The Role Of Gospel Music In Hip Hop Cinema

In the world today there are hundreds of different genres of music that have been identified. Through a little research, you can often times see that most of the current genres of music were rooted in older genres such as jazz. This essay in particular will discuss hip hop which has roots stemming from jazz, blues, and also gospel music. In Understanding Black American Aspects in Hip Hop Cinema by Tani Sanchez, we see an excerpt where music scholar Craig Werner establishes a three step process in which hip hop music is associated with the gospel. These steps include “(1) acknowledging the burden; (2) bearing witness; (3) Finding redemption” (Sanchez 5). In the 1982 song “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the group
Within the song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, there is a line that says “Standing on the front stoop, hanging out the window. Watching all the cars go by…Crazy lady, living in a bag. Eating out of garbage pails” (AZ Lyrics). This particular lyric tells of him bearing witness to the poverty and disarray that has overtaken the inner-city community. Another lyric that emphasizes the bearing witness aspect of hip hop and gospel music is “My son said, Daddy, I don’t wanna go to school… I think it’d be cheaper. If I just got a job” (AZ Lyrics). This shows that the son in this song is bearing witness to the economic hardships that his parents must be enduring and therefore sacrificing things to help his parents out. Within this song it is easy to see that the “bearing witness” ideal of the gospel process is contained within this
This song does not have a ton of concrete lyrics which can be related to finding redemption. However, there is one recurring lyric that can related to the idea of finding redemption in life. That particular lyric would be “It makes me wonder how I keep from going under” (AZ Lyrics). This lyric is repeated throughout the song and really says something about the determination of African American and inner-city communities. It shows determination because even with all the problems that are referred to in the song that are being faced, they are still persevering and not “going under”. Another way of finding redemption was outlined in the reading by Craig Watkins. In that reading it was consistently mentioned how African American communities were looked at as the reason for the downfall of inner-city communities. Even though they were looked at in a distasteful way, the African American communities persevered and found redemption by creating a life for