The Tight Rope

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As we navigate the balance between hope and uncertainty, we invite you to join Dr. Cornel West & Professor Tricia Rose on The Tight Rope, a weekly program where we welcome listeners and guests as thought collaborators. The Tight Rope is rich in creative, unfiltered dialogue on topics ranging from culture, art, and music to the contours of systemic racism, philosophy, the power of Socratic self-examination, and the possibilities of a peaceful and just world. Our innovative and interactive format will highlight the professors’ combined expertise to encourage critical thinking, self-reflection, and human connection as we navigate The Tight Rope.

Episodes

Thursday Jul 30, 2020

Lecrae in The Deep End: Finding Restoration and Forward Motion

Thursday Jul 30, 2020

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Tight Rope, award-winning hip hop artist Lecrae joins Dr. Cornel West and Professor Tricia Rose for dialogue about posturing in the world of rap, the meaning of being a revolutionary Christian in today’s world, and the importance of having moral courage no matter what your ideology. They critique the policing of genres and stereotypes of Trap music. Lecrae also speaks vulnerably about his healing journey from depression after the “American dream” failed him and all of America. Be sure not to miss this powerful episode of The Tight Rope.

Cornel West

Dr. Cornel West is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University. A prominent democratic intellectual, social critic, and political activist, West also serves as Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. West has authored 20 books and edited 13. Most known for Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, West appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span, and Democracy Now. West has appeared in over 25 documentaries and films, including Examined Life, and is the creator of three spoken word albums including Never Forget. West brings his focus on the role of race, gender, and class in American society to The Tight Rope podcast.

Tricia Rose

Professor Tricia Rose is Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. She also holds the Chancellor’s Professorship of Africana Studies and serves as the Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives. A graduate of Yale (B.A.) and Brown University (Ph.D), Rose authored Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy (2003), and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (2008). She also sits on the Boards of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Color of Change, and Black Girls Rock, Inc. Focusing on issues relating to race in America, mass media, structural inequality, popular culture, gender and sexuality and art and social justice, Rose engages widely in scholarly and popular audience settings, and now also on The Tight Rope podcast.

Lecrae

Lecrae is a celebrated, award-winning, multiple platinum artist. As a rapper, author, activist, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Christian, Lecrae has forged his own path combining his faith and hip hop talents. Houston-born Lecrae has earned two Grammys and a No. 1 album on the Billboard Gospel chart, a first for a hip-hop album. Lecrae’s seventh album Anomaly debuted at No. 1 on both the Billboard 200 and Gospel charts simultaneously in 2014, another first for any album. His 2016 memoir Unashamed inspired millions as a New York Times Bestseller, and this October, he will share more of his vulnerable honesty in his upcoming book I Am Restored: How I Lost My Religion but Found My Faith. Truly a revolutionary force in hip hop music and the Christian community, Lecrae remains true to himself standing for love, justice, and humanity. Lecrae’s newest album Restoration will be released in August 2020. Listen to his latest song “Deep End” now.

Insight from this episode:

Details on the sense of hope and connection to inner emotional worlds that people are looking for and are becoming more open to in hip hop music.
Secrets to transforming personal suffering into creativity.
Reflections from Lecrae and Dr. West on being artists, thinkers, and Christians, who speak truth, love people, and seek justice.
Details on Lecrae’s journey to form his musical and activist identities, along with his inspiration for his upcoming album Restoration.
Secrets to handling backlash, standing true to yourself, and finding your path to spiritual, mental, and emotional healing.
How to walk alongside people with differing views from you.

Quotes from the show:

