Winner of the 2004 ARSC Award for Best Research in Recorded
Rock, Rhythm & Blues or Soul, The Holy Profane explores the
strong presence of religion in the secular music of
twentieth-century African American artists as diverse as Rosetta
Tharpe, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Earth, Wind &
Fire, and Tupac Shakur. Analyzing lyrics and the historical
contexts which shaped those lyrics, Teresa L. Reed examines the
link between West-African musical and religious culture and the way
African Americans convey religious sentiment in styles such as the
blues, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and gangsta rap. She looks at
Pentecostalism and black secular music, minstrelsy and its
portrayal of black religion, the black church, "crossing over" from
gospel to R&B, images of the black preacher, and the salience
of God in the rap of Tupac Shakur.
Traditionally, west European culture has drawn distinct
divisions between the secular and the sacred in music. Liturgical
music belongs in church, not on pop radio, and artists who fuse the
two are guilty of sacrilege. In the West-African worldview,
however, both music and the divine permeate every imaginable part
of life -- so much so that concepts like sacred and secular were
entirely foreign to African slaves arriving in the colonies. The
Western influence on African Americans eventually resulted in more
polarization between these two musical forms, and black musicians
who grew up singing in church were often lamented as hellbound once
they found popular success. Even these artists, however, never
completely left behind their West-African musical ancestry. Reed's
exploration of this trend in African American music connects the
work of today's artists to their West-African ancestry -- a
tradition that over two-hundred years of Western influence could
not completely stamp out.
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