The AlgoRHYthm

The AlgoRhythm Ep. 7: Slave to No Computer — Hip Hop Warned Us About AI in 1984

In 1984, Grandmaster Melle Mel rapped a warning on the Beat Street soundtrack: don't be a slave to no computer. Forty-two years later, some of the people who built artificial intelligence are quitting their jobs to warn the public about the same thing, and Congress is writing bills about it. This episode asks whether hip hop saw it coming, and what the culture has to say now that the machines can rap.

I start with where that line came from, then go back through hip hop's long, complicated history with technology: the turntable, Kraftwerk and "Planet Rock," the Biz Markie sampling ruling, and the Auto-Tune wars. From there, the question gets sharper. FN Meka, an AI "rapper" dropped by Capitol Records in 2022. An AI Drake and Weeknd song pulled in 2023. Drake's AI Tupac verse and the estate's cease and desist. An AI artist with a $3 million deal. J. Cole's "cLOUDs," Timbaland's all-in embrace of Suno, and Kanye's back-and-forth on AI. Then the bigger fear: researchers warning about a loss of control, and the bills now in Congress.

I close at the pulpit, with Romans 6:16 on becoming slaves to whatever we obey, Genesis on stewardship ("to work it and keep it"), the Tower of Babel, Psalm 115, the Golem of Prague, and the Quran's story of the amanah, the trust that humanity agreed to carry. The charge: decide what you will never hand over.

IN THIS EPISODE

00:00 – Cold open: Beat Street, 1984

00:00 – The Warning: Melle Mel, "The Message," and Deltron 3030

00:00 – The Machine Was Always in the Room: turntables, "Planet Rock," sampling, Auto-Tune

00:00 – Who Gets Replaced: AI and the artist

00:00 – Lose Control: the researchers and the bills

00:00 – What a Machine Can't Testify To

00:00 – The Turn: Romans 6, Genesis, Babel, Psalm 115, the Golem, and the amanah

00:00 – The Charge: what you will never hand over

[drop in real timestamps once it's edited]

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE

– Grandmaster Melle Mel & the Furious Five, "Beat Street Breakdown" (Beat Street, 1984); Rock the Bells, Harry Belafonte and Beat Street

– Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force, "Planet Rock" (1982); Herbie Hancock, "Rockit" (1983)

– Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. Records (1991); Jay-Z, "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" (2009)

– Deltron 3030 (2000)

– Capitol Records and FN Meka (Aug. 2022); "Heart on My Sleeve" by Ghostwriter977 (Apr. 2023); Drake's "Taylor Made Freestyle" and the Tupac estate (Apr. 2024)

– Xania Monet and Hallwood Media (2025); Forbes on IngaRose's "Celebrate Me" (Apr. 2026)

– J. Cole, "cLOUDs" (Feb. 2025); Timbaland and Suno (MusicTech, NPR); Kanye West and BULLY (Paste Magazine, AOL)

– Coverage of Jacob Coxon's resignation and Evan Hubinger's risk estimate (Sept. 2026); Al Jazeera on the AI Kill Switch Act and the Stop Rogue AI Act; the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act (Sanders and Casar)

– Romans 6:16; Genesis 1:28, 2:15, 11; Psalm 115:4-8 (ESV); Quran, Surah Al-Ahzab 33:72

– The Golem of Prague legend

The AlgoRhythm is where the cipher meets the pulpit — hip hop, faith, and the culture that raised us. New episodes mix solo breakdowns like this one with conversations with artists, organizers, clergy, and scholars living at the intersection of these worlds.

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🎙️ Hosted by Dr. Jaime Kowlessar — Pastor of Community Engagement and Repair, Revision Church Atlanta | Founder & Executive Director, Raise Your Voice, Inc.

