The Kingdom of God is Like a Freestyle Rap Battle

In terms of personal spiritual reflections, God has been speaking to me through the nature of hip-hop to illustrate how the kingdom of God battles the kingdom of Satan. In Luke 11:14-22, we see that the reign of God battling the reign of Satan involves fighting over the inner lives of individuals, namely, inside the "home" of their hearts. Spiritual battles involve power struggles over worship/glory inside a person's heart. An Old Testament macrocosm of this inner heart battle takes place in 1 Kings 18 where Elijah engaged in a glory battle against the prophets of Baal. In a New Testament understanding of these battles, God wins when he gets the glory and Satan wins when someone or something else does (whether it's something of the sinful flesh, the world, or explicitly demonic stuff). In non-religious language (which is sometimes more helpful to the mind in understanding), someone having "glory" involves causing others to have jaw-dropping, awe-filled wonder that magnetizes a person's attention with stunning, astounding amazement.

How does this relate to hip-hop? An emcee freestyling rap battle totally illustrates this concept. In a freestyle battle, two rappers spontaneously produce rhymes to creatively and artistically attack the other person in the dimension of linguistical aesthetics. What is of paramount importance is how aesthetically beautiful, "slick", "sick", "ill", "hot", "legit" each rapper's rhymes are. This relates to glory in how the rapper who wins (usually) ends up capturing the crowd's attention with jaw-dropping, awe-filled wonder and stunning, astounding amazement (albeit on a "finite" level). In this context, they do so by rapping with a soulful rhythmic flow of fresh lyrics that are saturated with seemingly life-giving, energetic punch-lines. This apparent "life-giving energy" of the exquisite phonetic synchrony of rhyming words is in sync with and propelled by the lively pulse of an awesome sounding hip-hop beat. This beat, if it is "legit", has a dynamic bass that vibrates the air molecules of the room's atmosphere with a soulful rhythm, which synergizes with the energy of the spontaneous poetic lyrics of the rappers that are intended to take down one's opponent. This is a glory battle, where the crowd, hungering to thrillingly praise a rapper's "dope stuff", ascribes glory to who they think is worthy of it.

(This is the cleanest example I could find of Emcee Jin freestyle battling before his conversion.)

The spiritual parallels are what follows: the instrumental hip-hop beat is the spiritual realm, one emcee represents the voice of God, the other emcee represents Satan's voice, and the crowd represents the human heart's hunger to worship something that worthily captures its attention. (As an incidental parallel, in Genesis 3:14, God "curses" Satan with "his voice".) The human heart desires to "enthusiastically cheer" for something from its depths, that is, to have its attention astoundingly magnetized by an independent life-giving, soul-pumping energy that comes from an awe-saturated source it feels deserves deep admiration, devotion, and even obsession with. This is glory. This can either come from God's voice wooing us to himself, or Satan's voice wooing us to the world, the flesh, or even his demonic kingdom explicitly. At any given moment, this "spiritual rap battle of the heart" is always taking place. For each moment, the heart is left with a choice to give glory to God or to something else. And Satan's voice likes to tell the human heart to secretly (or sometimes not so secretly) have admiration, devotion to, and obsession with the idols of the world ("a stable career", "a high-income salary", "a prestigious position", "a relationship", "romantic interests", "human honour", "safety", "pleasure", "a respectful reputation", "laziness", "looking righteous", "being special in the world") by astoundingly magnetizing its attention by deceiving it into thinking that these idols have independent life-giving, soul-pumping energy that comes from an awe-saturated source it feels deserves deep admiration, devotion, and even obsession with. Of course, a student of Jesus knows that this can only come from God. Although one's head knows it, a lot of the time, our heart does not "functionally know it" and during these moments this heart-knowledge of God's glory, for all intents and purposes, is non-operational, inactive, and stripped of its functional power. This is when we start losing the battle of glory on the "spiritual stage" of our hearts. It is a choice each moment as to which voice my heart will functionally follow and worship. The flow of God's voice, or Satan's. Each one becomes louder, more dynamic, energetic and "hype" the more I focus on it and tune out the other.

