The Huffington Post Profile of Lecrae

Jon Ward—one of the best in the business—has a well-researched and thoughtful 3,300 word profile of Lecrae, with a number of videos embedded in the article. In particular, Ward explores Lecrae’s recent recording relationships, the question of whether one can be a Christian who is musical artist vs a Christian artist, and how some in evangelicalism have voiced their concerns.

Here is an excerpt:

The morning after [Billy] Graham’s birthday bash, Lecrae flew to Las Vegas to attend the Soul Train Awards. “That was completely different worlds,” he said.

He has been spending an increasing amount of time in the mainstream hip-hop world. He first burst the Christian bubble in the fall of 2011 when he performed in a freestyle showcase as part of BET’s annual awards show—”Hey, this what happen when hip-hop lets the saints in,” he quipped then—and the network has continued to promote Lecrae heavily.

“I will equate that feeling I got when we identified Kanye West,” Kelly Griffin, director of music programming at BET, said of the first time he heard Lecrae. “Like, ‘Wow, we want to take a chance on him.’”

In October, Lecrae found himself inside a cramped New York sound booth next to Sway Calloway, the 43-year-old MTV personality, rapper and journalist whose daily radio show, “Sway in the Morning,” is broadcast nationally on SeriusXM.

“We got a hybrid artist here,” Calloway told listeners. “Now, even I used to say he’s a Christian rapper. But he’s a rapper—who is a Christian.”

A quiet grin spread across Lecrae’s face. That’s a distinction he likes to make often. The way he explains it is you don’t call it Christian architecture, or a Christian pharmacy, or Christian pottery, when it is simply done by a Christian person. Rather, to be a Christian and also be an architect, or pharmacist, or potter, is supposed to mean that an individual performs those professions to the best of their ability, and with passion and excellence.

And as Lecrae points out, hip-hop is full of rappers who practice Islam or incorporate messages of the Five Percent Nation, such as some members of Wu-Tang Clan. They talk about their faith in their rap, but they are not labeled “Muslim rappers.”

Yet even as BET hailed him as the next Kanye, Lecrae drew a distinction between himself and the artist better known as “Yeezus.”

“I deeply respect what he’s doing artistically. I do think there’s a lot of brilliance,” Lecrae said. “There’s a line between being egotistical and being genius or great. And I think he plays with that a lot.”

Still, he continued, saying of Kanye’s most recent album, “I hear a broken person, if I’m going to be honest, when I listen to it.”

“I’d say even the writing, like, from my end, from my perspective it’s not as thought-provoking,” he said. “It feels a little hasty, a little like, ‘Let me just get this off my chest,’ versus, ‘How do I say this in a unique way?”

Uniqueness is a quality that has largely been lacking in Christian music. The genre didn’t really exist until the 1970s, some time after the advent of rock-and-roll. Its creation was the product of a desire among many evangelicals to resist a culture they felt was increasingly non-Christian. But the genre’s downfall—like many of the cultural artifacts that have come out of evangelicalism over the last several decades—was that instead of creating better alternatives, it just made knockoffs.

You can read the whole thing here.