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The Disturbing Profane
Hip Hop, Blackness, and the Sacred
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
About this book
In The Disturbing Profane, Joseph R. Winters explores how hip hop’s religiosity is found in qualities associated with the dark sacred. Rather than purity and wholeness, this expression of the sacred signifies death and pleasure, opacity and contamination, exorbitance and anguish. Winters brings religious studies, black studies, black feminist thought, and critical theory to bear on hip hop to trouble distinctions between the sacred and the profane. He shows how artists like Notorious B.I.G., Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Lupe Fiasco, and Nicki Minaj undermine stable meanings of the sacred to reveal listeners’ investments in unpleasant realities. Hip hop opens its audience to a volatile notion of the sacred and the unruly qualities of blackness. Moreover, Winters demonstrates that hip hop’s dark sacrality makes it inseparable from its expression of, participation in, and resistance to the antiblack and black gendered violence that organizes the social world.
Reviews
“The Disturbing Profane is the book on hip hop that I’ve been waiting for. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, seamlessly weaving together critical theory and black studies, this work not only guides us to a new understanding of the complex relationship between the sacred and the profane; it does so by taking hip hop seriously as conceptual and theoretical interlocutor. Joseph R. Winters’s perceptive and discerning analyses of the music make this a must-read.”
-- Candice M. Jenkins, author of Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh
-- Candice M. Jenkins, author of Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh
“As Joseph R. Winters points out, there are dimensions of our understanding of hip hop—and, by extension, our sense of religion—that can help us rethink our social and cultural worlds. Winters outlines how the sacred is manifest within hip hop culture, acknowledging its more widely embraced dimensions while privileging what he sees as the edge where disruptive and contaminated elements of the sacred are pronounced and the nature of blackness and antiblackness most amplified. Pick up and read this book to have your sense of our social world amplified and refined through the sights and sounds that define hip hop as an outlet for the ‘volatile sacred.’”
-- Anthony B. Pinn, author of Deathlife: Hip Hop and Thanatological Narrations of Blackness
-- Anthony B. Pinn, author of Deathlife: Hip Hop and Thanatological Narrations of Blackness
"[Winters] speaks to the hip-hop head who wants to appreciate rappers’ deeper meanings and double entendres, and he broadens the perspective of churchgoers seeking the Divine in all areas of life. His work offers something for everyone—or at least for those who are willing to be disturbed by it.”
-- Jordan Burton Presbyterian Outlook
-- Jordan Burton Presbyterian Outlook
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
v -
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Acknowledgments
vii -
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Introduction
1 -
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1 Sorrow/Death
37 -
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2 Redemption/Rupture
75 -
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3 Monster/Monstrosity
109 -
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Conclusion
145 -
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Notes
153 -
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Sources
173 -
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Index
189
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
July 4, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781478060826
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781478060826
Keywords for this book
Hip hop; black religion; anti-blackness; profanity; dark sacred; opacity; violence; WEB Du Bois; Lauryn Hill; Notorious BIG; Lupe Fiasco; Kendrick Lamar; George Bataille; Hortense Spillers; Nicki Minaj; Black religiosity; kinetic anguish
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