#TheAlgoRhythm #HipHop #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MelleMel #FaithAndTechnology #AIandMusic #Interfaith

Mac Phipps served 21 years of a 30-year sentence after prosecutors spliced lyrics from two different songs into something he never wrote. He was granted clemency in 2021, and he's still on parole. His case isn't an outlier. It's part of a pattern researchers call "rap on trial," and this episode walks through how it works. I break down four court cases that show how differently the same argument, art versus evidence, can land: Vonte Skinner in New Jersey, Jamal Knox in Pennsylvania, and two current cases that prove something together that neither proves alone. Lil Durk was acquitted on all five counts in his federal trial this September. In the Jam Master Jay murder trial, a federal judge kept the defendant's lyrics out, and both men were still convicted. Then I look at what's happening here in Atlanta, where Georgia's RICO law was used to treat a record label and a friend group as a criminal enterprise. I close with the harder question: what do we owe people when words are made to testify against them? The faith turn looks at Exodus 20 and Surah Al-Furqan (25:72), two texts that name the same sin, and at where the church has and hasn't shown up. The Charge gives you something to do about it. 

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE– Erik Nielson and Andrea L. Dennis, Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America (foreword by Killer Mike)– State v. Skinner (N.J. Supreme Court, 2014)– Commonwealth v. Knox (Pa. Supreme Court); amicus brief filed by Killer Mike, 21 Savage, and Meek Mill– Coverage of the Lil Durk federal trial and Sept. 11, 2026 verdict (TheGrio, LA Magazine, AP)– Jam Master Jay murder trial, Eastern District of New York; Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall's ruling on lyric evidence; verdict Feb. 2024– Young Thug / YSL RICO case, Fulton County, Georgia– The RAP Act (Restoring Artistic Protection Act), status as of recording– Exodus 20:16; Quran, Surah Al-Furqan 25:72 

The AlgoRhythm is where the cipher meets the pulpit — hip hop, faith, and the culture that raised us. New episodes mix solo breakdowns like this one with conversations with artists, organizers, clergy, and scholars living at the intersection of these worlds. 

🔔 Follow The AlgoRhythm for new episodes

🎙️ Hosted by Dr. Jaime Kowlessar — Pastor of Community Engagement and Repair, Revision Church Atlanta | Founder & Executive Director, Raise Your Voice, Inc.

A rapper from North Philly, mid-career, career in free fall — instead of doubling down, he gets on a plane to Mecca. This episode traces orthodox, Sunni Islam's real influence on hip hop, starting with a man almost nobody names when they tell this story: Warith Deen Mohammed, who took over the Nation of Islam in 1975 and rebuilt it into orthodox Sunni practice. From there: Freeway's Hajj, Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad naming their production trio "The Ummah," Yasiin Bey's shahada, and Brother Ali's conversion through the very same Warith Deen Mohammed community. Then we go global — Palestinian hip hop pioneers DAM, the Muslim upbringings behind Akon and French Montana, and London's young Muslim rap scene.

This one is deliberately separate from Episode 3's Five Percent Nation material — go back to "1520 Sedgwick" for that story. This is about the artists who prayed five times a day, made the pilgrimage, and built a specific, global thread of the culture around it.

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE

– Wikipedia, "Nation of Islam" — founding, Elijah Muhammad's leadership, economic self-sufficiency programs

– Wikipedia, "Malcolm X" — 1964 Hajj letters, prison conversion in the late 1940s

– Wikipedia, "Warith Deen Mohammed" — 1975 succession and reforms, conversion of NOI temples to orthodox Sunni mosques

– Wikipedia, "Freeway (rapper)" — conversion at 14, Hajj pilgrimage, Free at Last (2007)

– Wikipedia, "The Ummah" — Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and J Dilla's production trio

– Beliefnet, "Rapper Mos Def talks about his decision to devote himself to Allah" (2001)

– Wikipedia, "Yasiin Bey" — shahada at 19, 2011 legal name change

– Vice, "Brother Ali and the Secret Islamic History of Hip-Hop"