A Return to the World of Rhyming

After a series of inspirational events within the past few months, I have intentionally been trying to pick up rhyming again.

Being somewhat intentional about writing rap from my highschool days to the first half of university, I subsequently sort of let this art recede into the background of my interests, especially as I got more into the world of critical thinking, academic learning, and scholarly research. Through this decade of time, I did write the occasional birthday rap or humourous rap for friends for random things. However, I wasn't really intentional about it.... until a few months ago.

It's interesting how things end up. I never knew I'd be picking this thing up again. Honestly, I thought it was kind of a "juvenile" hobby of mine from another era of my life that I "outgrew".

An unexpected surprise was waiting for me around the corner though. For the past couple years, I have been exploring psychoanalysis, and through that, I have learned how to use the right side of my brain more and more. The right brain is the side of the brain that is more associative, intuitive, emotive, imaginative, creative as opposed to the left side of the brain that's very logical, rational, factual, scientific etc. Through psychoanalysis, I have learned how to use the right brain in specific ways, like dream interpretation, counselling exercises involving ones imagination, and getting in touch with the wisdom of my physical body on issues that I'm dealing with. I've also tried to approach life with more of my right brain in general.

The interesting thing though, is that I've learned to freestyle rap with my right brain! I realize only now that 10+ years ago, I tried to go about freestyling mainly with my left brain. And it simply doesn't work. Even if it works for a few lines, it feels very mechanical, the way one feels when one is reading/doing scientific lab reports. It has a different qualitative feel to it compared to the other side of the brain. One has to tune into the right brain for organic "flow" that's "cool". It's been really interesting. I never knew before that one had to freestyle with the part of the brain one dreamed with.

I am far from mastering the art of freestlying, but the unexpected psychotechnology of psychoanalysis has taken me really far. It's a big exaggeration, but it feels like the help of psychoanalysis in freestyle rapping has been like Neo "downloading" Kung fu into his mind and then just "knowing how to do it".

I also realize that it's so much easier to rhyme vulgar than rhyme clean. A lot of the time, when I tap into my right brain flow, my inhibitions/restrictions/limits of the cleanliness of the words that come into my mind are lowered along with the rational logic that I try to lower because it helps me to be more creative. However, when this happens sometimes, I can sense vulgar words coming into my mouth, where I have to override my mouth from rhyming with my left brain right before the filthy content almost rolls off of my tongue! This is a concrete lesson for me in how Jesus said that out of the overflow of the heart (in my view, a lot of the "heart" of a person is associated with the right brain) the mouth speaks.

I also realize that it's easier to flow when I deeply put my body into it (i.e. my head bobbing, my rhythmic arm flailing, and even my leg doing some mini-springing). When my whole body is immersing itself in the "sick flow" of a beat, I feel like I've "entered the beat" as opposed to just "listening outside of it" and the result is that I can freestyle a lot better. This is opposed to me rapping while standing as still as a statue. It's so interesting how the body and rightbrain creativity are interconnected, another lesson I learned thanks to psychoanalysis.

Picking this up again, I have picked up more than just a hobby. I have the opportunity to "spiritually scrutinize" the nature of flow through its hip-hop form. Freestlying by its very nature taps into one's "spirit" that involves an autonomous and spontaneous flow that, to a certain degree, has a life of its own. Just like how the content of one's dreams seems to have a life of its own. And putting this part of the human person under the microscope of introspection can reap rewards on uncovering more about the "spirit" of human nature. I know this, because I have learned that there is a dimension to interaction with God that involves "passive reception" on the part of human consciousness, such as "being filled with the Spirit" (which is a passive imperative that involves allowing oneself to be influenced by something, or in this case someone). Also, Ephesians 5 also associates spiritual phenomena, such as being filled with the Spirit, with music, suggesting another strong connection between musical flow and spiritual flow. I am learning more and more that the very nature of "spirit" is something that is constantly flowing in a spontaneous manner to a certain degree. The fruits of this spiritual research can have massive implications for one's spiritual formation in Christ!

Exciting!