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For me, I want to change the way people see the world. That's why I do what I do...with every email, text message, and every phone call that I get with people saying "Man what you've done God has used it to change me" that's when I see success.
When you go watch "The Lord Of The Rings," you don't just buy a bag of popcorn, and go sit in the movie theater to watch where covetous people in our hearts deceive us, and then walk out the theater. That's the message that may be in that movie.
My mission is to change the way people see the world. Everybody has a perspective or a lens they see things through, and hopefully I can adjust that lens or change that lens so that they see things from a different perspective, a different lens.
Hip-hop is substance. It's social. It's science - that's what it started off as. We have fun, and we still having fun; ain't nothing wrong with fun, but we need that social, we need that substance, we need that science, and we need that spiritual.
I've made so many crazy mistakes and done so many terrible things, I don't know. I'd just say I'm grateful for every mistake and every disappoint that I've had to experience - that I'm still loved and still cared for, that God's still here for me.
I would say you've got to find your identity in God - in God alone - because everything else is a false sense of identity. He's the one who made you, he's your designer and your work and your value is found in him and not in anything or anyone else.
People have got to form some kind of unified fronts where you know who your allies are, you know who your friends are, and really begin to work together to create different kinds of infrastructures to protect one another and to help one another thrive.
My mission is not to give an apologetic for why I'm trying to impact people's lives and use the Gospel to transform. My mission is to impact people's lives and use the Gospel to transform. I want to be on that mission and not explaining it all the time.
It's easier to be hedonistic and just chase after whatever appeals to your senses. That's the life of an animal, you just do. It's more difficult to stand by your convictions and have people berate you on both sides and feel like there's no home for you.
I'm very optimistic that there are sincere believers out there that are okay with tradition but don't want to endorse traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism but want to embrace tradition because it's God-honoring. I think that's a beautiful thing.
Hip hop - it's an art form but it's a culture as well. You grow up in the culture and you never leave it. It's a style of dress; it's a way of thought. I always grew up in the culture, and it was part of who I was and I carried it into every world I was in.
Moving forward, hopefully the platform my career has given me will allow me to continue to be a voice in culture, whether that's doing lectures on campus or writing books or whatever that looks like. I feel like that's really the lane that I uniquely connect with.
Nobody would deny that if someone was a billionaire in 1962, his billions are going to affect all of his descendants. The reverse is also true. The lack of education, material, and finances for a slave are going to affect the descendants of that individual as well.
Hip-hop in a lot of ways is like sports; when you go to a sports game, you see people from all ages, all ethnicities, all social classes, they're all there enjoying the game. Hip-hop has been one of the only forms of music that has provided that kind of atmosphere.
My graduation was an amazing moment for my family, my community. In my early childhood, we lived on a subsidized income, with government assistance - at one point when I was growing up, my mother was making $14,000 a year. Now I had made it out of the hood, so to speak.
There's not too many artist that can handle what we would call an Christian R&B sound. It's kind of a limited field as far as singers go. Just hoping that more artist like that can resonate and grow.In terms of female rappers, man hey come on! We're here...come talk to us!
For a lot of people, groups, Christians included, issues are homogenized. And so to be a Christian, I'm either this staunch, conservative Republican, or I'm this tree-hugging liberal. You're stereotyped. It's almost assumed that people know what your issues are going to be.
I think of people like Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes. They all came out of the South, and they followed a certain tradition and energy. That's no knock to groups like The Temptations or The Supremes, not at all, but they were way more polished in how they did things.
I'm saying let's demonstrate what Jesus had done in us so the world may see a new way, God's way, Jesus' way the picture of redemption that Jesus has done in us. So Jesus redeems us and we desire to go to the world and demonstrate that so that others can see what redemption looks like.
I've always done music to push people to get them to get uncomfortable in their seat so they could wrestle with things. Not to become pew potatoes, just simply sitting there, growing fat with knowledge and not applying it. It's a mixed tape that's really aimed and geared toward hip hop culture.
For me, Christianity is not a genre. It's faith. The Gospel is not a genre either. It's faith. I definitely understand the semantics of naming things to give them some kind of distinction but I think my faith is pretty distinct. If you want to call it hip hop, essentially it is. That's the art form.
When I moved into one of the worst inner-cities in America to do missionary work I had to do risk assessment, and It was a risk. My family could have been in danger, house could get robbed at any minute but I count it all as nothing compared to knowing Jesus it was all worth it at the end of the day.
Men, specifically in the West, have no rights of passage, no way to know when they become a man. Everywhere else in the world you gotta kill a lion or stab a shark, or go on some journey, and you come back and you're a man. But here in the West, we're really kind of clueless as to what makes us a man.
I tried to give some warnings early on to a lot of my Christian followers that mixtape really wasn't targeted at the church so they would be able to understand. I wanted to wrestle with some things that I know people outside of the church wrestle through. When It comes to the church I just want to edify.
