On Wednesday, April 5, 2023 students, faculty and staff, and friends of the Bucknell community gathered in Hildreth-Mirza’s Great Room to hear from renowned religious studies scholar, Africana theorist, and humanist Dr. Anthony Pinn. His talked was titled “Hip Hop, Religion, and the Rhythm of Death” and focused on Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize and Grammy award-winning album DAMN as a way to address and read the synergistic relationship between life and death, hip hop’s engagement with death and dying, and the assumed distinction between life and death.
Dr. Pinn opened up his lecture with a narration of his own youthful upbringing, paying particular focus to the role the Black Church and hip-hop played in his development. Realizing the danger that growing into blackness entails, he shared that as a young person, “[t]here was something about hip-hop that spoke a kind of cultural defiance and amplified and animated life for [him]…” Moreover, there was something about the burgeoning genre that amplified and animated even the mundane. To this point, he rattled off an excerpt of the Sugarhill Gang’s 1980 track “Rapper’s Delight.”
“I said-a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie
To the hip hip hop-a you don’t stop the rock
It to the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie
To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat…”
Unfortunately, part of the mundane for Blackness and its people is the fine line between life and death, or, as Dr. Pinn described it, the sameness of life and death. Lamar’s DAMN provides a secular theology of sorts to think through this relationship and its inevitability. Over the course of the event, Dr. Pinn played snippets of various tracks from DAMN to highlight this, including “Blood,” “DNA,” “Fear,” “Lust,” and “God,” and interlaced them with reflections and key takeaways of his own. My personal favorite: “One can regret these circumstances, attempt to undo them, or embrace the presence of death and all it entails.”
For more, visit the Griot’s MediaSpace to view the full recording, and, if you haven’t already, give listen to Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN!
– Ninah Jackson