In Rap Testimony, James F. Broad examines the musical testimony narratives of UK Christian rappers to analyse how testimony is used in the Pentecostal movement in establishing identity both for individuals and the wider religious community.
Distinct UK rap cultures such as grime and UK drill are flourishing in the UK and affecting popular culture and by extension, the church and youth culture. This book would begin conversations around rap and faith in a UK context. It aims to fill an unmet need in focusing on UK Christian rap expression and contribute to the academic study of Pentecostalism in the UK, hip-hop and the arts and more generally churches and youth groups as rap becomes an ever more popular medium for the expression of religious identity.
Adapted from Broad’s PhD thesis, the data in the book is unique; both with regards to the songs, which no other academic work has examined before, and the interview data, which was generated for the study. Despite a wide range of material on religious rap in a US context, no such academic work exists in the UK in a book format. The book is interdisciplinary, focusing not only on the spirituality of the Pentecostal church in the UK but also utilising social science methods and musicological approaches in analysis.
This work engages with debate about the extent to which, as Pentecostalism has institutionalised and denominationalised, the narrativity and orality of the early movement has been reduced in favour of more structured, clearly-defined theological statements. It argues that narrative and oral expressions are still alive and well and are being utilised in rap. Rap music is often narrative in nature, prioritising the stories rappers tell in its expression, thus rap can be a vehicle to recapture the orality and narrativity of Pentecostal/Charismatic expression.