Hip hop’s pantheon rumbles

J. Cole's changing role in the battle for pre-eminence with Drake and Lamar.

Nyasha Chiketsani

Nyasha graduated from Cardiff University where he studied media, journalism and culture. He makes both hip hop and spoken word content.

Cole, Lamar and Drake.

Spirituality and religion are inseparable from American hip hop culture. Recent studies have shown that African Americans, the pioneers of hip hop culture, are more likely to be religious than any other ethnic group in America. As such, hip hop lyrics are often littered with allusions to both organised religion and more abstract spirituality. Consider Kanye West’s infamous 2004 record Jesus Walks, a song in which the Chicago native overtly professes faith in Jesus of Nazareth and pleads for his protection as he traverses through the adverse socio-economic terrain that is Black America.

Or take two of hip hop's most successful and influential artists today, friends turned enemies: J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar. As recently as his second last project, The Off Season, Cole reveals an ongoing journey he finds himself on, stating:

I dibble-dabble in a few religions

My homie constantly telling me ’bout Quran, puttin’ me on

I read a few pages and recognize the wisdom in it

But I ain’t got the discipline for stickin’ with it

Cole’s belief in some form of a deity is well-documented throughout his music. Religion, though often critiqued, serves as a continual trope in his discography. Consider his pseudo-messianic perspective on the track Want You To Fly, where he claims that:

God is real and he usin’ me for a bigger purpose…

Sometimes I think that these verses can help a person

Way more than the ones they readin’ in churches on days of worship

No disrespect to the Lord and Savior, that ain’t just ego

I just observe that them words no longer relate to people

‘Cause modern times be flooded with dollar signs

And social media stuntin’, my n****s just wanna shine

They frame of mind so far removed from the days and times

Of Nazareth

His counterpart, Lamar, is not far behind in terms of religious motifs and themes. His spiritual journey, like Cole’s, is complex and multi-layered. Early in his career, one could assume that Lamar was an all-out Christian due to lyrics on songs such as His Pain, within which the Compton artist questions why God keeps on blessing him amid his mistakes and transgressions. Furthermore, his debut album good kid, m.A.A.d city was flooded with religious overtones, the culmination being the 12-minute track Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst where Kendrick and his affiliates confess their need for a Saviour, namely Jesus of Nazareth. However, as alluded to earlier, Kendrick’s spiritual journey is not as straightforward as that song would make it seem.

Though Christian virtues such as humility, altruism and charity still run through songs such as How Much A Dollar Cost, Kendrick has often been drawn to other religions, including Black Hebrew Israelism. Kendrick’s current position is uncertain, he seems to have landed on a form of religious syncretism. In his most recent album, Mr Morale and The Big Steppers, he confesses to still being a Christian “but just not today” and openly confesses to “praying to the trees”.

Both artists, surveying their immense influence across the hip hop community, both locally and globally, have developed something of a Saviour complex as they seek to promote peace and unity. Despite Cole and Lamar’s prominent themes of emotional healing and social consciousness, the two still possess a competitive edge. Cole, on the hit single First Person Shooter on Drake’s For All The Dogs album stated

Love when they argue the hardest MC

Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me? We the big three like we started a league

This seemed to be a profound moment of acknowledgement and respect for the three rappers on contemporary hip hop’s pantheon (J Cole, Kendrick Lamar and Drake). However, the collaboration between J. Cole and Drake clearly didn’t sit well with the Compton Cowboy, Kendrick Lamar. This seemingly uncontroversial statement triggered a response Lamar, who declared:

“Motherf**k the ‘Big 3’, *n***a it’s just Big Me”

Lamar’s verse instantly became the talk of the town as Lamar had returned from his hiatus in order to take aim at his competition. And thus, Cole’s observation from his 2019 release Middle Child that “They act like two legends cannot coexist” has proved to be true.

However, Cole, perhaps unknowingly, has showcased the character of the Christian God in choosing to forego his offence and make peace with his brother.

So, what was Cole to do in this scenario?

For the Fayetteville Emcee, it seemed like a catch-22 of sorts; on the one hand, if he chose to retaliate that could cost him a friendship (with Lamar) that spanned over a decade. However, if Cole, choosing to maintain the peace, chose to turn the other cheek, his reputation as a preeminent emcee would be brought into question.

Cole, competitive as they come, refused to be outdone and replied to his friend-turned-foe, Kendrick Lamar, on a since deleted track called 7 Minute Drill. Cole scrutinised Lamar’s most recent album Mr Morale And The Big Steppers as well as his critically acclaimed 2015 release To Pimp A Butterfly. However, within a few days of the retaliation, J.Cole made a public apology to Lamar and his fans.

Cue the trolling, the confusion and the memes.

After years of working to cement his position as an elite hip hop artist, Cole’s status as a top emcee was now being questioned. The discourse surrounding Cole quickly turned sour, for the many hip hop fans who rejoiced over the return of parity and competition to the genre, this seemed to be a cop-out by Cole. However, Cole, perhaps unknowingly, has showcased the character of the Christian God in choosing to forego his offence and make peace with his brother.

But when he began to display forgiveness and humility? That became too much for the hip hop audience to stomach.

When Kendrick Lamar subsequently began to battle the third member of hip hop's Big Three, Drake, many fans applauded Cole for staying out of the conflict.

When Cole made his public apology to Lamar, his actions more resembled those of a Gandhi, Martin Luther King or, dare I say, Jesus, than a hip hop megastar. When the opportunity for lyrical bloodshed presented itself, Cole admittedly indulged, yet quickly retracted and repented. His actions strikingly resemble the teachings of Jesus, who advocated for radical reconciliation with one’s enemies.

It seems as though hip hop was content, and even supportive, of Cole’s afore-mentioned saviour complex... but only to a certain point. Giving to the poor? Fine. Spreading positivity and uplifting the oppressed? Fine. But when he began to display forgiveness and humility? That became too much for the hip hop audience to stomach.

In Jesus’ day, it was widely hoped that a Jewish messiah arrive in the form of a military warrior, who would destroy the oppressive Roman Empire. Therefore, when Jesus of Nazareth spoke of forgiveness, love for enemies and humility, this was difficult for his audience to accept. Instead, he taught and demonstrated a different path: one where the merciful will be shown mercy.

And so, perhaps there are similarities between Jesus’ story and the scenario Cole finds himself in.

Both audiences desired kings who sought bloodshed, vengeance and dominance. But, instead, both displayed love, peace and humility. It’s easy to choose the former but it’s pricey to choose the latter.

Some ponder the existence of God and His activity in the world today and with valid and noble reasons. However, what if God’s actions and character are sometimes mediated through unsuspecting people. What if God is condescending? Not in the sense that He belittles us or speaks patronisingly to us but rather gently descends to our level and communicates in ways that we can comprehend through people that we can relate to? What if God is more human than we sometimes think? Again, not in the sense that He’s susceptible to mistakes and error like us but more so in the sense that He knows what it’s like to experience pain and injustice, joy and relief and everything that comprises the human experience? Maybe through the medium of hip hop, a culture birthed out of poverty, vocational insecurity and social instability God has spoken to us? After all, it would be much like the God of the Christian Bible who chose not to enter the world as an infant in a royal family but rather choose the ghetto of Nazareth as His humble abode. Maybe, just maybe, this hip hop feud and Jermaine Cole’s withdrawal from it was a microphone through which God chose to speak and communicate His character to an onlooking world.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.