Humble Beast Interview, Part 1.
Thomas Terry and Bryan Winchester of Humble Beast, w/Aaron Halvorsen and Todd Miles of Western Seminary.
AARON: To begin, tell us a little bit about your start in hip-hop.
THOMAS: I started doing hip-hop when I was about 13 years old. I came from a real dysfunctional home. My father was essentially gone, and I found that the hip-hop community in a sense was a father-figure to me. They showed me how to think and feel and what to believe. Hip-hop shaped my worldview, and from about 13-18, I was immersed in the culture of hip-hop. But then around 18 the gospel was preached to me, and I became a Christian. The church that I was saved in was not very hip to hip-hop. They told me that the music was of the devil and that I needed to put that stuff away with my old man. So for a long time I stopped doing music. Probably about 3 years after that, I realized that there were still a lot of my friends in the culture that would hear what I had to say about the gospel if it was put into a medium that was acceptable to them. So I started crafting and penning lyrics that were much more evangelistic and putting my new worldview on display.
BRYAN: I was born in a family that didn’t talk about church, go to church- had nothing really to do with church. My parents were divorced, and neither my father, nor my mother, nor my step-father professed any religion. There was no religious background. Eventually, I gravitated toward hip-hop, probably around 11-12 years old. I was one of those kids that, if I liked something, that meant I wanted to do it full-time. So if I liked basketball, I wanted to do basketball for a living. I never wanted to just watch the game, I wanted to do it myself. So when I got into hip-hop that was my instinct. In Portland, there were no artists that really did hip-hop professionally in the early to mid-nineties. I personally knew no rappers. I just kind of rapped in my bedroom at home when no one was listening. I was really shy about it, and it was mostly a form of self-expression. But around age 14, I walked into a place called Lents Boys and Girls Club, and someone immediately recognized, from the way I dressed (I dressed very hip-hop, based on what I saw in magazines), that I was a real hip-hop head. He began engaging with me, and actually used the opportunity of our common interest in hip-hop to preach the gospel to me. That was the first time that I heard the gospel, and after a year of thinking about it, I couldn’t shake it. A year later I actually ran into the same guy, and he asked me about it, and asked me if I wanted to receive Jesus. I said yes, and essentially then became a Christian. But I didn’t know that guy well enough to have discipleship, my family moved away, and I had no concept of the church or anything, so music became the medium in which I began expressing and learning my newfound faith. I also found other artists who were also expressing their faith through music, so I was never able to understand that idea of hip-hop being evil, because it was the means God used to bring the gospel to me. I later found that in youth groups that youth pastors thought the fact that I rapped was super cool. “You should be a youth leader, you can rap! Let’s put you up in front of the kids.” I never ran into this world of hostility toward Christians who do hip-hop. It was the tool God used in my life to make the gospel known to me, and then it provided opportunities for me to serve in church and do ministry.
AARON: How did you handle those early years of being into hip-hop and being Christian? I’m sure there weren’t a lot of models around to emulate.
THOMAS: Similar to Bryan, there wasn’t anyone around to disciple me, particularly in a hip-hop context. I just kind of floated in this world of assumptions of what Christianity really was. It actually took some guys who were outside of hip-hop, who invested in me and discipled me, for me to flourish and understand the nuances of the gospel, about church, discipleship and the Christian life. So hip-hop never helped me to flourish in my Christian life. It just helped me communicate the things that at the time I didn’t know all that much about. Discipleship and hip-hop wasn’t really a good look for me, which is the reason we started Humble Beast. We felt like the music could be such a good medium to engage with people and disciple people- almost a bait and switch. We could engage with some guys through a common interest in hip-hop, and I could bring them into this community a record label, with the intention of helping them to grow in their Christian walk. That’s the beginning of Humble Beast. It was a discipleship mechanism. Because I didn’t receive any discipleship, I partnered with Bryan and we started this Humble Beast thing.
BRYAN: Yeah, and from years of traveling around and interacting with other artists, you see how, as they travel, it becomes easy to become disconnected from any type of discipleship or church membership or involvement. (And I find this isn’t unique to hip-hop but is true of Christian musicians in general.) So you have all these artists who are given a platform in the Christian world, based on their talents, but there’s really no accountability, oversight, or growth in the knowledge of the thing they’re communicating. And that’s the boat I found myself in- people always were interested in me according to my talents, and not according to me as a man. I see a lot of guys, and Christian rap guys, who are in their 30s and no one has really poured into them as a man. People say, “Oh, you’re talented. Let me give you the baton and run.” I don’t think that’s unique to hip-hop, but it does happen a lot for Christians who do hip-hop. So much emphasis is placed on their gift or talent, and not a lot of time is spent cultivating them as a person. Humble Beast, in noticing that deficiency, is trying to bring a balance to that. We are more invested in helping someone develop as a holistic person and as a Christian, as opposed to just helping them develop as an artist. Ultimately, becoming a more effective artist will be the result of growing as a person.
