Hip-hop and its cousin, rap, is stuff I won’t let my kid listen to on the car radio because I never know what weird thing is going to come out of the speakers. Which is why I was interested to see the Tennessean announce that Christian hip hop has arrived.

When it comes to this kind of music, I’m beyond clueless. But I do know that Nashville is as close as you can get to not only being the go-to place for country music but is also the national capital for contemporary Christian music. There’s a reason why CCM Magazine is based there.

So I appreciate it when a secular publication tries to explain the genre to us great unwashed in the peanut gallery.  Here's what ran Tuesday:

The audacious Christian hip-hop movement, which to this point has been spearheaded mostly by independent artists and record labels, has made its way to Music Row with Word Music’s launch of a hip-hop imprint called 4 Against 5.

The new imprint is headed by Joseph Prielozny, the producer and artist development executive who helped guide the career of Christian hip-hop’s flag bearer, Lecrae.

Prielozny likens the rising popularity, word-of-mouth marketing and do-it-yourself ethos of the Christian hip-hop movement to rap music’s emergence into the mainstream in the 1990s. Obviously, the message of Christian rappers like Lecrae is different than Easy E, but the ethos is the same. Something fresh, something resonating is happening with Christian hip-hop and now Word, the genre’s oldest label, is buying in.

I kept wondering what 4 Against 5 meant, but the article never said. Thank goodness for online searches and YouTube. The story continues: