Hip Hop as Ironic Faith: Rappers Performing as Totemic Prophets through Trickster Figures

Abstract

Hip hop is often treated as music, or a form of performance. Yet hip hop heads do more than just listen to songs. They engage with the lyrics as words of wisdom and apply those teachings to their day-to-day lives. Such active engagement calls into question whether hip hop is strictly performative or concomitantly religious. A similar inquiry has already been conducted for another type of performance. In his monograph Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing beyond the Game, John Sexton treats baseball as a religion, what this thesis calls an ironic faith. Whereas Sexton describes baseball players as saints and sinners based on his primary faith of Roman Catholicism, we describe rappers as totemic prophets who perform through a pair of bipolar trickster figures—one good, the other evil—based on the spirit of Esu-Elegbara from Yoruba mythology. In that vein, the objective of our investigation is to determine whether religiosity exists in hip hop by examining the music artists’ work via the intersection of performance studies and religious studies. Hip hop studies tends to treat performance and religion as separate entities, with the analytical lens of the former dominating the latter. What “dogma” will be discovered if that analytical lens were reversed such that hip hop is treated as a religion with performative elements? Altogether, there appear to be five components that culminate in a hip hop “dogma”: (1) hierophany, (2) totemic prophet, (3) trickster figure, (4) denomination, and (5) ironic faith. In the end, ironic faith appears to be a subset of artificial intelligence.