 Hello, good afternoon everyone. Hello, good afternoon. Okay, so the people who know me already know how this is going to go. Because of that, let's try that. Come on. Hello, good afternoon everybody. Hello! Okay, so it sounds a little bit like maybe you all woke up and had a coffee this evening. Hi. Hello, good afternoon everyone. Hello, good afternoon everyone. We're having a event about hip-hop, so there's going to be a big problem. Right, right, right, come on. Okay. Come on. My name is Nikisha Elena Alexis and I'm so excited to welcome you today to the Soul of Hip-Hop in the Church in America, hosted by Anabaptist Metadine Vocal Seminary where I am the staff member and also an alum. First of all, can we please give DJ Nikita Naisen a round of applause? Thank you for having us live on School Health Day. Let's also give a giant hand to everybody who donated a book to the Tulsa Veterinary Day throughout today's event and at our Intercultural Competency Workshop on the end of this campus tomorrow, which starts at 8.30 a.m. Hip-Hop music and culture have a complex place in American society. Since we begin within marginalized communities of the Bronx, New York City, among African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, and immigrants of Caribbean and Latin American descent who drew its rhythms and vocalizations from the traditions of the African B.F.O. and we mixed them for another sound and another kind. And in its short value 50 years of business, its cultural expressions, rapping, great dancing, DJ and current symbolism, graffiti, beatboxing and its ever-changing street styles have influenced culture as far beyond that small world, reshaping people of all identities across the planet. Despite its profound impact on our global landscape, Hip-Hop still occupies a tenuous space to make elected consciousness. It's both love and love, appropriated and dismissed. Hip-Hop is most mainstream and suspect. On the one hand, Hip-Hop has proven itself to be a lucrative product that constantly transforms fashion, music, dance and everyday language. It is created, extracted, packaged and sold. It can be found everywhere from nine-time dramas, My Empire on Power Feast, I think. Tip commercials for Oreos. And if you haven't seen the video called Oreos Commercial, it's a little weird. Yet if primary source material continues to be individuals and communities who are oppressed to the political, economic, social and racial fringes who are largely excluded from the profits the industry generates off their reality, their struggles and their stories. When it comes to the church, there are Christians, myself included, who like Hip-Hop. And there are even those who would go so far as to trust its form to communicate with us. Yet the place is still largely outside the church, as a thing to be embarrassed about, or as competition to overcome. It remains insipidiously absent from most worship services and ministry initiatives except on those rare and sometimes dubious occasions where we're trying real hard to track down those hard to attract youth. Even the terrain among those who are passionate about Hip-Hop can be choppy. There are strong, critical debates within the movement about the way the industry limits and assists women, about the dominant correct characterization of blackness and masculinity, about the value of its militants around street economics and addiction and violence, about whose real and whose fake and who doesn't doesn't get to decide. Hip-Hop is complicated in controversial business and it is into this dynamic swirl of things that I invite us to enter together. Today, let us explore Hip-Hop in the company of Dr. Daniel White-Hodge who has joined us all the way from Chicago. Can we give him a hand? Hip-Hop is the genius of the genre and sees within it wisdom, even to the practice of faith in the way of Jesus in these days. Let us celebrate in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who called that an uprising to be powered in part by singing and storytelling and song. Let us be inspired in this new moment of old hostility toward black life, black voices and black mattering, toward immigrants and neighbors from afar, toward the kinds of people who brought Hip-Hop to life in the first place. So shall we begin? Together!