AARON: Who are some of your musical influences? Have they changed over the years?
THOMAS: In the beginning, I had no knowledge of Christian music, so my influences were A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and just other good hip-hop. Even when I became a believer I had no idea there were Christian rappers, because I was so disengaged from Christian culture. My only real musical influence was general market Christian hip-hop. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I realized there were other Christian rappers.
BRYAN: It was interesting because when I first started listening to hip-hop, there were predominant regions of music. West Coast music was defined as music that came from California, and East Coast music was music that came from New York. Those were the two camps. A lot of the West Coast camp had a particular gangster style to it that didn’t really relate to my upbringing, so I gravitated more toward the East Coast style. I heard guys talking about lives that seemed a little bit more similar to mine. Like some of the people Thomas named, they were a little more peaceful. Not even from a Christian background, I would be almost embarrassed to listen to some of the more vulgar stuff, thinking; “Oh man, if my mom heard I was listening to this….” So I gravitated more towards the East Coast style. So A Tribe Called Quest would rap about getting a milkshake, and I realized that I could rap about whatever my reality was at the time. Rappers just kind of communicated their reality. As the genre grew, though, people began communicating whatever they thought would sell. But what interested me about hip-hop was that I would have all these tapes of artists from different regions, and it would be a window into their world. I had never been to New York, but I knew a lot of street names. I’ve never been to Compton, but I have a picture in my mind of what it might look like. I sought out rap from different areas and cultures, and I discovered Christian hip-hop early on after becoming a Christian. It was just so small, and there so few resources.
AARON: How did you both end up meeting?
THOMAS: We ran into each other in different parts of the country. And we knew about each other, because the community was so small. One night we met up in Los Angeles, at a show.
BRYAN: That would have been 2000 or 2001. And then we didn’t run into each other until 2005. I was just touring in California and was at a studio where he was engineering for someone, and I was just trying to lay a verse down for someone else. Then we didn’t run into each other until 2009. We would just cross paths at random times, and didn’t really know much about each other, just what we would hear from someone else or hear from songs. Then in 2010, we both found ourselves in Portland, and actually ended up sitting near each other at a worship service at Emmaus. So we just started hanging out, and the friendship developed quickly because there was a little history there.
AARON: And sooner or later, you all put a record label together.
BRYAN: Yeah, we were both looking into doing that sort of thing. I had done a record label in the past, and it was the best I knew how to do at the time. But Christian hip-hop just started morphing into another version of positive hip-hop, because so many of us didn’t really understand the gospel. And when you take the gospel out of Christianity, you’re just left with moralism. And if you’re not explaining the gospel, but just giving a bunch of moral charges or optimistic worldviews, you’re really not presenting Christianity and you’re showing you don’t know it. That was so much of what I was doing with my old record label. And I wanted to disassociate with it, not because I didn’t see any fruit from it or didn’t see God’s hand at work, but because I wanted to approach things differently. So I wanted to start a whole new label, and Thomas wanted to start a label, and we were going to help each other. He had a background in multimedia, and I had a background in executive producing, helping artists see their vision through and finish their records. Thomas and I were going to help each other accomplish our independent goals, but the more we talked the more we wanted to work together and accomplish a common goal.
AARON: What is that common goal and purpose of Humble Beast?
THOMAS: Make the gospel known. That’s why one of our distinctives is to freely give, because we want to infuse the gospel in music and remove any variable that would stop people from hearing the gospel. So we give the music away for free. At the end of the day, if we reduce it to the core and crux of Humble Beast, it is that the gospel be known. May Jesus be known through our music. We want to do it in a medium where we can compete with the culture. We’ve realized that in Christian hip-hop and Christian music in general, there is much that lacks creativity, lacks innovation, and lacks excellence. We see that. And we also see a lot of music that lacks substance, that lacks the gospel. Our aim with Humble Beast is excellence with a posture of humility. We want to humbly present the gospel and make Jesus known, and in a way that doesn’t put so much of an emphasis on hip-hop that all else is secondary, yet at the same time competing in the marketplace, that when people listen they will digest it. Because if it’s not quality music, no one is going to listen to it anyway. So we exist in that tension of trying to be excellent at what we do for the sake of the message.
Next Monday (9-21), we will run Part 2 of this interview. In it, Thomas and Bryan talk about giving away free music, developing new artists, and their relationship to the Church.
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