soul. (In this book I speak of “the soul” when referring to the spiritual concept, and “soul” when discussing the cultural, aesthetical understanding, as long as we keep in mind that the latter is distinct but not separate from the former.) Though hip-hop is prominent, my primary focus is on the fate of the soul in our times. Because there are many signs of the soul’s retreat or disappearance in modern life, this study digs deep into the underground for signs of the soul’s throbbing and vital pulse, especially among African American and Latin cultures. Besides the spiritual value of this effort, studies in Afro-Latin conjunctions have great contemporary significance, especially given the surging waves of Latin American immigrants to the United States and the fact that many of them end up in crowded and pinched quarters, elbow to elbow, if not shackle to shackle, with many blacks in America. Studies on the relationship of blacks and Latinos in the Americas will only grow more urgent and timely, and I hope that this book, with a focus on some of the spiritual, literary, and musical dimensions of this relationship, will join the swelling choruses of black and brown voices.
The seeds of this study lie in the simple desire to add color and culture to a study of the soul. When a study of this sort remains at the level of pure philosophical or theological abstraction, it is almost certain that the embodied nature of soul will be missed, that the wild diversity of human souls in race, culture, and language will be overlooked. And the result is usually an image of the soul that is insipid and pale, resembling very little the idea of soul in living color, the soul as a living, breathing, suffering, dreaming thing. The transition from part I to part II of my study can also be seen, then, as an attempt to provide a thicker description, to sprinkle the soul with the spices and piquancy of human culture. In holding together these two dimensions, the sacred and profane, this study insists on the value of each perspective: the sublime and transcendent qualities of the soul in religious traditions on the one hand, and the brilliant, luminous frescos of soul in culture, art, and music on the other. And this brings us to the ancient view of rap. For the Greeks, the term rhapsodize (rhapsoidein) meant “to stitch songs together,” so in my study, I hope to be true to ancient and new attempts to stitch together various songs, beats, and human experiences, all in the effort to shed some light on the dark and dusky idea of the soul.
As I explore these different components of soul, I consider Otis Redding’s classic album Complete and Unbelievable: Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul (1966) as a revealing symbol of the spirit of his age and an intimation of what was to come in hip-hop. Out of the pyrotechnics of Redding’s soul, a new tempo was introduced to American life as the meaning of soul was given a new level of intensity, emotional force, and sartorial flair. It would change clothes and take on shades of the night, become blacker and more tender. I am suggesting that a similar ingenuity is apparent in the hip-hop generation, as rappers have added new words and syntaxes, new syncopations and styles to this older lexicon of soul. After ransacking and absorbing the traditional vocabulary (the beats in addition to the dialect), rappers left their own marks on the dictionary of soul, making sure that it would parse and interpret the ghetto conditions of their lives in the late twentieth century. To fully appreciate their modifications, I need to begin with biblical, theological, and literary monuments, then shift focus to the rappers who shook these monuments, Samson-like, to produce new temples of art. In these figures, the acquisition of soul becomes closely related to the search for the perfect beat, rhyme, and style. Rakim describes it this way: “I start to think and then I sink / into the paper like I was ink / When I’m writing, I’m trapped in between the lines / I escape when I finish the rhyme. . . . I got soul.”20 As a tribute to these efforts to escape the traps and confinements of older conventions, or the more treacherous traps of ghetto life, hip-hop has demonstrated mighty powers of soul, combining cool aplomb and sweaty, funky grace to make a combustible form of music that has exploded into many luminous sparks. In the process, something beautiful and resplendent has been fashioned out of an age “knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow-up.”
PART ONE
Sacred Histories of the Soul
1
In Search of Soul
Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle—for the soul throws up wonders every second.
—Virginia Woolf1
Fix every wandering thought upon that quarter where all thought is done; who can distinguish darkness from the soul?
—W. B. Yeats2
Now, my darling Nora, I want you to read over and over all I’ve written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself.
—James Joyce3
THE LOSS OF SOUL IN THE MODERN AGE
As so many other ancient pieties are viewed in our times, the concepts of God and soul have increasingly become objects of suspicion, if not indifference. Where secularization has been most aggressive in the twentieth century, especially among European and American writers dubbed the “new atheists,” we have seen obituaries written on behalf of both ideas, as if they are now anachronisms, relics of days of old, when wonder and magic filled the air.4 In many of these accounts the story of the modern world is narrated in evolutionary terms, with secularization greeted as the morning sun, dispersing the murky fog of the night, and the age of Enlightenment welcomed as the conqueror of the dark ages of the past. As a corollary of a Eurocentric bias, measuring every corner of the globe by its own presumptions of cultural superiority, this story measures and quantifies the development of world cultures by their adherence to Western norms of rationality and finds them crude when they deviate from these norms. It is a story that frequently casts religion in the role of the superstitious and primitive barbarian and reserves the civilizing and colonizing role for science. With a monopoly on truth established by scientific principles, the religious worldview is largely denied and dispossessed of any claim on the truth; this now belongs to the purview of modern rationality, a conception of knowledge stripped of archaic mysteries and primeval beliefs. In this paradigm, little, if any, tolerance is afforded a concept like the “soul.” It belongs to an antiquated age whose time is done.
While this narrative of intellectual and cultural evolution has remained an influential model, it has also stirred up swarms of opposition from various artists and intellectuals who dispute its value and credibility. Around the same time that the clouds of disbelief thickened the most (roughly speaking, the nineteenth century to the present), the principles associated with the idea of soul found advocates in numerous modern movements, from romanticism and modernism to African American and Latin American thought. In their own unique ways, these developments resuscitated and breathed new life into the concept of soul, making it stronger and richer, infusing it with the magic elixirs of poetry, myth, melody, and cultural style. In these cases, the various apologists for the idea of the soul revealed a certain degree of misgiving and skepticism about some of the new dogmas that the age of reason sought to enshrine in place of the soul and God. They tended to blame modern secularism for a small and monochromatic view of reason and culture and for a Eurocentric hubris that presumed to judge all that is true, good, and beautiful by its own parochial standards. For those who continued to believe in the power of the soul to claim and raise up a person’s life, the Enlightenment’s pantheon of new creeds—free enterprise and consumerism, materialism and bureaucratization, science and rationality, and not least, self-assured confidence in European superiority over all other peoples in this brave new world—offered a poor and paltry substitute for the values of old, and many modern artists withheld their devotion.
One might measure the breadth of discontent in modernity by the interest in the soul, by the palpable fear that the soul, once a star, is now in danger of collapsing into a black hole. For Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, advocacy on behalf of the soul—or what he called “soul force”—revealed a profound sense of discontent