– Hollowverse, "The Religion and Political Views of Ice Cube"

– Wikipedia, "Palestinian hip-hop" — Tamer Nafar and DAM (founded 1998), Shadia Mansour, Belly

– Wikipedia, "Islam and hip-hop in the United States" — Akon and French Montana's Muslim upbringings

– Huck Magazine, "London's young Muslim rappers know the power of verse" — Mohammed Yahya and Rakin Fetuga

The AlgoRhythm is where the cipher meets the pulpit — hip hop, faith, and the culture that raised us. New episodes mix solo breakdowns like this one with conversations with artists, organizers, clergy, and scholars living at the intersection of these worlds.

🔔 Subscribe for new episodes

🎙️ Hosted by Dr. Jaime Kowlessar — Pastor of Community Engagement and Repair, Revision Church Atlanta | Founder & Executive Director, Raise Your Voice, Inc.

#TheAlgoRhythm #HipHop #Islam #MuslimRappers #FaithAndJustice #Interfaith #HipHopHistory

The AlgoRhythm Ep. 3: 1520 Sedgwick — The Real Story of Where Hip Hop Was Born

August 11th, 1973. A 15-year-old girl named Cindy Campbell threw a rent party in a Bronx rec room to pay for school clothes — and her brother, DJ Kool Herc, played the music that became hip hop. But the party is only half the story. This episode goes into what that neighborhood had just survived to get there: a highway that displaced tens of thousands of people, a decade of landlord arson, and a gang murder that turned into an unlikely peace treaty six days later.

I also dig into two threads that don't usually make it into the origin story — the Five Percent Nation's direct influence on hip hop's vocabulary (word is bond, droppin' science, represent), and Afrika Bambaataa's decision to redirect a gang's organizing power into the Universal Zulu Nation instead of more violence. And I close with the harder question underneath all of it: if a Bronx block could organize across faith lines to stop a war, what's stopping our congregations from doing the same against the injustices still in front of us.

IN THIS EPISODE

0:00 The Intro

2:20 The Demolition

4:11 The Truce

7:01 The Science

9:01 The Nation

10:31 Faith and Justice

15:29 The Outro

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE

– Washington Post, "DJ Kool Herc, Cindy Campbell threw a party that birthed hip-hop 50 years ago" (Aug. 2023)

– Segregation By Design, "The Cross Bronx Expressway" — displacement and fire data; Decade of Fire documentary

– Wikipedia, "Hoe Avenue peace meeting" — Black Benjie's death and the Dec. 8, 1971 truce

– Times of Israel — Benjamin Melendez's Sephardic Jewish ancestry

– Wikipedia, "Five-Percent Nation" — Clarence 13X and the Nation of Gods and Earths

– Malay Mail, "Afrika Bambaataa, Planet Rock legend and Zulu Nation founder, dead at 68" (April 2026)

– Isaiah 61:3; Quran, Surah Ash-Sharh 94:5-6

– Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

The AlgoRhythm is where the cipher meets the pulpit — hip hop, faith, and the culture that raised us. New episodes mix solo breakdowns like this one with conversations with artists, organizers, clergy, and scholars living at the intersection of these worlds.

🔔 Subscribe for new episodes

🎙️ Hosted by Dr. Jaime Kowlessar — Pastor of Community Engagement and Repair, Revision Church Atlanta | Founder & Executive Director, Raise Your Voice, Inc.

#TheAlgoRhythm #HipHop #HipHopHistory #BronxHistory #FaithAndJustice #Interfaith #KoolHerc

The Bridge is Over — Songwriting for the Algorithm vs. Songwriting for the People

"Everything is marketing. I just want to release music, man." That's what Halsey said in 2022 when her own label wouldn't approve a single until she faked a viral TikTok moment. This episode is about what that permission problem has done to songwriting itself — and about the GZA bar from 1993 that already called it, thirty years early.

