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>> 59 2 We Are All One in the Periferia Blackness, Place, and Poverty in Gospel Rap In late June 2003, I met Vilmar Junior, a twenty-two-year-old Pentecostal member of the Brazil for Christ church, dedicated rap MC, accomplished graffiti artist, and proud negro. We sat in a McDonald’s in downtown São Paulo, near the Praça da República, munching French fries. He sported dreadlocks, wire-framed spectacles, and a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of Africa. Every word he said was suffused with earnestness. I listened for nearly three hours, through the bustling lunch-hour rush into the quiet midafternoon , as he regaled me with denunciations of the sinfulness of racism, stories of how his rapping had changed his life and those of others, and how the Lord had, it was clear, begun to pour his anointing on the hip hop movement in Brazil. I listened to all this with a feeling of great relief. I had been in São Paulo for three months, trying to find evangelical Protestants who articulated the points Vilmar was now making. At long last, much cheered, I turned off 60 > 61 denounced was hatred, discord, drugs, and the lack of education, and what was being advocated was the need for salvation through Jesus Christ. The topic of race did not even come up. I scoured the group’s rhymes for references to racism or blackness. Nothing. I told Vilmar privately that I was surprised, given our earlier talk, that antiracism was not more present in the group’s work. He laughed. “Of course, it’s not there. That is not what we rap about. We rap about helping the kids in the periferia get away from drugs and gangs and violence. What did you expect?” That was my first clue that what I would encounter in gospel rap was not the black consciousness to which I was accustomed from my experience in the United States. Over the next two years, I ended up remaining attentive to how blackness among gospel rappers got expressed, articulated, and reshaped in three sites—in the voices with which rappers told their stories, in the ever-present theme of periferia, and in the history of the scene itself, recounted in interviews and informal moments between rehearsals. What I found is that among gospel rappers there is a very robust though complex understanding of blackness—but not at all the one I had thought I would find. A brief methodological note: though I ended up spending equal amounts of time with gospel and secular rappers, the data on which this chapter is based are derived mainly from my time with gospel rappers. I make a point, where needed in the text, of distinguishing between the two groups. That said, one of the key findings of this project is just how similar are the ideas and practices of both secular and gospel rappers. At various points in the text, the reader will find me referencing both groups at the same time with the locution “both secular and gospel rappers.” Indeed, in many ways, the two groups are virtually indistinguishable. Both are committed to rap, identify deeply with the periferia, seek through their rhymes to paint a realistic portrait of the hard lives young men and women face in the favelas, seek to offer realistic ways out, and invoke God and Jesus. The gospel rappers just do the latter with a good deal more regularity, more biblical accuracy, and, many gospel rappers would say, more integrity. That is, since gospel rappers are baptized members of Protestant churches, seek to walk in the ways of doctrine, and make a point of regular church attendance, they can legitimately claim to be “of the church.” Whether this means they are any more spiritual than those who do none of these things I leave for others to decide. 62 > 63 eh? God is good. Look at all that beauty. Beleza. Those lights. It’s like we’re looking at heaven.” “Maybe.” The word was laden with skepticism. The speaker was Will. Will, the MC of his own three-person rap group, Profecia Final (Final Prophecy), was a compact sixteen-year-old in baggy shorts, faded T-shirts, and corn rows. He had grown up in a small Assembly of God church and had strayed at the age of thirteen; but in 2003, depressed by the deaths of several buddies, he returned to the bosom of the Lord. He...

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