J. COUNTESS/WIREIMAGE
THE COOL CHRISTIAN
They talk about their faith in
their rap, but they are not labeled
“Muslim rappers.”
Yet even as BET hailed him as
the next Kanye, Lecrae drew a distinction between himself and the
artist better known as “Yeezus.”
“I deeply respect what he’s doing
artistically. I do think there’s a lot
of brilliance,” Lecrae said. “There’s
a line between being egotistical and
being genius or great. And I think
he plays with that a lot.”
Still, he continued, saying of
Kanye’s most recent album, “I
hear a broken person, if I’m going
to be honest, when I listen to it.”
“I’d say even the writing, like,
from my end, from my perspec-
HUFFINGTON
03.09.14
tive it’s not as thought-provoking,” he said. “It feels a little
hasty, a little like, ‘Let me just get
this off my chest,’ versus, ‘How
do I say this in a unique way?”
Uniqueness is a quality that has
largely been lacking in Christian
music. The genre didn’t really exist until the 1970s, some time after the advent of rock-and-roll.
Its creation was the product of a
desire among many evangelicals
to resist a culture they felt was
increasingly non-Christian. But
the genre’s downfall — like many
of the cultural artifacts that have
come out of evangelicalism over
the last several decades — was
that instead of creating better alternatives, it just made knockoffs.
John Jeremiah Sullivan captured
this in a memorable 2004 piece he
Lecrae performs
at an Apple
store on July 17,
2012, in New
York City.