The Disturbing Profane: Hip Hop, Blackness, and the Sacred

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, and exorbitance and anguish. Winters draws on religious studies, Black studies, Black feminist thought, and critical theory to bear on contemporary hip hop in order 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 Manaj 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 anti-Black and Black gendered violence that organizes the social world. 

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Sorrow/Death 37 2. Redemption/Rupture 75 3. Monster/Monstrous 109 Conclusion 145 Notes 153 Sources 173 Index 189

About the Author :
Joseph R. Winters is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies at Duke University and author of Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, also published by Duke University Press.

Review :
“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 “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