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You sound just like Eminem. KJ-52 had heard the line so many times, he got sick of it. He didn't want to be compared to the world's most famous rapper—not to mention one of its crudest. Didn't matter if their styles and voices were similar. Didn't matter if they were both white. Didn't matter if they both rapped about growing up on the streets—Eminem in Detroit, and KJ in Tampa, Florida.

KJ wanted to do his own thing, to blaze his own hip-hop trail: "I didn't want to be known as the Christian version of Eminem."

But eventually, KJ began to see it another way.

"Kids started telling me how they threw their Eminem CDs away after they got mine," he says. "Youth pastors were giving my CD to their kids who were into Eminem. God just started showing me that he could use me like this. So I said, 'All right, God. If they want to say I'm the Christian Slim Shady, I can't fight that.'"

So he embraced it—and even wrote a song about it. "Dear Slim," on KJ's Collaborations (Uprok), is a series of three fictional letters he wrote to Eminem. Some lyrics:

Dear Slim . . . my name's KJ . . . / This is what I'm saying / It's for you that I'm on my knees now daily praying . . . / I hope you understand that I ain't even dissing you / And even though it's a song you'll probably never listen to . . . / God's got a mad love for you up in a mad abundance.

Turns out KJ might've been wrong about it being something Eminem would "probably never listen to." At last year's MTV Video Music Awards, a pastor backstage gave Eminem a copy of Collaborations and encouraged him to listen to "Dear Slim."

Eminem asked, "Is he dissing me?" The pastor said, "No, there's a lot of respect. Just listen to it." Eminem took the CD and walked away.

KJ never heard whether Eminem actually listened to the CD, or whether it made any difference. But he often hears stories of how his music affects others. For example, he received an e-mail from a girl who was considering suicide, but said that a song on his first CD, 7th Avenue, "literally saved my life."

The girl was struggling with family problems and decided to take some pills to end it all. But she said she "somehow" hit the play button on her CD player, and KJ's "Keep Ya Head Up" started playing. The chorus: "Gots to keep ya head up, even when ya fed up."

The girl wrote: "That song stopped me from making the worst decision of my life. Thank you. You have no idea what you've done for me."

"I was blown away by that e-mail," says KJ. "I was ready to cry."

He met the girl a few weeks later, and learned that she is doing well and that her family situation had improved.

That's what it's all about, says KJ—making a difference, sharing God's love and the good news of the gospel.

"That's how I look at my music," he says. "I use hip-hop to evangelize and to encourage."

Check out KJ's website at kj52.com.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Campus Life magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Campus Life.

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