The Hip Hop Culture

The Origins of Hip Hop in New York City

For God like you askin' for it Standin' before my God like y 'all eye tight Man that's the Lord you high, you fly, you say you rich That's a blessing from Jesus Hip hop itself as a music and as a culture was started before I was born.

In the 80s, in the inner city of New York, some people say the Bronx, some people say Queens. I'm from Queens, so I tend to try to give them some credit. Well, that's neither here nor there. The point is, it was started by inner city people who were trying to share what was going on in their neighborhoods, have a good time at a party, and use their skills and the tools that were around them to make good music.

They would take turntables, and they would loop jazz records, find the best section of the drum break or the musical breakdown, and then they would make up poetry over that, and they would do that at the parties just to have a good time and escape some of the ills and the pains that were going on in the community around them.

From Party Music to Social Commentary

Then people started taking it from just making party music to something called The Message by Melly Mel, which was him explaining what he sees in his neighborhood around. So hip hop became a culture driven by young people who were hungry, who were poor, who were passionate, who were extremely skilled at using the resources around them to express themselves as a way to articulate what they were feeling inside, the depression that the communities were feeling, but also highlighting and celebrating some of the good things that were happening there.

Hip Hop as a Cultural Identity for Believers

Within that culture or using hip hop as a culture, a lot of kids were raised with hip hop as the music that they listened to, the way that they dressed, the way that they communicated, and you had believers, people who love Jesus Christ, who know who he is and what he stands for, who celebrate the fact that he died on the cross, rose again on the third day, but they're still part of that culture, the same way we would argue somebody who is from China is Chinese, somebody who is from Chicago is a Chicagoan, and all the things that come with that, that's what it was for the hip hop culture and people who came up within that.

The Gospel Shaping the Content of Christian Hip Hop

And so they made music and continue to make music based on their worldview and the way that they see the world. And so instead of just making music about the ills of society and about the cultural differences between you and I, or about how much fun we're having, they're writing it through the lens of what has happened to me in my heart and in my life because of the gospel.

So even though I live in this neighborhood, what does the gospel do and say about that? And so that'll be the difference when you listen to an artist like Kanye West versus an artist like Sha Lin. They may come from similar neighborhoods, have similar backgrounds, but the way that they view the world, the lens that they articulate their life through is through the gospel, in Sha Lin's case, and so he'll sound very different than Kanye West or Jay Z or somebody like that.