Now we know that Kanye West has gone all-in on the Jesus thing – he’s been running his Sunday Services all year, he’s about to drop a gospel album at some point in time, and he’s set to release a documentary called ‘Jesus Is King’ at IMAX theatres at the end of October, but not too long ago, the ‘Jesus Walks’ rapper was half a second away from throwing in the towel in the rap game. Well, according to his pastor, that is.
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Adam Tyson, the pastor at Placerita Bible Church, sat down recently with Apologia – a Christian radio and podcast, which proudly has an anti-abortion poster in its podcast studio (????) – to chat about his life as a God-serving man, and what it was like when Kanye West stepped into his church back in May.
“One time he told me he wasn’t going to rap,” Tyson said.
I said ‘why not?’ and he said “Well that’s the Devil’s music” and I said ‘Hey man, rap is a genre. You can rap for God’ I think he was already thinking about it a little bit, but I just definitely said ‘Hey bro, I think you need to use your talents that God’s given you, and use that platform for God.’
I think he was definitely thinking about that and I’m not going to take any credit for it but I definitely said ‘Hey man, have you heard of Lecrae?’ and he said “No.”
‘Ya heard of Flame?’ “No.” ‘Tedashi?’ “No.” ‘Trip Lee?’ “Nope.” He hadn’t heard of any of those guys.
I’m not sure what’s more alarming here, that Kanye very nearly quit rap for good because he didn’t want to piss off God with his rhymes, or the fact that he doesn’t know anything about other Christian rappers – who even I, a very white woman in Melbourne, know about.
I guess all we have to do is give big thanks to Pastor Adam showing Kanye the way to the light, and by ‘light’ I mean ‘Kirk Franklin’s greatest hits’ and like, literally every rapper with a vague interest in the Big Beat Man upstairs.