“[Hip hip] begins with this extraordinary intervention in the process of music making. It just dramatically changes what it means to make music. It brings the voices of marginal black and brown people right into the fore. It takes them from being completely spoken for in the 70s, for sure in the mainstream, to having a voice of their own. Just incredible storytelling that hip hop elevates… it’s individual, what my story is, but it’s also collective. It tells an experiential collective story.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #8
“People are much more open in hip hop to a kind of interrogation of interiority.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #8
“There’s no such thing as a Christian hip hop artist. The hip hop artist just got to tell the truth, and the truth just also happens to connect to Jesus.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #8
“What we’re seeing is young folk’s hunger for something real: spiritual, moral, political, economic, institutional, personal… inside all the wounds and bruises owing to the trauma they’ve been through but also connecting to the critiques of structures and institutions.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #8
“Art is not democratic. Everybody can’t be Toni Morrison. Everybody can’t be Prince. Everybody can’t be James Brown. Everybody can’t be Aretha. We can all love her, but we can’t all be her… We got certain folk who are called out, who have tremendous responsibility and a burden but also great joy because it’s a joy to serve the people. It’s a joy to be a truth teller. It’s a joy to move people at the deepest level.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #8
“Hip hop chose me. We’re talking about an art form that was created by disenfranchised black and brown kids in the Bronx. Black and brown kids all over the world who saw that felt like, man, we have a voice.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“I needed hip hop. I needed to talk about the things going on inside and what was going on in my community.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“Many times people frown upon the South from the Northeast, and they said, “Oh they’re slow and they haven’t progressed and adjusted.” It wasn’t that there was a slowness, it was that there was a difference in how things were being seen and being approached. It’s like the blues and jazz. It’s not that one is better than the other. It’s that there are two different approaches in how they’re expressing themselves through music.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“Hip hop initially started as a form of expression for a lot of young people. And then it was galvanized by suburban white folks, who kind of wanted to peer into this world that folks were talking about, but didn’t actually want to experience it. It’s like watching a Scarface movie-- you want to see all the gangsterism, but you don’t want to have to live through it.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“Because there was money involved, now that muddied up the mixture because now you didn’t know how authentic you should be. Should I embellish these tales of trauma and terror because it sells more? I came up at the height of people embellishing these tales. So I wrestled internally.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
On his earlier music and his spiritual transformation: “I would kind of dumb it down because it wasn’t something that was exalted or highlighted in my community, being educated and knowing about what’s going on in the world. So I dumbed it down and talked about the usual, typical stuff-- the money, the cars. But I think after my spiritual transformation, I came to the resolve that if I have worth, if I have purpose, if I have dreams, then I was purposed for something and there must be a greater being that gave me purpose and I need to investigate not only who this being is but what I’ve been purposed to do. And then there became a conflict in my life, which made me say, okay, I’ve got to start using my voice for more than the normal party, get drunk, get high.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“When that kind of spirituality connects to your genius, brother [Lecrae], you can start soaring like an eagle. We ain’t talking about no peacock. A lot of these hip hop artists are just peacocks, look at me, look at me, look at my foliage. We ain’t interested in your foliage; we interested in your fruit. You shall know them by the fruit that you bear, not the foliage that you display.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #8
On white consumption of hip hop: “They want to define what it means to be Black by asking Black performers to perform a very narrow set of stereotypical ideas about what it means to be Black. It becomes another reinforcing mechanism, “Well, we’ll recognize you as Black, but not you as Black, because you’re telling me what I already know about what it means to be authentic.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #8
On merging hip hop and his spirituality: “It takes a instant to remove a person from slavery, but a lifetime to get the slavery out of a person. So for me it was a process.” –Lacrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“Peacocks strut because they cannot fly. You got to be an eagle… We’re glad that you’re successful and you got money and you got wonderful artistry, now what you going to use it for? …Martin was broke as the 10 Commandments financially, but everyone remembers him. They don’t remember the most successful Negro in Atlanta in 1968. Malcolm only had $151 in his pocket when he was shot. We shall forever remember Malcolm. He didn’t have no cash. He didn’t have any success. He was in the world and not of it. –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #8
“[Vulnerability] always drew them closer. It made them more endearing to me, and in some ways it was helpful… I want to show off my scars, so they know their wounds can heal.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“The trap house is an articulation of systemic racism… Wall Street is part of the gutting of Black communities and banking fraud and destroying people’s opportunities to create even a poor stable neighborhood. So the trap house become a terrible articulation of what’s left. But trap lyrics that people normally attach to that is sort of a hedonistic acceptance of the very circumstances that trap has grown out of based on the conditions. [Lecrae] says this is a trap sound, this is a trap reality, and here’s an alternative reality to that trap circumstance.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #8
“We are very nuanced. But people hate nuance… They don’t want to wrestle with our nuances to see the beauty of who we are as a people and to see the trap for more than just where the drugs get sold and where the boarded up houses are.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“As a Christian, from my own community, I’ve got to navigate people to understand I’m not shucking and jiving because I’m a follower of Jesus. I’m not embracing white supremacy or a slave master’s philosophy or belief. I’m talking about something that predates slavery. It’s an Eastern religion if there ever was one… I’m following a brown Palestianian Jew.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“I continued to stand up and say something, and, man, I’ve never been met with so much visceral hate in my life. It was just constant and consistent. It drove me to one of the darkest places I’ve ever been.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“Curtis Mayfiled not looking to the Grammys for his point of reference. He wants to know whether in fact those who came before-- what do you think about it, Jerry Butler? What do you think about it? The tradition becomes the lens through which he views himself. So it ain’t about these prizes. It ain’t about the establishment. We want to put a smile on grandmama's face. Grandmama never questioned your worth, ever. She love you to death. So if you put a smile on her face, it don’t make no difference what these white supremacists and neoliberals who act like they lovin’ white folk who got their own little programs and agendas, that’s not the point of reference. That’s how Black sanity and dignity is persevered.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #8
“Pessimism is the belief that based on the evidence, nothing’s going to change. Optimism is the belief is based on the evidence, things will change. But hope is the belief that with or without the evidence, God is faithful, I’m going to be consistent, I’m going to keep pushing.” –LecraeThe Tight Rope Episode #8
“There’s a layer of restoration that is simply your mental and emotional health. You don’t have to embrace any of the spiritual health. If you do, awesome. But some people need it-- you’re just hungry. I’m just trying to make sure you’re getting fed today.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
On community: “That’s going to be the skin on your faith-- seeing actual people who love you, who walk with you, and who care for you.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“You can’t police Black genius and Black talent.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #8
On people with different views from him: “Disagree does not mean dislike... A rainbow is beautiful because of the multitude of colors within it, and not because it’s one color, one shade. It’s learning how to appreciate those nuances. We’re so quick to dismiss people because of these broad strokes that people get painted with.” –Lecrae The Tight Rope Episode #8
“Each human being is made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, they have a dignity that is never reducible to their politics. They have a preciousness that is not reducible to their ideology. And they also have the capacity to choose and go another way.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #8