Unstrange Bedfellows: Hip Hop and Religion

In the past two decades, an expansive archive of hip hop scholarship has emerged. In response to reductive criticisms of hip hop culture as nihilistic, violent, and inartistic, scholars in a variety of disciplines have endeavored to show the complexities, nuances, and possibilities within hip hop culture. In this article, I trace the connections between broader trends within hip hop scholarship and recent work exploring the relationship between religion and hip hop. Although I look at the impact of Islam and Christianity on hip hop, I am more interested in Anthony Pinn’s attempt to develop a notion of religiosity within hip hop that is not reducible to institutional forms. Although his notion of religion as “the search for a complex identity” does some productive interpretive work, I conclude with some concerns about the ways in which Pinn’s formulation of identity formation is divorced from broader configurations of power.