LeCrae
My graduation was an amazing moment for my family, my community. In my early childhood, we lived on a subsidized income, with government assistance - at one point when I was growing up, my mother was making $14,000 a year. Now I had made it out of the hood, so to speak.Collection: Graduation
Gandhi said it; Frederick Douglass said it. A lot of people have probably said 'It's not Christ that I have a problem with, it's his people.' And that was my struggle: it's God's people. I felt disenfranchisement. I felt so much abuse from organized religion because I'm walking in a direction that a lot of them couldn't fathom and can't understand.Collection: Religion
We judge people based on their clothes, social class, and, dare I say, ethnicity. Our comedians make light of these stereotypes regularly, and we laugh at their accuracy.
Old habits die hard, and if you're not careful, the person you used to be can overtake the person you're trying to become.
Life is a precious gift - a gift we often take for granted until it is threatened.
Your identity is not wrapped up in how right you get it or how perfect you can posture yourself. But, your identity is wrapped up in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
No matter how bad you mess up, God loves you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
You can't celebrate gifts without celebrating the giver of all gifts, so I want to celebrate Jesus.
I consider what I do soul music. It's music that is concerned with the soul.
College allows you to make better decisions, better friends, and a better future. There's only one catch: when the opportunity comes, you actually have to take it.
I navigate different cultures daily, and I understand how people can make false assumptions because of their lack of interaction with the cultures I find myself in. But if they don't frequent these spaces much, how can they rush to judgment?
People who've only seen me perform might assume that I'm confident and that being ignored wouldn't bother me - but it does.
As we wrestle with questions of identity, we imitate those actions we think best fill an ambiguity we have within ourselves. And that goes for everyone; no one is free from this condition.
You don't realize you're vying for the approval of everyone so much until being yourself is not approved of.
I think complexity is beautiful.
I knew my ways were unfulfilling. I chased power, pleasure, possessions, something satisfying. I knew I kept getting let down. I knew it was insanity, and I was never going to find fulfillment, but I didn't know what else to look for.
Hang out with me long enough, and I'm bound to let you down.
I live in Atlanta because Ludacris lives in Atlanta. And because T.I. lives in Atlanta and because Lil Wayne comes to Atlanta to hang out all the time and because Rick Ross' engineers are in Atlanta.
The pain and the suffering that I went through made me an activist. It made me stronger; it made me more compassionate.
Moving forward, hopefully the platform my career has given me will allow me to continue to be a voice in culture, whether that's doing lectures on campus or writing books or whatever that looks like. I feel like that's really the lane that I uniquely connect with.
I'm free. So, every time you hear me, just know that I'm speaking as a liberated person.
I think of people like Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes. They all came out of the South, and they followed a certain tradition and energy. That's no knock to groups like The Temptations or The Supremes, not at all, but they were way more polished in how they did things.
My music is not Christian - Lecrae is. And you hear evidence of my faith in my music.
Christianity is the truth about everything. If you say you have a Christian worldview, that means you see the world through that lens - not just how people get saved and what to stay away from.
Christians need to embrace that there need to be believers talking about love and social issues and all other aspects of life.
Many times, that's how people see Christian art or Christians making art: They see the art as having an agenda.
Lecrae is not just, you know, church, church, church.
I've done songs with legends like De La Soul with Pete Rock. I've done songs with B.O.B. I've done songs with Big Kit.
I think every artist reaches a place where they want to transcend genre.
I'm not a country music fan, so if you slide me some music and say, 'You gotta check this out; it's country,' I'm going to be a little hesitant to listen, and I think if someone says, 'Hey, you gotta listen to this guy rap; he's Christian,' you're like, 'I don't identify as Christian, so not really sure I want to listen to that.'
When you have legends who want to do music with you, and you befriend the Kendrick Lamars and the Chance the Rappers, that's due to you really being authentically hip-hop and not being contemporary Christian.
If you suffocate my blackness, you've got to realize that's supremacy.
Whether you think you're jacked up or not, we're all broken people, and until we can admit that, we're not going to progress.
I'm in a very comfortable place, and some of that comes from the shackles of not having to be what people want you to be.
A lot of times, we believe what the media says about us or what our awards or accolades say about us instead of what God says about us.
If my significance comes from God, then I know I'm always secure.
America has this fascination with glorifying the villain and not talking about the trials and tribulations. We tell the story of the successful villain a lot of times, but we don't tell the story of the people who don't come out so successful, and we don't tell the story of all the bystanders of that choice.
Waka is really intelligent. A lot of people don't know that because he just gets people hyped up, but he's a dynamic individual, and once you get to know him, you get to see a lot of that.
Pain can be a haunting reminder to appreciate every waking moment.
What I bring is unique. No one else brings to the table what I am.
In order to cry out for my black brothers, I had to hate the police.
I'll put it to you like this: You can only go as mainstream as people will let you go.
When you're part of hip-hop culture but you're a Christian, people want you to be either-or. Or they'll create a category for you, like, 'Oh, gospel rap!'
I always liked the content of a Common but the commercial viability of a Lil Jon. And I would say, 'Why don't those worlds ever come together?' So for me, it was like, 'Let's do that.'
That's a win for me, for people to be able to say, 'Faith, fatherhood, monogamy exists in hip-hop.'
I function, I live life as a Christian, and me living life as a Christian doesn't mean I'm a sanitized person. It means that I readily admit I'm a jacked up person, and I need a savior.
My views as a Christian means there's a moral plumb line that I'm fighting to adhere to.
Honestly, what Jesus was about was laying his life down for the marginalized who didn't have it all together.
It's unfortunate that myself, as a black man, cannot care about the issues that impact the black community without being seeing as a race-baiter or without being seen as someone who doesn't care about any other ethnic groups.
The biggest accolades aren't the Grammys for me. It's creating opportunities for people.