Abstract
This essay concerns how hip-hop has both killed and retained the concept of God in a perpetual rising and sublation through its primary cultural forms: graffiti, breakdancing, DJing, and MCing. It reveals hip-hop as a “Silent Partner” in the enactment of postmodern death of God theology, illuminates how the death of God is the premise of hip-hop itself, and observes how the death of God illustrates hip-hop culture’s oscillation between the “not true” and the “not a lie” of secular and confessional God language.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“The Entire History of You,” Black Mirror (BBC, 2016), television.
- 2.
My way of saying “manifested” with some flare.
- 3.
Havoc & The Alchemist, The Partner (Babygrande, 2016), CD.
- 4.
Gabriel Vahanian, “The Future of Christianity in a Post-Christian Era,” in Toward a New Christianity, ed. T. Altizer (New York: Harcourt, 1967), 256.
- 5.
Ibid., 261.
- 6.
Monica Miller, Religion and Hip-Hop (New York: Routledge, 2013), 177.
- 7.
Vahanian, 261.
- 8.
The “picture Gods” is a name I gave to images of the divine that insist to appear as anthropomorphic in a foundational resistance of their inevitable statuses as philosophical concepts. In other words, the “picture Gods” represent divine images that are understood to literally be their representations (e.g., God sits on a throne in place called “Heaven”). I have argued elsewhere that process theology’s usage of picture Gods limits the possibilities of the secular function of God that Whitehead advocates for.
- 9.
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1994); Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004); Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005).
- 10.
Thomas Altizer, “William Blake and the Role of Myth in the Radical Christian Vision” in T. Altizer and W. Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 171.
- 11.
The Opus, “Take Me to the Basement,” feat. Aesop Rock, First Contact 001, compact disc (2002, Ozone Music).
- 12.
Rass Kass and Apollo Brown, “How to Kill God,” Blasphemy, digital audio (2014, Mello Music Group).
- 13.
Sacred Interconnections: Postmodern Spirituality, Political Economy, and Art (Albany: SUNY P, 1990), ed. David Ray Griffin, promotes a postmodernism that is reconstructive in its collective understandings of spirituality, politics, and art as perpetually-linked and ever-evolving organisms.
- 14.
Altizer (1966), 175–176.
- 15.
Cf. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (Amherst: Prometheus, 1989).
- 16.
KRS-One, “Higher Level,” Return of the Boom Bap (Jive, 1993), CD.
- 17.
Altizer (1966), 177–179.
- 18.
See what you did there?
- 19.
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. R. Kimball (London: Oxford UP, 1959), 60.
- 20.
John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1997), 59.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Thomas Altizer, “The Religious Meaning of Myth and Symbol,” in Truth, Myth, and Symbol, ed. T. Altizer (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 97.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gill, J.I. (2018). Hip-Hop. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_39
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96594-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96595-6
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)