For mainstream rap pioneer Nas, “hip-hop just died this mornin’‚ and she’s dead, she’s dead.”

But the truth is, hip-hop is alive and well. At the mainstream level, the genre continues to yield sizable dividends – in 2006, it accounted for 10 percent of all album sales.
 
By comparison, Christian hip-hop is a mere drop in the bucket. And here’s proof:  Of the almost 40 million albums sold in Christian and gospel music in 2006, a little less than 500,000, or roughly 1.2 percent, were hip-hop discs. That’s barely enough for an album to be certified Gold.

But hip-hop’s difficulties are not limited to the retail side; radio airplay of faith-based hip-hop music has also been scant. Of the Top 20 songs of 2006 in the CHR – or pop – format according to Radio & Records, only one song, perched all the way down at No. 19, had a bit of a hip-hop flair to it:  tobyMac’s "Welcome to Diverse City."

Incidentally, that’s not tobyMac’s only accomplishment in 2006; his 2004 release, Welcome to Diverse City (Forefront), was also the bestselling “hip-hop” album of 2006, a title he’s held for three years in a row.
 
“[The numbers] break my heart, because I think there’s great hip-hop in our market,” says tobyMac, an artist who, by his own admission, doesn’t think of himself as a hip-hop artist, at least in the strictest sense of the term. “My music is pop music that leans hip-hop. I don’t think the same people that buy my records are buying straight hip-hop.”

But even if that’s the case, straight hip-hop buyers don’t seem to be making a lot of noise of their own, at least in terms of driving sales. This less-than-golden performance furthers speculation about the state of Christian hip-hop today. And for those seeking clarity, the answers seem to be as varied as the genre itself.

“The business is getting a little more open, but there’s still a lot that needs to be done,” says Teron “Bonafide” Carter, one-half of GRITS, the most popular rap group in Christian music. “It’s almost kinda too late for [that to happen]. We ourselves don’t even look at it as Christian hip-hop, because, honestly, on paper, it doesn’t even exist. On radio, it doesn’t exist. In the media, it doesn’t exist. So to us, it’s just hip-hop. We don’t need a label to sell the music. As a true artist, you don’t have to have a title to get people to buy what you do. That’s the way we look at it. There’ve been some changes, but there still have to be a lot more changes.”

West Coast rapper T-Bone thinks things are getting better in terms of acceptance of the genre, but he believes the hotness level is not up there.