this enthusiasm for poetic style and idiomatic verve, mixed with a curiosity about religious questions, I eventually found myself in graduate school in Chicago, and this was one of the most elevating educational experiences of my life. Ideas and books nourished my sense of wonder in these years, swelling and raising it to new heights. At the same time, though, my education got a jolt from living on Chicago’s south side: Instead of elevating, I would say that it was grounding, as I began to notice with greater and greater alarm the scope of the poverty and violence only a stone’s throw from the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus. While my mind burrowed deep in books and libraries, my eyes and ears started to pick up on many of the battlegrounds on the south side, and the result was a schooling in ghetto life. When tempted to lose myself in books (the quixotic temptation that can addle one’s brain, as the case of Don Quixote proves), the pounding bass and gritty realism of hip-hop brought me back to hard truths and reminded me, á la Sancho Panza, or Hamlet’s dictum to Horatio, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in intellectual life. In effect, the music forced me to scrutinize my education for its capacity, and sometimes failure, to spotlight the trials and tribulations of our world.
By some nice happenstance, the years of my graduate education, the 1990s, coincided with rap’s most explosive growth and artistic inventiveness. Tupac burst on to the stage of hip-hop wearing multiple masks—villain and saint, pimp and preacher, street hustler and prophet—and many others followed suit. As a student of religion, I was particularly intrigued by rappers who would wantonly crisscross the categories of the sacred and profane, and the list was a long catalog of the most distinguished rappers: Nas, Lauryn Hill, Public Enemy, Common, Mos Def, KRS-One, Bone Thugs & Harmony, Wu Tang, and numerous others. In spite of their crucial differences, almost all of these figures created music that was earthy and raw, but with unmistakable desires and dreams of transcendence, so that one side of their souls was rooted in the brute realities of urban life and the other half soared high above the mundane. The result was often a more mature, if tortured, spirituality than one would find in many suburban churches, a thug’s theology, as Michael Dyson describes it.15 Instead of viewing God from the pulpit or the ivory tower, artists in this vein were rapping about God in a lower register, out of the baritone depths of the human soul. From these guttural regions, they sometimes reached surprising heights of sublimity, as they wrestled with the crushing weight of suffering, the pits of despair, the darkness of God, and somehow came out kicking and alive like Jacob at the Jabbok stream.
True, there have always been strands of rap that are wack and trifling, but the best of it is a pedagogy in the dungeons of America, served up with juicy beats, guttural moans, and lyrics that, Ali-like, bounce, float, and box the listener’s ears. More and more, I wanted to get in the mix and see if these street scriptures had anything to add to my formal studies at the university. If it was the sound and sonorous pleasures of rap that seduced me in my early years, now it was more about the social consciousness and spirituality of the music, how it assaulted the untroubled American conscience for its neglect of the poverty and distress of many American cities. I came to appreciate rap more and more for its ability to psychoanalyze the ills of the body politic, to plunge into the dark labyrinths of the American unconscious, and to force America to confront the traumas of its past and present. I came to value its dissenting heterodoxy when the American civil religion was concerned. Instead of apotheosizing the American dream and turning it into infallible dogma, rap offered a disquieting portrait of American nightmares: burned-out buildings, cities riddled with violence, housing projects that look like prison cells or orphanages, and young black and brown lives that ended prematurely, like fallen fruit that was never allowed to ripen. If nothing else, as I explore in chapter 6, hip-hop has often adopted an apocalyptic mode of utterance—shouts, hollers, screams—as a way of registering the feelings of existential brokenness and urban decay in many of these communities.
But there was something else that I increasingly noticed about the rough and ragged textures of the music: the invocations and appeals to God. Though there is certainly no denying that the music has a very secular, vulgar pitch to it and at times circles the drain in displays of prodigal excess, from hedonistic revelry to swaggering curses, I was also surprised by the frequency and depth of religious language in rap. Even in the thick mud of its wild prodigality, there remains a concurrent flow of the deepest spiritual springs, one that taps into subterranean rivers from black history and adds a mournful, blues-like trickle to the more raging waters of rap’s hollers, shouts, and boasts. In these instances, hip-hop can strike a note that is thoroughly immersed and baptized in spiritual waters, in rivers that roll like the Jordan and bleed like the Red Sea. When this happens, hip-hop becomes a testimony, like so much of American black music, to the brooding depths of great art and to the ability of the human spirit—perishable breath and all—to survive the tyranny of misfortune.
In my reading, the spiritual moments in hip-hop are interrogations of God in the face of confusion and affliction. They give voice to something like a theologia crucis or memento mori, reminding us of the bodies and souls left exposed to flames of the underworld. If death is a “beat without a melody,” as Lin-Manuel Miranda has poetically called it, hip-hop is a faithful rendition of this bare skeleton beat, the sound of death in banging, tolling, boisterous, and exuberant tones.16
Of course, if this all sounds too heavy, I was also drawn to rap music because it was just plain fun, irrespective of the lyrical content. As many modernists have maintained, sometimes poetry can delight in the pure sonic qualities of words shorn of semantic meaning, a celebration of prancing syllables, dancing consonants, stressed syllables, and wailing pitches.17 In this spirit, even the most frivolous raps appealed to me as long as they contained big, fat, apple-bottom bass and were delivered in a bouncing, uncooked flow, part singing, part talking, part grunting. Only those partial to the music can testify to these delights, the bass vibrating and electrifying the microscopic layers of the soul, making listeners feel that they are made of the same elements of the music, some unseen rhythms and spirits. Such things have a language of their own and can communicate without relying on words, as if the pulses and cadences speak in some ineffable, mystical tongue that calibrates the soul while riding roughshod over it. In such cases, words rarely suffice to explain the delicious beauty of music.
But then again, insofar as rap leans heavily on words and narratives, we must judge it by what it says and doesn’t say. And when this becomes our theme, as in this study, my own biased inclination is toward the most artistic forms of rap, in which the lyrics are inventive and meaningful, the song’s value is measured by its spiritual weight and ethical volume, and it does so much more than “make the club get crunk.” For someone who feels the magnetic pull of transcendence as I do, it shouldn’t surprise the reader that I would have a special affinity for the kind of hip-hop that combines dope beats with spiritual and social lessons about life in the hoods of America. Though I can still appreciate the playful party joints, the rap that appears in this study is a stricter diet of poetic, provocative, and thoughtful nourishment, music that is imbued with “moments of truth” as Gang Starr memorably described it, or “moments of clarity” in Jay Z’s language.18
In my experience, at any rate, rap music has been all of this. It was my compass during my time in Chicago and helped me chart parts of this world, even parts of my own soul, that had once been foreign to this Mexican American kid from Tucson. Looking back on these formative wonder years, I consider some of my experiences inside and outside the University of Chicago to be the building blocks of the study presented here. In the great classics of religion and literature, I explored the tenebrous depths of the soul and learned a lot that shaped the contours of this study. But my years in Chicago also confirmed a truth deep in the American grain of things, that there are wilder truths and more soulful lessons than the classroom can offer, that a whaling ship could be one’s Harvard and Yale (Herman Melville), that the slums and tenements of New York could be the finest tutors (Stephen Crane), and that “beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined” (Nas).19
AFRO-LATIN SOUL
At the risk of being repetitive, let me say in