America has this fascination with glorifying the villain and not talking about the trials and tribulations. We tell the story of the successful villain a lot of times, but we don't tell the story of the people who don't come out so successful, and we don't tell the story of all the bystanders of that choice.
If you just want a comfortable life, the awards, and pats on the back then you play Christian Hip Hop safe. Because playing it safe will give you consistency, but if you're really in this to see peoples lives transform then you're gonna have to do some risk assessment - it is costly to rally try to impact people.
God says, "there's nothing you can do to be accepted, trust me and and let me change you." And at the end of the day, acceptance isn't about what I do, or what I don't do. Acceptance is about me trusting God to take me exactly as I am and take me to something different. And I think that's what we should have for people.
I'm not a country music fan, so if you slide me some music and say, 'You gotta check this out; it's country,' I'm going to be a little hesitant to listen, and I think if someone says, 'Hey, you gotta listen to this guy rap; he's Christian,' you're like, 'I don't identify as Christian, so not really sure I want to listen to that.'
Folks working late, I had a babysitter. I ain't about to sit here and name her. I was almost 8 when she came in late, woke me up with a game to play. Did a few things that it's hard to say. Told me to keep that secret safe. I'm trying to act like it ain't real. Had my innocence just stripped from me, and I still don't know how to feel.
You got to do well at your craft ultimately, especially if you know that people are observing you and watching you and you don't want to get out there and produce subpar work. Because that's how people look at it. They don't just look at you as an athlete, they look at it as o you're an athlete and you're a Christian, what's happening now?
Gandhi said it; Frederick Douglass said it. A lot of people have probably said 'It's not Christ that I have a problem with, it's his people.' And that was my struggle: it's God's people. I felt disenfranchisement. I felt so much abuse from organized religion because I'm walking in a direction that a lot of them couldn't fathom and can't understand.
I know specifically me being somebody who has had most of my experiences within the black church, that's cultural... you gotta put on your church clothes when you got to church...and it's nothing wrong with that - that's absolutely fine! But I think what's happening to a new generation ,the hip hop generation, there's astigmatism, a feeling that I'm unwelcome.
I don't think the music industry has done any damage to my faith - it's probably strengthened it because it's made me see how necessary and relevant it is. I think if you don't keep your guard up, obviously there's a lot of potential for being half-hearted throughout the whole process because you can compare yourself to other people instead of the ultimate standard.
I think everybody has a purpose. Everybody is made to be a picture of how good and glorious God is, and I think sometimes we'll get it confused and think because we mess up, we make mistakes or we have some blemishes in our record, that our purpose is somehow messed up. But actually that only serves to further paint a picture of how good God is when he uses people who are messed up just like me.
I want to be able to get my point across. I respect people expressing their freedoms and their liberties and their rights, but at the same time I'm almost mindful that my freedoms can be other people's downfalls. I don't want to flash my freedoms in your face all the time, especially if they're going to be detrimental. I can get you to understand my point without going overboard, and we're cool.
I want to be the bridge. I embrace it. I don't mind being a leader. I don't mind opening the doors. I guess my prayer is that there will be other leaders behind me who will come in and do more than what I've done, and more than what I can do and that this serves as an opportunity to level the playing field in hip-hop. I just want to be able to say "Hey, there's way more going on in life than the club."
I know for me as an artist, I think I do myself and my listeners a disservice, if I don't listen to some of the best music out there. If I was an architect or a carpenter, I'm going to want to study the best architects and carpenters and I'm going to appreciate their work, because they're going to inspire me to do well. And I just look at them as great architects and I just appreciate the gift that God gave them.
Barack Obama didn't say "I only want to be the President of Black people," he said "I want to be the President of the United States and have something to say about the United States and my perspective and my lens is going to affect my judgment on everything" and that's the way a Christian should be. I'm going to invade culture and my lens and perspective is going to influence culture just as much as anyone else's.
I want people to know that LeCrae the person is a Christian. Just because you put a tag on me or my music that doesn't make me or the music more or less of a Christian. I'd hope the legacy that I'd leave that people say... No, he's not a Christian because he said he was or because his stuff was labeled that. He's a Christian because he lived it! And when you know him and you know his life this is someone whose life is marked by Jesus.
I think Hip Hop and Gospel are such strong distinct cultures that have problems, unspoken problems obviously, but problems with one another. On the hip hop side, it's the problems of "awe man I don't like the suits and ties," and on the Gospel side it's " awe man they need to pull their pants up." I just think those are minor, really small issues that we just need to get over and learn to help each other. We're all on the same , and in the same boat.
Anytime you're dealing with moral issues, in a government position, you're dealing with some sticky stuff because everybody's morality is different. So you may be a Christian and say "my morality is based on the Bible." But if it doesn't line up with the way they think it should line up, now you got a problem with them. And then you can say, "I'm more in line with the Bible," but you don't care about the Bible, so they are like 'why are you imposing these difficult rules on me? I don't even believe in that.' So you just have an interesting and sticky situation.