Religion in Hip Hop interrogates the ways that hip-hop artists engage with, invoke and deploy religion. This edited collection, published by Bloomsbury in tandem with a reader compiling recent scholarship on the subject issued by Routledge (Miller and Pinn Reference Miller and Pinn2015), comprises 14 new essays that theorise religion's impact on the genre. Religion has received scattered attention in hip-hop studies, including Michael Dyson's writings on Tupac Shakur, Felicia Miyakawa's monograph on Five Percenter rap, and references to Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam in studies of 1980s hip-hop. Yet scholars in religious studies, Miller and Pinn's home discipline, have recently been concerned with how hip-hop expresses and transforms African-American religious practices. In doing so, they understand religion not just through its institutional or denominational form, but as the broader moral and spiritual dimensions of identity formation: ‘a way by means of which humans parse out and explore the social world, the self, and human experience in relationship to a desire for a wide variety of things from “unity” of experience, framework of meaning, or strategic acts of identification’ (p. 3). Religion thus becomes a powerful inroad into hip-hop's ethics, philosophies and identities.

Many essays position religiosity as a major influence on hip-hop philosophy. Greg Dimitriadis's essay theorises the contradictory and seemingly blasphemous invocations of God in hip-hop lyrics as a humanist gesture that avoids fundamentalism, transcendence and dogmatism in the search for personal and cultural transformation. He illuminates morally ambiguous narratives of struggle and contentious references to the divine in the oeuvres of Jay-Z and Kanye West, whose resistance to moral clarity is intended to circumvent any rigid belief system. Countering this, Julius Bailey theorises the existentialism of Tupac Shakur's music, drawing on Nietzche and Sartre to explore Shakur's uncertainties about the existence and nature of God as well as the larger meaning of his own life struggles. Anthony Pinn's contribution uses NaS's 2001 track ‘Black Zombies’ to theorise black urban culture as ‘zombified,’ ‘neither fully objects nor fully subjects’ (p. 185). Pinn ruminates on a more theological approach to death premised on the ‘loss of meaning more generally’ (p. 186) to understand how Kanye West, Tupac Shakur, KRS-One and NaS push back against the zombification of blackness.

Some chapters build on Dimitradis's emphasis on humanism and transformation by probing statements of self-divinations, asking what it means when rappers proclaim, as per the track on Kanye West's Yeezus, ‘I Am a God’. Michael E. Dyson's introduction opens the book in this light, connecting the births of hip-hop and Tupac Shakur with the birth of Jesus Christ. Monica Miller's essay on Jay-Z's Picasso Baby and his invocation of himself as a ‘New Black God’ argues that rhetorical self-divination serves as a strategy of ‘hyper-legibility’ in the face of the illegibility of black cultural expression. Jay-Z is in part deifying himself as a form of masculine braggadocio, but more important is the assertive power of his artistry and cultural survival, and by extension that of African Americans. Dyson's own contribution likewise situates Jay-Z's statements as drawing on the ‘tradition of black preaching and rhetorical performativity’ (p. 56). He provocatively riffs on Jay-Z's ‘God complex’ through the concept of ‘complex gods’, the humanist avoidance of dogmatism through playing with religious imagery, and ‘God's complex’, using complex as a synonym of projects and hoods to argue that Jay-Z's boasts are ultimately oriented toward the oppressed. Elonda Clay also examines the role of rhetoric and play in the online creation of ‘Yeezianity’, a so-called religion formed around Kanye West's Yeezus. Yeezianity becomes a way both to construct online identities and playfully consume Christianity.

Many essays productively use religious expressions and signifiers in hip-hop to rethink the social politics of both titular topics, but some stretch the meaning of religion too thinly, mitigating its theoretical power. Margarita Simon Guillory's essay on Erykah Badu's religious identity provides an important corrective to the androcentric bent of the collection and demonstrates the myriad and complex ways that Badu expresses her religion in interviews. Yet her readings of Badu's ‘Window Seat’ and New Amerykah Part 2 turn to conventional (at least for popular music scholars) musical analyses intersecting art and identity that submerge her nuanced discussion of religiosity. Maco Faniel's examination of the Houston hip-hop scene usefully theorises its dynamics of space and place, but Faniel often uses religion simply to mean identity. In doing so, his essay applies Murray Forman and Adam Krims's theories of urban geography and identity rather than using religion to nuance their arguments further. The push toward a more flexible and individualistic conception of religion in Religion in Hip Hop is to be commended, but doing so without firm grounding in the concept's historical and institutional resonances risk turning the term into a vague stand-in for culture or identity.

One other concern, for this reader, is the book's relationship to pre-existing scholarly debates in popular music studies. The book's title reveals its purpose to ‘map the new terrain’, to forge the intersection of hip-hop and religion as its own scholarly field. Hip-hop and religion do inflect each other in novel ways, but this articulation is conditioned by a long history of culture, identity, inequality, religious movements and musical genres which have long been central issues in African-American studies, black music studies and American studies, never mind broader fields of sociology, cultural studies, religious studies and philosophy. Too often, though, I found reference to pre-existing scholarship in these fields utterly lacking or given lip service when greater depth would provide a more enriching intellectual basis. (The Hip-Hop and Religion Reader, Miller and Pinn's other collection, includes a more substantial literature review in its introduction.) Since this journal's readership largely draws from these disciplines rather than religious studies, readers seeking engagements and extensions of their own long-standing concerns may often be left wanting.

Despite these issues, Religion and Hip Hop productively exemplifies another long-standing concern of popular music studies: collaborations between academics and musicians. The contributions of the third editor, Bernard ‘Bun B’ Freeman, best known as half of the 1990s hip-hop duo Underground Kings (or UGK), are particularly riveting. In an interview, he details his history with religion as the son of a deacon and with hip-hop. He draws numerous parallels between the two subjects, arguing that hip-hop and religion are at root vehicles for seeking out truth – of self, of the world and of the divine – that are easily corrupted by money, whether the music industry or the mega-church. His conclusion distills the book's major claim that religion critically contributes to hip-hop's social meaning and transformational potential: ‘we, within hip hop culture, are constantly trying to learn more about the world around us, as well as our place and duties in it. This is necessary for self-improvement, and for the development of useful answers to the large and hard – even religious – questions of life: who are we? Why are we here? It is only through this type of work that true growth can be achieved. Trill [True and real]’ (p. 220).