The present: Lecrae & Non-theology Rap
Now we come to the present day in CHH. We’ve had plenty of bumps in the road, but we’re moving on this journey of making music that glorifies God. One thing I did not mention in the previous article was the battle of theological or heavy Jesus lyrics vs non-theological or not so heavy Jesus lyrics. That debate hasn’t gone away. It really just changed names. Now it’s the Christian rapper vs rapper that’s Christian debate. Before it was you should talk about Jesus a lot in your records to distinguish you from the secular rappers. If you’re not doing that than you’re not doing it right or giving hope to the lost. Part of this debate was artists were biblically based in their lyrics, but a lot of the music was not good quality music, so people didn’t want to listen to it anyway. The non-theological rappers went the route of this is an art form. There is nothing wrong wanting it to be quality. If it’s good quality, then people will want to hear it and that will get us in the door to share Jesus with our lives and not so much in our music. Different methods, but the same end goal. We are going to give these people Jesus one way or the other. At the heart of it all was evangelism. Lecrae is really anomaly in all of this because he’s an artists who has been on both sides of this argument. Starting heavy theological lyrics and then later being ridiculed from switching from that approach altogether and doing it for what he felt was the greater good of reaching the masses with this hope we have as believers. Check out the below tracks by Lecrae to further make this point.
