Miles Minnick - GLOVEMBER

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Faith and rap spent a long time being treated as separate rooms, and the artists who refused that split got shut out of both for their trouble - too religious for the radio, too much like rap for the church. What survived that period is a scene with an unusual relationship to its audience: nobody is here by accident, and nobody is pretending the songs are about something else. The bars are real bars. The production is current rather than apologetic. And the crowd does the thing a crowd only does when the words mean something to them specifically, which is go quiet in the gaps. A downtown theatre rather than a sanctuary, so the night behaves like a concert and not a service. Seven on Saturday on South Hill Street. Christian hip-hop runs its own parallel circuit through Southern California - its own venues, promoters and festivals - and from outside it is almost completely invisible.