He began his hip-hop career with gangsta rap in Southern California. Yet these artists are signed to secular labels, rap about a very wide range of topics beyond religion, and largely reject the moniker вЂњChristian artist.вЂќДЄmisho Baraka Lewis, who performs as Sho Baraka, has personal experience with rupture. For example, popular artists such as Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, and NF publicly profess to be Christians and rap about explicitly Christian themes. The genre has an increasingly complex relationship with the Christian faith-the labels of вЂњsecularвЂќ and вЂњChristianвЂќ hip-hop music are no longer tenable.

Hip-hop has also flipped the script on Christian music in surprising ways. On a broader level, hip-hop artists subvert the familiar as they rap about raw, real, and troubling topics that are often ignored in mass media. Unique spellings, semantic inversion, and community-specific language are small ways that hip-hop flips the script. This flipping of the script can take a number of different forms. Rather than reinforcing existing cultural narratives, hip-hop artists subvert the familiar. From the beginning, the genre refused to underwrite the sentimentalities of society. Hip-hop began as an expression of the dispossessed, an artistic form of opposition in impoverished neighborhoods. Like the scratch, hip-hop aims to rupture the status quo. вЂњIt is difficult to overstate just how much the scratch changed music,вЂќ he writes, вЂњhow crucial it was to the brash announcement that Hip Hop did indeed come to change the game and even atВtempt to change the world.вЂќ In his book Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Adam Banks describes the impact of the scratch. It is a moment of rupture, a purposeful interruption breaking into the music and the moment. The scratch, however, is more than a musical technique. Ever since it was first introduced by DJs in the 1970s, the scratch has been a hip-hop hallmark. Hip-hop artists use turntables to tinker with timbres and make music. The scratch radically transformed the turntable into a musical instrument capable of deconstructing recordings and squeezing out new sounds through speakers. Scratching interrupts the steady movement of the record and produces endless timbral and rhythmic possibilities. As a technique, hip-hop artists scratch by moving a vinyl record back and forth by hand.

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