Song Cry: Rap Music, Rappers, and Psalmists.
“Why God, why God, do I gotta’ suffer? Pain in my heart, carry burdens full of struggle. Why God, why God, do I gotta’ bleed? Every stone thrown at you restin’ at my feet.”
I stopped wiping away my tears. Or, at least, I learned to let them stay a little while. But the absence of tears didn’t always mean the absence of aching, or of the stories and woes that echo through my silences, and moments I lose grip of language to express. My silence was even a poem. Poems came to symbolize tears I’d held back for months and years. Poetry and its gentle rhetoric offered me a language that could seize my emotions, hold them, and embody everything I felt, down to the slightest ache in my rib. A language that could breathe, grieved when abandoned, and should never be estranged from the body that claims it as its own.
We can wound our language when we abandon it, and don’t allow it to work, and, in the words of Ntozake Shange, “Attack and maim the language we have been taught to hate ourselves in.” But this is about rap.
Rap can wound the language that birthed it, or, more than this, estrange itself from the spirit of that language, when it weds itself to masculinity, virility, and the venom that kills. That spirit is soul-seeing, body-knowing, and indigenous to heaven, a witness to the dignity of the earth. Rap music, as the firstborn child of poetry and the poster child of hip hop, became a space where I discovered the potential of modern-day poets to be Psalmists, finding ways to document lament through sound and movement, and vernacular.
The Psalms were written, or composed, with the idea in mind that someone could set them to the metrics of songs. And the Psalms, like rap, are places, texts, and moments that reflect the reality of grief, sorrow, rage, and dejection in the human body and spirit. Rap, like the Psalms, can be solely for the moment. Psalms are not meant to be prophetic; they are the place we go to weep. They give you permission to immerse yourself deep into the forest of grief and heartache. A forest where God is already waiting, by the river, listening, watching, expecting God’s people to arrive and join in experiencing and learning the emotions of heartache.
I grieve and feel deeply. Need days to recover after a loss. Give my body over to its cycles or rinsing, acknowledging all the emotions of embarrassment, abandonment, rage, and shame. Rappers, like Kendrick Lamar and “U,” or Big Krit and “Drinking Sessions,” help us search our souls and bodies for our truest, wounded selves tucked away seeking arms to hold us. If rap and the Psalms share the same face, rap is ancient, embodying the spirit of God’s first language.
The body stores all the rage and madness of this world—a madness to which there is no method. And the language of rap, a language that is bone deep, is sturdy, steady, and sound enough to hold all that is heavy. Language is like water. Language can learn from water. It holds, stores, and doesn’t cave in when something heavy is immersed in it. Our sacred languages are what life’s madness, and the poisons of terrorism, and colonial awakenings, must conquer before it can conquer us.
Told by: Kwon
