Afro-Latin Soul and Hip-Hop

This chapter explores the history of African and Spanish musical fusions. In terms of race relations in the New World specifically, music has frequently been the occasion for an exchange of ideas and sounds that has brought together various cultures, transforming conflicting and clashing relations into harmonious streams of sound. Hence, lingering affinities from medieval Al-Andalus have been the inspiration for African and Spanish conjunctions and collaborations in modern times and have resulted in novel, hybrid inventions, everything from salsa and samba to funk and hip-hop. This chapter focuses on hip-hop within this context, though it also takes a look at the cultural soil of Latin America to appreciate the roots and branches of African and Spanish blends in the New World.

Christian Soul and the Revolt of the Slave

This chapter considers how Friedrich Nietzsche had seized on a fundamental fact about Christianity: that it bears the ignoble mark of a slave. In Nietzsche's view, Christianity represents a slave revolt against all the noble principles of antiquity and the introduction of base and grotesque values into Western civilization. As an affront to classic aristocratic taste, Christianity took vengeance on Rome by adopting the ghetto tongue and style of its Jewish brothers and sisters and used it to curse and subvert the patrician values of Greco-Roman culture. For Nietzsche, these “oriental slaves” upended the cherished achievements of Greco-Roman culture and instigated a carnival-like subversion of Roman hierarchies, a world turned upside down.

On Hebrew Soul

This chapter begins with a consideration of the terminology of nephesh in the Hebrew Bible, and also explores the meaning of this concept from a more elevated, bird's-eye perspective—one that surveys the dense, tangled forest of the soul from a literary and narrative perspective. Because the concept of the soul is the product of a story—a “living book” as Teresa of Ávila said—this chapter attempts to unspool the narrative threads of this story, with a specific focus on the way the Bible commingles tragedy and comedy and hence weaves together its drama with high and low strands of thought. The result is a pattern that features, in bold color, the sensibilities of the outcast, the outsider, and the downtrodden, so that if one can speak of the heart and soul of the Bible, it will be found in the Bible's predilection for these themes.

In Search of Soul

This chapter follows Virginia Woolf's assessment of soul in Russian fiction, applying it instead to African American and Latin American traditions as its guiding spirits. It operates with an assumption that there is something wildly quixotic about its endurance in the modern world and something surprisingly revelatory in this foolish passion for the soul, something that can school the modern intelligence on the matters of the human spirit. The chapter suggests that we look at these themes and refrains on the soul in two major ways: first, with biblical and theological traditions in mind, and second, in the spirit of the profane, in which “soul” becomes synonymous with exuberant styles, cultures, literatures, and, above all, the powerful currents of music.

In Search of Duende

This chapter discusses Federico García Lorca's concept of soul—what he called duende. As the muse of Lorca's imagination, duende transported his poetry and music to great heights and simultaneously agitated and menaced the powers of his age. Shaped and created in a similar likeness to “soul,” duende is a Spanish translation of the creative grace that transfigures suffering into some of the finest achievements in music, poetry, religion, and the arts. To Lorca's fascist critics, duende was the stuff of heresy, a kind of disease and deviation from the canonical values of society that if not checked could lead to full-blown plague. Critics of this sort sought to sanitize or sterilize Lorca's pen of all such rebellious instincts.

From Soul to Hip-Hop

This chapter traces the emergence of hip-hop to the rise of an apocalyptic era. Though hip-hop has its roots in the music of soul, R & B, funk, blues, and jazz, it went much further than its predecessors into the modern heart of darkness. In hip-hop studies, this swerve from the music of the past is frequently traced to a rupture that occurred sometime between the civil rights era and the generations that immediately followed. Forced to dwell in the rubble of the dreams of the 1960s, the children who came of age in the late twentieth century became increasingly disenchanted with traditional values and claims of progress. From their ghetto-centric vantage point, a view through broken windows and ruined infrastructures, injustice had not disappeared as much as it had disguised itself in new forms.

The Souls of Black Folk

This chapter explores some of the synergies between Spanish soul and black American traditions through Ralph Ellison's depiction of soul. In turning to Ellison, a contemporary of Lorca, this chapter falls in the thick of musical and cultural currents of soul. Like many black writers of the twentieth century, Ellison brought musical cadences and flows into the mighty river of American literature, injecting some of its stagnant waters with a fresh tributary of style. By adding his lyrical voice to American literature, he used his pen the way black musicians used their instruments, making it sing on behalf of a black American experience that was invisible in many parts of America. He not only honored conceptions of soul in black music, folklore, literature, and religion in this way, but also simultaneously exposed the blindness and tone deafness of many Americans.

Introduction

This introductory chapter briefly considers the two major streams that have shaped Western ideas of soul: religious and biblical versions of soul; and cultural, musical, and literary interpretations. These categories allow us to consider soul from different angles, first as a biblical and theological concept and subsequently as a question of style in music, folklore, poetry, and literature. When speaking of this second inflection, the chapter (and the book as a whole) focuses on African American and Spanish/Latin American traditions, as they converge with the author's own area of expertise and, more personally, touch aspects of his own culturally conditioned soul.