He was the guy next to the guy going to jail. Now, he's a Grammy-award winning artist with six albums and a second Don Cannon mixtape to his name. So how did this Christian rapper find so much success? It just took a little faith.
By Sunday night of Rock the Bells 2013, old-school hip-hop heads are worn out, their exhaustion compounded by two days of baking in sweltering California Valley summer temps, drinking overpriced cheap beer and smoking way too much weed. But these are do-or-die fans. If they don’t remember the glory days of the raucous call-and-response, they wish they did. So even though the name Lecrae only vaguely, if at all, rings a bell, when the rapper bellows,“Yo, how many people believe in freedom of speech?” during his hour-long evening set, the crowd is roused.
The next one almost incites them: “Yo, how many people believe in standing up for whatever you believe in?” Shouts fill the balmy night. “That's right, man!” “Yeah, man, that's what I'm talking about!” “Fuck yeah!” They’re hooked. And then he delivers the kicker:
“That’s exactly how I feel. I love God.”
This secular stage is Lecrae’s pulpit, and this is his sermon. Truth is, every rapper is preaching—and a lot of them at least mention God, either in an opening invocation, meat of their message or closing benediction. Kanye West even dedicated an entire song to Jesus. Yet Lecrae doesn’t just glance at the sky and move on. He namechecks Christ. Often.
Bringing the gospel to the masses has been a long war. He booked a spot on the mainstream festival Rock the Bells in 2013, but Lecrae’s first album, Real Talk, was released nine years ago on Reach Records, the independent label he co-founded. Since then, he’s released a handful of albums, one of which, 2008’s Rebel, became the first hip-hop album to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s Gospel Album charts. It wasn’t until his inclusion in the 2011 BET Hip Hop Awards cyphers, however, that he began to break through. “One crew was international,” Lecrae says. “[BET] was like, ‘You’re not international, but you’re foreign to us, so we’ll throw you in this one.’”
The following May, he secured even more mainstream ground by dropping his first mixtape, the successful Church Clothes, which was hosted by Don Cannon. “My producer and good friend Street Symphony introduced me to Don Cannon,” he says. “Both of us are over 6 feet tall, and can look each other in the eyes. I saw real hip-hop in his eyes, and he saw it in mine.”
Only a few months later, Lecrae’s sixth album Gravity was released to critical and commercial praise (it stormed the Billboard 200, becoming the No. 1 Rap, Independent, Christian and Gospel album as well as No. 3 overall) and went on to win the Grammy for Best Gospel Album. Now, with the RTB appearance on his resume and another Don Cannon-assisted tape, Church Clothes 2, out November 7, his seems to have gained a foothold in the secular rap world. Cannon doesn’t seem surprised.
“When you don’t sound too preachy, it comes off a little better,” the producer and DJ says over the phone from Atlanta. “Before, Christian rap didn’t really sound [like] authentic rap. The music didn’t have the same beat as a Lil Wayne beat or a Drake beat. Now it sounds more familiar. Makes it easy on the ears, easy for you to listen to the content.”
But in 2013 America, the word “Christ” might repel more people than the word “fuck.” It’s certainly flung around far less. Lecrae’s saving grace? No one really knows quite what to do with him, and he’s using that confusion to his advantage.
“I didn't really have any social currency in school,” the 31-year-old Lecrae says, sitting on a couch in a recording studio in a desolate, industrial section of downtown L.A. a couple days after his Rock the Bells set.
This is hard to believe. He’s as tall and muscular as the basketball players he’s worked with, like Dwayne Wade, who he partnered with this year for a national fatherhood initiative, or who are his fans, like Jeremy Lin. Dressed in khaki cargo shorts and a navy Pink Dolphin t-shirt, his arms are covered in tattoos and his ears are pierced. Around his neck hangs a gold chain of a totem pole, a nod to the small percentage of Native American in his ethnic makeup. Dude is very good-looking and has an easy confidence. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t have to do much to pull the hottest girl at the party.
The rapper was born in Houston but due to being reared by a single mom, he bounced around a good bit. Constantly moving, not to mention an absentee father, made him introverted as a child. Without a father figure, he struggled with his self-worth and began to emulate the gang members who lived in his grandmother’s San Diego neighborhood, where his mother had sent him in the hopes of giving him some stability.
“Southeast San Diego, Skyline Hills, is not a pretty place to be,” he says. He chuckles: “We knew there was a beach, [but] it was the neighborhood that, you know, doesn't make the brochures.”
Freshman year of high school, he failed almost every class due to skipping school and getting high. By sophomore year, he was stealing with his own version of a bling ring—it’s always easier to fall in with the bad kids than the cool kids—and landed on a gang list. “I was never a tough guy. I was always the guy next to the guy who was really headed to prison,” he says.
Fate intervened when a teacher spotted his artistic streak. “I had to blend in everywhere I went so acting was natural for me,” he explains. He ended up auditioning for and receiving a performing arts scholarship to the University of North Texas.
Though acting and creative writing came easily, he wasn’t passionate about either, skipping class in favor of going to the music lab. He transferred to Middle Tennessee State University because they had a recording program. Joining a fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, gave him the social relevance he’d never had in high school. Being a frat boy and not only throwing big parties, but promoting them, made him something of a local celebrity.
All should’ve been well, but Lecrae found himself still doubting his significance. His grandmother was Pentecostal, and his mother, who was a “kind of a black hippie,” bucked that and encouraged him to explore. “[My grandmother’s church was] skirts to your ankles and no makeup and shouting and tambourines and I was, like, ‘Yeah, I'm fine, I'll pass,’” he says.