In this episode, I trace how songs have physically changed shape under algorithmic pressure — shrinking, front-loaded, stripped of the bridge — and put that next to what songwriting looked like before there was anything to optimize for. GZA's "Protect Ya Neck" verse about a clueless A&R turns out to be the same complaint we're having about engineers and recommendation models today, just with the job title changed. And "The Message" still stands as the clearest example of the other way: writing because a truth needs a witness, not because a data point needs a hook.

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE

– Halsey's May 2022 statement on her label and TikTok (Rolling Stone)

– Spotify listener skip-rate data (Forbes, 2018)

– "The TikTok-ification of songwriting" (PUSH.fm)

– GZA, "Protect Ya Neck," Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), 1993

– Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, "The Message," 1982

– 1 Kings 22 (Micaiah and the four hundred prophets)

The AlgoRhythm is where the cipher meets the pulpit — hip hop, faith, and the culture that raised us. New episodes mix solo breakdowns like this one with conversations with artists, organizers, clergy, and scholars living at the intersection of these worlds.

🔔 Follow for new episodes

🎙️ Hosted by Dr. Jaime Kowlessar — Assistant Pastor of Community Engagement & Social Justice, Revision Church Atlanta | Founder & Executive Director, Raise Your Voice, Inc.

#TheAlgoRhythm #HipHop #Songwriting #FaithAndJustice #WuTang #GZA #HipHopHistory

Poets, Prophets, and Protest Ep. 1: The AlgoRhythm — What Algorithms Are Doing to What We See, Hear, and Remember

1994, Brooklyn. Ralph McDaniels decided what a whole borough saw on Video Music Box — and at least he was a person you could call, write to, argue with. Today, nobody's deciding what you see. Something is. In this solo episode, I break down what happens when a recommendation model — not a person — takes over the job of curating an entire culture's memory, with none of the accountability and a thousand times the reach.

Drawing on my own dissertation research (the Digital Griot Framework) and Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction, I walk through three questions: what the algorithm decides you SEE, what it decides you HEAR, and — the one that matters most — what it decides an entire generation gets to REMEMBER about hip hop. Jay-Z's "Renegade" and Mos Def's "Mathematics" both show up, because it turns out they were making this argument decades before anyone called it an algorithm.

IN THIS EPISODE

– Cold open: growing up on Ralph McDaniels and Video Music Box in '90s Brooklyn

– See: shadowbanning, throttled reach, and Cathy O'Neil's "models are opinions embedded in mathematics"

– Hear: Jay-Z's "Renegade" bar and how songs are now built to survive a three-second attention window

– Remember: Joshua 4's memorial stones and what a feed quietly decides is worth preserving

– The Turn: Mos Def's "Mathematics," Ephesians 6:12, and why this is a justice issue, not a tech issue

– The Charge: going and finding one artist the algorithm isn't pushing on you

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE

– Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Crown, 2016)

– Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press, 2018)

– Jaime M. Kowlessar, "Digital Griots Playing Lottery Tickets" (dissertation) — the Digital Griot Framework and #FixTheCountry / Ghanaian hip hop research

– Jay-Z, "Renegade" (feat. Eminem), The Blueprint, 2001

– Mos Def, "Mathematics," Black on Both Sides, 1999

– Joshua 4 (the memorial stones); Ephesians 6:12 (principalities and powers)

Poets, Prophets, and Protest is where the cipher meets the pulpit — hip hop, faith, and the culture that raised us. New episodes mix solo breakdowns like this one with conversations with artists, organizers, clergy, and scholars living at the intersection of these worlds.

🔔 Follow for new episodes

🎙️ Hosted by Dr. Jaime Kowlessar — Assistant Pastor of Community Engagement & Social Justice, Revision Church Atlanta | Founder & Executive Director, Raise Your Voice, Inc.

#PoetsProphetsAndProtest #HipHop #AlgorithmicBias #FaithAndJustice #DigitalGriot #HipHopHistory