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Review
| The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music, by Teresa L. Reed. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. 187 pp. $40.00, cloth.
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| This work explores interrelationships between African American religious traditions and secular music in the twentieth century. The author seeks to understand "the African musical mind" and to chart absorption of "western culture" in order to understand the "powerful connection between the holy and the profane in the African American psyche." Because these goals ensue from essentialist assumptions about culture, however, they induce the author to propose a simplistic opposition between "west-African" and "western" culture. Reed argues that religion was ubiquitous in West Africa, that spiritual beings were manifested through music, ritualistic dancing and spirit possession. Preserving elements of this world view, African American slaves sang spirituals while working. "Western culture," according to Reed, polarized the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the material. Characterized by precision and timing, western music was performed in designated places, and was created for contemplation or consumption. Presumably, Reed means to refer to High-Church traditions and European classical music here, ignoring the evangelical Awakenings, as well as the religiously infused folk cultures of many European American musical forms. In addition to these problems, her brief discussion about the influence of the white-controlled record industry in Los Angeles, the site of an interracial Pentecostal/Holiness revival in the first decade of the twentieth century, would have benefited from a more dynamic conception of culture. A more sustained analysis of cultural syncretism among poor folk would also have added context to her discussion of "crossover" artists in the fourth essay. |
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Nevertheless, since the bulk of Reed's book is composed of keen analysis of the sacred forms and spiritual themes that permeate African-American secular music, she achieves her primary goal. Reed convinces readers that artists like James Brown and Little Richard emulated and incited emotional intensity parallel to that of Holy Spirit possession. She clearly explains how both Pentecostal/Holiness congregations, and secular performers celebrate flexibility and virtuosity. Communal and interactive in setting, the congregation and the dance hall, she explains, each provide forums for participants to celebrate spirit led approaches to temporality. She also explains how blues artists integrated the secular with the sacred in their lyrics, embellishing biblical texts to render them relevant to impoverished and alienated blacks. Old Testament figures such as Daniel and Noah came alive in captivity narratives that described victims of injustice, who could experience freedom through divine intervention. Other blues artists satirized and caricatured the church, Reed writes, reflecting perceptions that religion often failed to meet people's needs. Burlesque critique of the Preacher figure, for example, placed exaggerated emphasis on his ignorance, hypocrisy, greed or sexual misconduct. |
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At the behest of white commercial promoters, however, some artists were prodded to mock the emotional intensity and spontaneity of black worship itself, maintaining an exploitative minstrelsy tradition. For some of the celebrated black artists, who had deep roots in the church, crossing over to the secular market came with a price. Artists such as the Platters had to downplay or erase ethnic markers. After World War II, as some churches began promoting racial integration, a new generation of preacher activists softened edicts against secular music. By the early 1970s, artists such as Curtis Mayfield, and the Staplesingers were performing message songs which called for social responsibility. As Black Nationalist and revolutionary politics came to the fore in the 1960s, some artists searched for spiritual alternatives to the social gospel. Sun Ra invoked subaltern disciplines from astrology, Egyptology and Gnosticism. Reviving an African cosmology that celebrated earth and nature, funk musicians invoked the "rhythm of one" to celebrate sexual, physical, and mental liberation. In the 1980s and 1990s, children of the Black Panther Party such as Tupac Shakur reinvented the persona of the blues preacher, describing ghetto life with brutal honesty. Shakur also rapped about a caring God, however, evincing a social consciousness that transcended the negative images so often associated with hip-hop. |
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Reed's observations about the interrelationship between black music and history are very useful for high school and undergraduate instructors who wish to incorporate popular culture and religion into their classrooms. Reed's central, and most convincing argument is that expressions of spirituality metamorphosed in response to changing economic, political and social conditions. She provides extensive quotes from song lyrics, which teachers can easily transcribe for classroom use. Since most of the recordings Reed discusses are commercially available, enterprising teachers can easily make compilations, and use them to illustrate themes of cultural change and continuity, or cultural resistance and accommodation. Reed has provided teachers with an invaluable resource for teaching black cultural history. |
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| Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey |
John Drabble |
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