An acquaintance on campus invited him to a Christian conference in Atlanta, and he figured girls would be there, so he said yes.“They talked like me and looked like me and were listening to hip-hop and I was just like, Yo, this is weird. Y'all can't be Christians,” he says. It set him off.
It was not, however, an overnight conversion. Having moved back to Texas, his partying didn’t stop. He’d gotten good at promoting, and decided to expand to high school parties. It happened to be a prime market for selling drugs as well. Things came to a head one night when he was 22 and the police found him trespassing on a high school campus. He rushed to get out of the building, but a couple cars had blocked off his car. They searched it and found weed. But they also found an obviously used Bible. One of the cops was a Christian.
Lecrae was in the back of the car, handcuffed. He already had a juvenile case, and was pretty sure he was going to jail. The policeman approached and asked if the Bible belonged to him. Lecrae said it did.
“He was like, ‘You know what I want from you? I want you to really live this. I want you to take it seriously. I'm going to let you go.’ I was like, ‘Okay Lord, you want me to take this as a sign,’” he pauses and laughs. “I didn't, but I should have.”
Not ready to fully commit to a Christian lifestyle, he continued doing whatever he wanted. Finally, though, in 2003, a bad day of epic proportions forced him to make a decision once and for all. One of his two girlfriends was flying in for the weekend, and he got in a serious car accident going to pick her up. Fortunately he was unharmed and proceeded to hang out with her, which caused him to show up late to his job as a stockperson and he was fired. From there he went out and got drunk, and driving home, got in an even worse car wreck, narrowly missing a semi-truck and flipping his car several times. He miraculously wasn’t hurt—again—and when his local girlfriend came to pick him up, he told her he wanted to go party more. While out, he got in a fight. His eye split open, he wound up in the hospital for stitches. The wake-up call was too ear-splitting. He would’ve had to have been deaf and dumb not to heed it.
Having co-founded the Reach label and ministry in Texas,Lecrae decided about five years ago he needed to relocate to Atlanta in order to expand his, well, reach. He, his wife and three children now live there full-time. “If culture is being shaped somewhere, you want your hand on the Play-Doh, too. [And] it’s just a great place to grow as an artist, to be connected to people and production,” he says.
Out of all of the people he’s connected to, Don Cannon might be the most important. Wandering around the studio today is the man who helped foster that relationship, Reach Records’ A&R, Street Symphony. He’s a Christian also, but having produced for the likes of Gucci Mane and Yo Gotti, his reputation has allowed Lecrae access he might otherwise be denied. “[He] is quickly becoming a young L.A. Reid here in Atlanta. He doesn't have a stigma [from being a Christian] attached to him,” Lecrae says of Street.
“[Street Symphony] never brought me nothing wack,” Cannon says of being introduced to Lecrae. “When I got [Lecrae’s] music, I was like, he’s talented. Everybody’s morals and ethics are different. His and my life are parallel. Same for the homie Street Symphony. We all come from a church background. Even though we had to deal with a lot of things on the street, at the end of the day, you still get down on your knees and pray.”
With the negative association Christianity has due to religious dogmatics, not to mention the disastrous setbacks the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal dealt the faith, convincing a secular audience of the sincerity of his stance might be the toughest part of Lecrae’s mission. Even he was hesitant to do Church Clothes. “It was me kinda stepping out of a faith-based box, and I was a little nervous. [Cannon] was like, ‘This is so freaking dope.’ Don Cannon helped in the streets. People are like, ‘Isn’t this the Christian rapper? But Don Cannon is hosting it!’”
More than just the streets paid attention. After Church Clothes was downloaded over 500,000 times on Datpiff, producers and artists clamored to get in on the next installment. “I hit him up like, ‘Yo, we gotta do a part two, people be harassing me!’” Cannon says, laughing. “That’s what happens when you discover something new—you got every producer in the world wanna be a part.”
Indeed. Church Clothes 2 features B.o.B., Paul Wall and production by Boi-1da and David Banner. When asked why so many secular artists are open to working with him, Lecrae says, “I get it, we use genres to help us categorize music. But when it comes to me, people kinda struggle. Is it gospel? But he’s got songs with B.o.B. So when people saw, oh, you’re not what I thought you were, it made it a whole lot easier.”
When I mention the pass some rappers are given for talking about God (Kendrick Lamar, for instance), Lecrae says he sees them as throwing him alley-oops. “They do a lot of what I call cognitive dissonance,” he says. “They talk about things, but they’re not necessarily saying how to change them.”
“I look at myself as a cultural revolutionary. I look up to Bob Marley,” he continues. While that sounds exciting, the reality is it’s often a lonely road to travel, and of course, he’s the one cutting that road. Not only is there really not a category for him—he is the category, after all—but he also doesn’t play a lot of the underhanded games suits do, therefore they don’t deal with him.
I ask if it bothers him that even with a long history in the industry, working on his seventh album in a studio lined with G-Unit platinum plaques and having a Grammy, radio won’t play his hits. Unlike Jay-Z, he does give a shit. “I'd definitely be lying if I said it didn't,” he admits. “But I get it. I’m not naïve.” He brightens: “My music doesn't get played on the radio, so I might as well make good, timeless music.”
It’s no altar call, but Lecrae’s brand of church doesn’t really believe in those, anyway.
