Rap and Religion: Understanding the Gangsta’s God by Ebony Utley (review)

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 culture courses, a survey that required students to answer questions about the religiosity of rap artists. The first chapter, “Communing with God,” examines the ways in which rappers relate to God through public acknowledgements, prayer, and spiritual transformation/pilgrimage. When rappers routinely thank God for their accomplishments at award shows, Utley claims that we should take these moments seriously “even when [they] seem insignificant” (14). These public expressions of piety enable rap artists to connect and identify with the broader black community (as Common did at the 2007 BET Awards), or appear strong and confident in the face of white-dominated audiences who might be skeptical of the artists’ spiritual motives (as was the case when Snoop acknowledged God at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards while still undergoing a murder trial). In addition to public shout-outs to God, Utley examines the prayers of various rap artists in this chapter, prayers that express anger, frustration, gratitude, and grief. The gangsta’s God, she points out, is often depicted as nonjudgmental and silent, providing a safe space for hip-hop artists to admit and perform vulnerability.

While the first chapter focuses on the relationships between male artists and God, the second chapter, “Doin’ It for Daddy,” examines how female artists imagine God as a father and lover, and sometimes both. In this chapter, Utley indirectly combines the insights of Feuerbach and Freud by suggesting that women rappers often depict God in terms of either an ideal, protective father (often a response to the absence of a real, biological father), or the imperfect lover who too often takes advantage of the unequal power relations between men and women. As Utley succinctly puts it, “female rappers’ relationships with God reflect their relationships with men” (46). Readers will appreciate...