In a nutshell: Chalk it up to the decentralized nature of faith-fueled hip-hop or the sorry state of the industry, but Christian rap has been on the down-and-down for some time. The dearth of new quality stuff or a one-stop source makes Hip Hope Hits 2009 a sure bet—it's easily the best collection the five-year-old franchise has compiled to date. Perhaps a bigger asset is the disc's audacity in pairing artists that—in a different time and space—would be the strangest of bedfellows, like the spacey collaboration between KJ-52 and GRITS' Bonafide. Hopeful, indeed.
