. In his book decoded, he writes,
“So many people can’t see that every great rapper is not just a documentarian, but a trickster—that every great rapper has a little bit of Chuck and a little bit of Flav in them—but that’s not our problem, it’s their failure: the failure, or unwillingness, to treat rap like art, instead of acting like it’s just a bunch of n***as reading out of their diaries. Art elevates and refines and transforms experience. And sometimes it just f***s with you for the fun of it.”
Jay points us to the humanity of the Hip Hop artist. To the human being who loves and hates, cries and gets angry, and sometimes just wants to have a little fun. He continues,
“But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn’t force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or a sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bulls**t is when you act like you don’t have contradictions inside you.”
I say Amen! But I would add a very important caveat. Acknowledging and to some degree, even accepting that we all have our inherent contradictions does not necessarily mean glorify or fully embrace our flaws. We all think. We all feel. We all love. We all hurt. We all have hopes, dreams and disappointments. We all have our own deep flaws and enormous potential to say and do things that are damaging to others. And we are all trying to find our way in the world. The easiest way to get lost in our own selves and never see the “other;” the easiest way to never change for the better, the easiest way to become and remain toxic and damaging to our neighbor and ourselves is to be insular and consumed with own image and self-portrayal.
This is equally true for a rapper trying to portray a criminal image, exposed as a family man as it is for the religious and community leaders and self proclaimed family-men exposed in our news headlines each day as criminals.
Until next time,
Wayne
Placement
Last night a former student from my youth ministry days (back in 2000- 2003) called me. He has grown up to be a young man that I am quite proud of; and I am happy to have been a part of his spiritual journey. He invited me to an Easter Vigil at his parish as he is joining the Roman Catholic Church. He said he felt he has finally found his place.
He also said he felt compelled to share a passage of scripture with me, for me to meditate on. He said he had taken note the difficult time I have been going through and meant this as a word of encouragement. It was the last thing I read before I went to bed last night and I read it again this morning:
Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him (Acts 10:34-38).
Here is the context: Peter has just had his roof top vision of God’s inclusive mercy. Peter went up on a roof top to pray and he had become hungry. Then he had a vision of heaven opening up and a large sheet being lowered down full of all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air: read foods that were considered unkosher to eat. For Peter this metaphoric vision translates into a new understanding of the scope and depth of God’s Mercy and the wideness in God’s kingdom vision, as to include Jews and Gentiles and indeed in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right.
This morning another friend, a sista, a preacher and a wonderful seminary colleague inboxed me with a word, a word she once shared with another friend and ministry colleague whose time and ministry was cut short. She has now passed it on to me. As I read I felt as I imagine Elisha might have as he picked up the mantle of Elijah. She wrote:
God has a special place for you to live out your call. It’s a place where broken people want to be put back together, to feel strong, to feel proud. It’s a place where rejects remember but what it feels like to be accepted. Its a place where people who don’t even know how to love are able to receive love again. It was a place that only you would know how to pastor.
Placement. We all desire it. We all crave it. We all need it. We have invented a world of prime time television where we can live out this desire vicariously: “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came.” We create sitcoms and dramas where the family dysfunction and banality of the work place that we all know so well becomes a place people are accepted and able to make familial, romantic or professional relationships work despite – and sometimes even because of – the flaws, quirks or idiosyncrasies of our favorite characters.
We also seek it out in virtual communities:Facebook, twitter, blogs, Pinterest or an online gaming alternative universe. And I do not want to diminish the power of social media to connect us, and even to be used to change us, or our world. But nothing, absolutely nothing beats the real thing: Entering into the messiness of real life human relationships and all of the dirt and conflict and mess that is inevitable if and when we so chose to open our hearts to love these other fleshy creatures who more often than not are more like ourselves than we would wish (probably the source of a lot of our conflict actually).
But if we can enter into those kind of relationships in an atmosphere permeated with grace, acceptance and unconditional love, well that truly is a piece of “Heaven on earth.” My story, unlike so many who I know have been so deeply wounded in the church is exactly that, one of finding a home. A place. When conflicts beyond my ability to cope with in my family of origin would arise (which was often) I ran to the church. I was literally taken in off of the streets by a youth pastor for well over a month when I had no place else to go. While it was never perfect, and there were times I felt I had to hide my imperfections, idiosyncrasies or true parts of my identity, it still somehow was enough. It was enough for me to develop a vision for ministry like the one described above. It was enough for me to develop a sense of place and a desire to work for a world were others never go without one.
After 8 years of school, denominational exams on top of that, and a lifetime of student debt to look forward to one can – as I did momentarily – develop a sense of self that says, ‘Okay, there you go, God, Church, World I have done all of this for you! Now provide me a place of ministry for me ASAP.’ Ahh, but that would be to easy and too contrary to the story I’ve known, the laments I have encountered and the vision I have been given. But the good news is that this last two years of feeling completely and utterly without place, without home have only strengthened my resolve to be in a place where I can partner with the right group of people in casting a vision of a place, a church, a home, a world where all are truly welcome; a place where grace permeates, where the oppressed are healed, and where there is a palpable sense that God is with us when we are with each other.
