The Disturbing Profane

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.