In The Disturbing Profane, Joseph R. Winters explores how hip hop’s religiosity is found in qualities associated with the dark sacred. Rather than purity and wholeness, this expression of the sacred signifies death and pleasure, opacity and contamination, exorbitance and anguish. Winters brings religious studies, black studies, black feminist thought, and critical theory to bear on hip hop to trouble distinctions between the sacred and the profane. He shows how artists like Notorious B.I.G., Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar, Lupe Fiasco, and Nicki Minaj undermine stable meanings of the sacred to reveal listeners’ investments in unpleasant realities. Hip hop opens its audience to a volatile notion of the sacred and the unruly qualities of blackness. Moreover, Winters demonstrates that hip hop’s dark sacrality makes it inseparable from its expression of, participation in, and resistance to the antiblack and black gendered violence that organizes the social world. 

Joseph R. Winters is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies at Duke University and author of Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction  1
1. Sorrow/Death  37
2. Redemption/Rupture 75
3. Monster/Monstrous  109
Conclusion  145
Notes  153
Sources  173
Index  189