Broke
“Broken hearts want broken necks
I’ve done some things that I want to forget but I can’t”
I hope Isaac Brock will forgive me. I know he is not big on the whole religion thing. There are a handful of people in the world whose art moves my spirit in such profound ways that it boggles my mind to find out they don’t see much validation for a spiritual component to life. Isaac is definitely toward the the top of that list for me. Still I want to be respectful of him as a human being with his own beliefs and perspectives and not leave any allusion: Brock believes religion is a crock.
If I am honest, music has always been one of the places I feel closest to God. So finding consonance between my faith and the music that moves me has been kind of a big deal for me. This started long before I ever learned this to be a sort of in vogue exercise for Christians, especially in Reformed circles. There is much about the sort of business as usual way this is often done that bothers me. I don’t like how Bono and Sufjan Stevens have unwittingly been sainted by a lot of Christians. I don’t like how popular worship music is popular in part because it purposely follows radio trends and offers a lot of interchangeable and too often hollow love songs.
Still there is much about music that does move the heart/soul/spirit or whatever that intangible part of us is that connects us to God, each other and the world we live in. I hope to say more in the coming days about how this is true for me and perhaps a bit more about some of my frustrations with how it is often done as well as my thoughts on some things that often unfairly gets excluded as “legitimate” art. But for now I could think of no other songs that dovetailed so well with this, a favorite quote from one of my favorite professors in seminary:
“How do we move from being a stagnant pool to being a gushing river of life? How do we become persons overflowing with justice and righteousness? Justice and righteousness flow from persons when they open their heart to the pain of the world… And Justice and righteousness flow from persons who open their heart to their own pain. God creates us with a spirit of exuberance. We see this in children and remember it from our own childhood. Joyously unrestrained and enthusiastic children open themselves to the world. Yet they and we soon learn that the world is not a safe place. People wound us deeply, often in spite of themselves and sometimes without knowing it – loved ones as well as strangers. In self defense we close ourselves off to the world and withdraw to nurse our wounds. But closed off to the world our wounds fester… hurt becomes anger. Anger becomes hatred. And hatred becomes rage and self loathing. Far from being a river of justice and righteousness in the world we become rivers of aggression and anxiety.” ~ Dr. Tom Boogaart
Rodney King and The Day We Will All Get Along
I am thinking deeply this morning about the death of Rodney King. Indeed as this article indicates, King’s caught on camera ordeal and the riots that ensued months later in LA served as a catalyst for reform in police procedures in LA and around the country.
I am also thinking how King has inadvertently touched my life with his life and struggles. I was 14 and just still transitioning from New Kids on the Block to more aggressive forms of music when the tape of Rodney King’s beating made its way into my family’s living room.
A little over a year later, officers Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseno were acquitted of assault charges. It was April 29, 1992. That day the LA Riots began in protest to the verdict. For six days the city burned. There were 53 casualties of the riots and thousands of injuries.
In November of that year Ice Cube released The Predator. It was a brilliant, violent and frightening summery of the American Zeitgeist. The album references, King the trial and the riots repeatedly. Somewhere in the course of that year between the video and the verdict, I had begun listening to Hip Hop, in particular the omnipresent gangster rap of the early 90’s. I am sure that teenage rebellion, allegorical identification with the angst young urban youth, MTV and the 15 inch subwoofers in the car of my childhood best friend all had an impact on my burgeoning taste in music.
But none of that can sufficiently account for what happened when I heard Ice Cube’s “Predator” album. It was the first hip hop album – the first album in any genre really – that I thoroughly devoured. I listened to it day and night. On my headphones into the wee hours of the night it was playing. I fell asleep listening to it:
I have often said that I discovered God under the lilac tree just outside our bedroom window listening to Ice Cube. While there is a lot more to my story than that. The statement is only partially hyperbolic.
I am not kidding whatsoever when I say that listening to this album fostered the birth of my awareness and my concern for, racism, economic disparity, abuse of power and injustice. It is at least part of the reason I ended up in seminary. It is definitely directly related to why I found myself taking electives in the Hebrew Prophets when I could in undergrad and seminary.
Like the prophet Isaiah, Ice cube was part of a larger collective, a tradition of voices that pronounced judgment and yes provided comfort for people suffering from many afflictions. Both men wrote to warn and also empower a people who had been dragged away from their homeland enslaved and impoverished. There are of course ways in which the historical context and message are dissimilar. But both Ice Cube and Isaiah surveyed their land and saw “a sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly!” And certainly Ice Cube, like the prophet Isaiah, was a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips, whose eyes had seen the disparity between the Holy and the way we live. As Ice Cube was fond of saying and would later put into a song on a subsequent album, “They wont call me N!**er when I get to Heaven.”
In the end it is Isaiah who has provided me with what I have come to believe is God’s answer, God’s eschatological or ultimate vision for a world torn apart by racism, classism, ageism, sexism, religious bigotry and persecution and a seemingly endless list of other injustices. God’s vision for a day when badges and batons will cease to be wield as weapons. A day when by God’s grace we will all do one better than just getting along. Isaiah provides nothing short of God’s vision for Heaven on earth:
In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (Isaiah 2:2-4).
