ICYMI, Snoop Dogg recently dropped a 32-track, hand-on-heart Gospel album called ‘Bible of Love’, featuring about every big name in Gospel going, including Tye Tribbet, Fred Hammond, Faith Evans, the Clark Sisters, and many, many more. It’s now #1 on Billboard’s Gospel chart.
Although Gospel music is generally outside of the Sputnik remit, we’ve written before about the fascinating case of Christianity in American hip-hop. Snoop, unsurprisingly, has church roots – his mother, Beverley Broadus, is a travelling evangelist. While there are many different pockets of hip-hop that can’t all be pushed together, gospel music – ‘the music of black resilience and black fortitude’, as this Vulture review put it – is an inextricable influence on mainstream rap and R&B alike.
Though it’s stylistically broad, there’s little crossover in ‘Bible of Love’; it’s really a curated compilation of modern Gospel, resting entirely on your own personal taste for the genre. Musically speaking, it’s pure celebration of a subculture. But if it’s the result of Snoop’s personal journey, he keeps pretty quiet – he barely appears on the 2 hour album, which feels odd in the context. Whatever you make of it, the synergy of rap and modern gospel in the US carries on apace.
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