Reconstruction

The phrase “your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper” is used all the time, but what’s the equivalent for the moral direction of the genre? Shortly after taking a stance for hip-hop’s principles in his battle with Drake, Kendrick Lamar shouted out Lecrae as his own example of who he looks to for guidance. “Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do,” he rapped aloud on an untitled track. “Fuck these n\*\*\*\*s up, or show ’em just what prayer would do?” The Texas native has topped the Billboard 200, won four Grammy Awards, and collaborated with other rap greats over his 20-plus-year career, all while creating music that’s firmly rooted in his Christian faith. It’s easy to see why Kendrick would look up to him: He’s stuck by his principles and reshaped the face of Christianity in hip-hop in the process. But a listen to *Reconstruction* shows that Lecrae isn’t the pillar of spiritual steadiness that many think. He’s had rifts with sects of the religious community that made him consider abandoning his faith, he’s still reeling from the deaths of loved ones, and memories from his past in the streets are still fresh in his mind. It’s all led him to a new perspective on his faith, as he explains in the title track, angrily chastising institutional Christianity for getting in bed with crooked politicians and evil forces. “They said we were walking away from faith?/We wasn’t walking away from faith, we was walking away from fraud,” he proclaims. “This ain’t a crisis of belief/It’s a reconstruction for clarity.” But Lecrae hasn’t gotten this far by being preachy. He has just as much skill on the mic as he does conviction in his beliefs. “Brick for Brick” cleverly uses drug and housing metaphors to illustrate spiritual stability, and “H2O” flips water-and-ice wordplay to emphasize the prioritization of spiritual connection over material wealth. “Headphones” finds him bonding with Killer Mike and T.I. over grief and survivor’s guilt, and on “Politickin,” he surprisingly sounds right at home over a thumping West Coast homage. But on “Die for the Party,” he directly responds to Kendrick’s shout-out, mirroring his peer’s disgust with a lack of morality in rap and the world writ large. But he also laments his own imperfections in the same context. “Truthfully, I’m nobody to judge,” he admits.