I’m no hip-hop expert. I’m just a white boy who grew up in small town Oklahoma. But I’d like to think I know good music when I hear it. I grew up on a steady diet of rock and roll, and got into metal and punk in my teenage years. It would be a little while longer before I began to dabble in rap music.
While Christian rap did exist in the 1980s, most of it was pretty cheesy, and relatively sub-par to what was going on in the secular world.* S.F.C. (along with P.I.D. and JC and the Boyz) were among the earliest groups creating full-length albums of artistically legitimate hip-hop. The crew began in the late 80s, and by 1988 had released an independent cassette called Fully Armed. Many of those songs wound up on their debut album, 1989’s Listen Up! for Broken Records.
The album, and its successor–1990’s A Saved Man (In the Jungle) showed promise, and the group released two more albums in the 90s, with some membership changes. DJ Dove moved on to help form Gospel Gangstaz. After SFC finished in the mid-90s, Chris Cooper (AKA “Super C,” “Sup,” or “Sup the Chemist,” or alternatively “SouptheChemist”) released a couple of solo albums.
While all of their material is compelling, their third album Phase III is widely regarded as one of the most creative albums in the genre. They borrowed samples from R&B, jazz, reggae, and even heavy metal. While that level of eclecticism is normal today, it was not so in the early 90s. Cooper’s lyrics were hard-hitting and Gospel-focused, and both his and partner-in-rhyme Q.P.’s (AKA “The Anointed Nubian”) delivery was strong.
“Hoods of Good” is taken from Phase III, and features an unusual sampling mix of jazzy R&B, and heavy metal guitars. The lyrical approach initiated by S.F.C. on the track became a sort of blueprint for 90s Christian ‘gangsta rap.’ That is, lyrics that used a parallel of gang activity to evangelism:
Once again
With the Spiritual fitness
I’m allways down
For a drive by witness
Roll up real slow
Then fire
I hit a gang banger
And a backslider
Now both of them
Are singing the choir
On fire
I am
Like I said in my last cut
To more brothers transformed
So what up
This type of lyrical approach influenced countless other Gospel rap groups throughout the decade. There is also a subtle critique of racial stereotypes in the lyrical approach as well. If the assumption was that rappers (and members of minority communities) are hoodlums, then S.F.C. (and others who followed in their path) were going to flip that assumption on its head and be “hoods of good.” Some might call it cheesy, or others irresponsible. I call it contextualization.
*No disrespect is intended to the early hip-hop artists who were paving the way for what was to come.
