The 'Govenor' Raps for Christ

BY: Bruce Nolan
Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS -- For the first few moments on stage, young Govenor Reiss -- his stage identity is simply "Govenor" -- looks like many a rapper grown too hard, too fast on New Orleans' streets. Both arms are heavily tattooed, wrist to shoulder. An Asian symbol for "soldier" peeks over his collar near his throat.

Other tattoos chronicle his story: "Dust Be My Destiny" is emblazoned on his left upper arm; his old neighborhood turf, "Skyview," wraps around his left shoulder, front to back. And, over his heart, the one word "Pain," appropriate to a young man once so dead to hope that one day seven years ago he swallowed every pill in his mother's medicine cabinet. He was 18.

But as the heavy bass thumps and Reiss begins to rap, what comes out rises above the tattooed memorials to his past.

Instead, he begins rapping about Jesus Christ, a different way of life, and a personal transformation still under way that has put Reiss, Christian rapper, on a new course that was uncertain at first, but is slowly gaining momentum.

In his music, he beckons old friends:

I'm the same brotha that was with ya when the guns bust
Hustle 'til the sun's up
But things then change, I ain't the same
Man, I got to keep my brain on things that ain't vain

Reiss would adopt an edgier stage persona, would drape himself in jewelry if he had it, to complement the tattoos and better affirm his street cred. But his music has not yet provided a road to riches. Reiss lives in a one-bedroom apartment in eastern New Orleans with Johna, his wife of five months. He is temporarily without a car. It was stolen.

So he raps at local churches, at youth revivals, in mission tents that sprout on weekends in the city's housing developments. Sometimes, when a distant church hears of him, he goes off to another city like Dallas or Memphis, Tenn. Sometimes Johna moves through the crowds, selling her husband's two CDs, "Godson" and "Flame of Fire." They are trying to make a living.

They know that New Orleans has its share of rap success stories. Both Percy "Master P" Miller's No Limit empire and the Williams brothers' Cash Money Records have sold millions of albums nationally and, with Reiss, can trace their roots to the city's sometimes bloody neighborhoods.

But what Reiss is trying to do is even more of a long shot. Christian rap's share of the market is minuscule. And Reiss and a few others like him -- people like Var-G, Second Samuel, Holy Remnant, the Oracle, Chosen One, Foundation -- are confronting the type of rap that put New Orleans on the map.

Together, they preach the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the teeth of a bitter competing gospel of the streets.

They are outmanned. Certainly outgunned.

"The first time I saw a dead body was in a club," Reiss says. "First time I saw gunfire was at a club -- bullets so close I heard them whiz by. Hit the wall right behind me."
Read more >>

_Related Features

The Soul in Rap Interview with KRS-One The Spiritual Contradictions of DMX

Continued on page 2: »