Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic speech and in rhyme that is sung. It developed as part of hip hop culture, a subculture defined by four key stylistic elements: MC/rapping, DJ/scratching, break dancing, and graffiti writing. Other elements include sampling (or synthesis) and beatboxing. Although often used to refer to rap, "hip hop" more properly denotes the practice of the entire subculture. The term hip hop music is sometimes used synonymously with the term rap music, although rapping is not a required component of hip hop music; the genre may also incorporate other elements of hip hop culture, including DJing and scratching, beatboxing, and instrumentals. For hip hop culture in general and rap music in particular as an important source for the study of religion and an important source of reflection on religion in America. Traditional notions of religious commitment lodged, for example, in the rhetoric and structures of black churches are challenged by the religious rhetoric and existential posture of artists who claim a relationship with the divine, but whose surface activities might suggest a lack of the ethical posture; one might assume that such a commitment might entail. Here we connote a paradigm shift that has a different impact on cultural studies, religious studies, and African American theological reflection, a conceptual alteration of African American theological reflection that promotes a turn towards a more complete arrangement of the organic source material. Theology, therefore, moves away from the apologetics of the supernatural, from the affirmation of the self-understanding of parts... middle of paper... conceptualization of life. But where does hip hop culture fit into this conceptual framework? Does rap music really imply a complex religious posture or disposition? In other words, how can we avoid realizing that rap music borrows from the very structures and assumptions that Miller seeks to challenge? Yes, the religious landscape projected in rap music is complex, bumpy and conceptually approximate, but how much of the substance of this reality is "captured" in our analysis? How much of the complexity and messiness of religion is precisely and vividly "captured" in the representations offered by rap artists? Does the artist represent the material of religious life or just a modified representation of that life? What is "religious" and what is it called? Works Cited http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14755610902786361#.U00KPqRD9-A