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“The music industry takes sales as gospel”

According to The Boston Globe’s Dec. 3, 2006, article Christian and gospel music is the one growing music category; sales in 2007 were up 11.6 percent. That popularity is recognized at conferences and music award ceremonies, where Christian rap or hiphop is increasingly included as a category.

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“Black Youth Project”

The Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago surveyed 1,590 African-Americans, whites and Latinos aged 15 to 25 in several Midwest cities on subjects including rap music, premarital sex, politics and the “color-blind” society. The results included: 58 percent of black youth listen to rap music daily, compared with 45 percent of Latinos and 23 percent of […]

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Michael G. Datcher

Michael G. Datcher, clinical assistant professor of English at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, co-edited Tough Love: The Life and Death of Tupac Shakur (BlackWords Inc., 1996). He can discuss criticism of rap music and of the hiphop ethos.

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Kathleen Sands

Kathleen Sands, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, is the author of Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology. She says that in the 1970s, with the onset of liberation theology, religious scholars moved from thinking of evil as an absence of the good to viewing sin as […]

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Jessica Ralph

Dancer Jessica Ralph, a member of the National Baptist Convention USA, directs workshops using hiphop, liturgical dance and other art forms in a religious context. She is a member of the World Council of Churches’ transformation team, a group with varied backgrounds and talents who lead classes and workshops.

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Marcyliena Morgan

Marcyliena Morgan is a professor in the department of African and African American studies at Harvard University and author of Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She founded the Hiphop Archive at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University while on the faculty there. She now directs the Hiphop Archive@Stanford University and is working […]

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