“When I created that name, Young Noah was the person that I was aiming to be through Christ.” He wanted to stand for righteousness and holiness. “The message was ‘Christ is coming’ and this was a strange message. Noah preached that it was going to rain and it had never rained before, and I preached that Christ was slain and then ascended into Heaven and is coming back for us.”
Looking at Christian hip-hop now, Young Noah is discouraged by seeing “people who follow trends. People who don’t pray and be lead by God when they decide the direction for their music, when they decide their aim, their goal.” His dissatisfaction with the genre as a whole is why he has chosen to re-release three albums from his past.
He says that many artists just want to do what Lecrae does because Lecrae is so popular and successful. “The same way when Lecrae was talking about unashamed, Jesus, 116, everybody was doing the unashamed, 116, Jesus rap.” Young Noah thinks that artists need to find their own identity and make music that is not dependent on what is trending.
Young Noah believes that a lot of rappers who are Christians are trying to break into the secular hip-hop market, but the only person who can do that effectively is Lecrae. “He has the platform to go into that space, do the kind of things he’s doing, but I don’t have that platform, and a lot of the other guys who are trying to copycat what he’s doing don’t have the platform to make any kind of wave in the secular hip-hop industry. That is a very saturated industry. Do you know how many people are trying to be rappers over there?”
