Mitchell West (known as Street Hymns) is one of the founding members of the Christian battle rap group IV Horsemen. ReligionUnplugged Senior Contributor and board member Roberta Ahmanson talked to Street Hymns on his role and history with Christian rap, battle rap and the interconnected ways that faith and rap have influenced one another.

The interview has been edited for brevity, but you can listen to the entire conversation on the ReligionUnplugged podcast here.

Roberta Ahmanson: Today we are going to talk to my friend here, Mitchell West, whose moniker is Street Hymns, because “the streets need Him.” I’ve done some listening, and I’ve been learning a lot from you already, so thank you for being here. How does Battle Rap fit into the rap realm, and how does a Christian rapper fit into this?

Street Hymns: I was born in Jersey and that's where hip hop is known to have started, in the East Coast. The people around me knew the music so well, and then we moved to Texas when I was 8. My hip hop influence came from those two places and also the early foundations of Christian hip hop, specifically The Cross Movement. They were called lyrical theology, and they were the first battle rappers in the Christian realm. A lyric from them is, “without Christ man, y’all ain’t spiritual, y’all just caught up in a bunch of spare rituals.” They talk about how the rituals of man are apart from Christ, and over beats they are addressing theology.

Ahmanson: Could you go into a little bit about when it started?

Hymns: Battle rap got its first mainstream when a movie called “Eight Mile” came out, which was a biopic of Eminem, where he told his perspective of what it meant to be a battle rapper. When that movie came out, me and my friends started battle rapping each other. That’s where my start happened– from freestyle battling with our friends. We were like, “how can we joke with each other while also making it rhyme?”

Battle rapping now is all about who is the better presenter of the rap. The presentation itself is beautiful– it’s an art if it all works together. Even though sometimes it’s vulgar, you could look at it the same way we have a medieval piece of art when a sword is going through somebody’s head and blood is spouting out. Yeah, it’s very vulgar, but it’s beautifully painted. It’s the same thing with battle rap.

Ahmanson: Sort of like Caravaggio’s famous painting holding the head of Goliath, bleeding all over the place.

Hymns: Exactly, that’s how we portray battle rap. If you’re watching it from the outside, you’re just going to look at two men fighting each other and think you need to call the police. But it’s like no, that’s our culture. We’re expressive. Where we place value is what creates culture. We see a group of people who love lyricism, metaphors, storytelling, aggression, and just love the expression of coming together and hashing it out lyrically. I’ve seen legitimate rivalries ending, because when it’s over it’s like, “what more do we have to say? Now, we have a group of believers and Christians saying, ‘in this violence and in this aggression, what about Jesus?’”

Ahmanson: Somewhere in an interview, I read that you wanted to see yourself more as a writer than a performer. Could you talk more about that?

Hymns: With Christian battle rapping, you must assume what your opponent will talk about based on their history. One time I battled an atheist, and I spent over 40 hours of research watching apologist videos. So you have to really work on your rebuttals, which is a big element of writing. But when I say I want to be known as more of a writer than a performer, I mean I want to be a great writer, to write things that lyrically hit different.

Ahmanson: Is spoken word different from rap?

Hymns: Absolutely. Spoken word is if I wasn’t battling anyone and I rapped without any beat. Now, within spoken word, there's also a sub-genre of that, which is called slam poetry. Slam poetry is very poetic, it’s from the heart and involves every piece of your body. You can’t overly focus on lyricism, but instead it’s all about focusing on the people in front of you and expressing what you have to say.

Ahmanson: Can you talk to me about the Christian tradition in the spoken word?

Hymns: Absolutely. There’s been so many beautiful documentaries on slam poetry and even slam poetry done in urban settings from junior highs to elementary schools. Some of this is the best slam poetry you’ll ever see, because you have these kids just writing from a beautiful, raw place.

When I work with the youth in the juvenile detention centers, we’re talking about an environment where it's freezing cold, with grey sweatshirts, white walls, and there’s nothing abstract or beautiful. But the kids in there have melodies, raps, rhymes, and they are rapping the same lyrics over and over again because they've all practiced with each other. So the heart of the urban community in spoken word is to create beauty in this struggle.

Ahmanson: Talk to me about the impact of Christian rap within Christianity, but also its impact outside Christianity in the rap world in general.

Hymns: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I haven’t been to any Christian conference in the last five years where it was a majority of non-believers showing up. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but let’s call it what it is– events for Christians to leave feeling motivated to share the gospel, not evangelism. Because evangelism means you have to go out and reach the lost. What I’m seeing is that people will show up to things where they feel like they’re welcomed and their questions will be answered. For me, I am looking at these models and trying to see where non-believers are coming from. We have to meet them where they’re at so that they feel comfortable. I’m seeing that in the apologetic realm, especially with celebrities who have given their life to Jesus. I feel like as believers we should be doing more collaboration and answering of questions, which is what battle rap does.

Ahmanson: What impact does this have on the church?

Hymns: The church has to start paying attention, to go out into the world. We’ve had our fair share of building up the church, and now we need to go out and be the answer givers of the answers we learned in the walls of the church. We need to use our resources and our churches to reach people. We need to empower our youth and children, to entrust that they can be carriers of the gospel, which is of course the same thing that Jesus did. We are told to not look down on their youth, so let’s empower them. We have got to do a great job of representing Christ on a high level while we are being in and creating art.

Ahmanson: We live in a fraught world. Between the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, where does all of this play in a country that is constantly screaming at one another? Battle rap seems to me a place where you have to hear one another, and it strikes me as a genre particularly suited to this time.

Hymns: Absolutely. The answer to understanding culture is immersion. The Bible says to “become all things to all men so that you can save some.” If you're wondering why the Black community is feeling left out and alone, maybe you need to go immerse yourself. Don't just look at the statistics and say, “Oh, well, if you only just pick yourself up by your bootstraps.” How about you go and spend some time with these children in these neighborhoods and you'll see all the differences. The books that your kids have are not the same books that they have access to, and the teaching that your kids have is not the same teaching they have. Once you do this, you’re able to empathize with the situation rather than looking at just numbers. They’re not numbers, they’re people, and we have the right to be viewed as such and to be equal. In order to be equal, we have to look at the numbers and figure out how to help. I’m not saying I have the answers, I’m just saying that when it comes to understanding culture, immersion is needed. When you immerse yourself, you’re able to feel as they feel, hurt as they hurt, and that’s what I did with battle rap. To understand the culture, I had to immerse in it and study it, and I love it now.

Jewels Tauzin is an intern reporter at ReligionUnplugged.com. She’s a student at Barnard College in New York City, where she also contributes to “Bwog”, a Columbia student newspaper. She has previously interned at the Mississippi Center of Investigative Reporting, Trinity Episcopal, at Girls’ Life magazine and at The Bridge: The Memphis Street Paper.