Hip Hop’s Recasting of Christianity and Gospel Music in Kenya

This chapter explores the ways in which the intersection between hip hop and Christianity brings about a recasting of what is assumed to be the norm within Christianity. It provides examples of how contemporary hip hop and Christianity in Kenya interact through a focus on youth, both in their historical roots and in current practices. Although music and Christianity have been regarded as incarnational processes that narrate themselves in lived experiences that document social reality, the chapter argues that hip hop provides Christianity a contested arena for self-expression and indigenization because of its emergence from a socioeconomic context of depressed economies and livelihoods neoliberalism fuels, as well as through multidirectional processes, multiracial identities, and multicultural interactions.