On his book Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz
Cover Interview of December 04, 2008
A close-up
There are a number of individual moments in the book I would want a reader to find on first browsing, so it is hard to choose only one. On balance, perhaps, it would be the opening pages of Chapter 4 on “Rap and American Business.” Part of the fallout of segregating Latin and U.S. black musics is that almost no one comments on the fact that rap and salsa grew up in the same areas of New York, only miles apart, during exactly the same period (the late 1960s and 1970s). The former was a retaliation against postmodern cynicism using the elements of urban consumer culture; the latter, a deliberately old-fashioned rural looking-back in hostile urban surroundings. The tragic forms that African spirituality was forced to take in the United States are exemplified by rap’s ambiguous business ethic – the inseparability of its message from the desire to get rich. Salsa, by contrast, carefully tried to hold on to naivety and humor.
The two genres represented very different approaches to dealing with the pressures of American business and its commercialization of art. So here is a very concrete example of what I meant above about the need to see black music of the Americas as a unity. For, what I show here is that hip-hop arose when it did in order to make up for a lack in U.S. neo-African music as compared with its Latin counterparts. In Latin America, there were always a number of available musical forms like calypso and guaracha that had a strong verbal component – an element of political exposé, poetry, and dance all rolled into single form. This is an essential component of African holism lost in the U.S., where jazz has become essentially a spectator sport and R&B an impoverished verbal idiom. We like to think of hip-hop as a heroic creation of embattled black youth with their backs to the wall, and of course it is. But it also had to be created in order to fill a void in African secular devotion.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
There are a number of individual moments in the book I would want a reader to find on first browsing, so it is hard to choose only one. On balance, perhaps, it would be the opening pages of Chapter 4 on “Rap and American Business.” Part of the fallout of segregating Latin and U.S. black musics is that almost no one comments on the fact that rap and salsa grew up in the same areas of New York, only miles apart, during exactly the same period (the late 1960s and 1970s). The former was a retaliation against postmodern cynicism using the elements of urban consumer culture; the latter, a deliberately old-fashioned rural looking-back in hostile urban surroundings. The tragic forms that African spirituality was forced to take in the United States are exemplified by rap’s ambiguous business ethic – the inseparability of its message from the desire to get rich. Salsa, by contrast, carefully tried to hold on to naivety and humor.
The two genres represented very different approaches to dealing with the pressures of American business and its commercialization of art. So here is a very concrete example of what I meant above about the need to see black music of the Americas as a unity. For, what I show here is that hip-hop arose when it did in order to make up for a lack in U.S. neo-African music as compared with its Latin counterparts. In Latin America, there were always a number of available musical forms like calypso and guaracha that had a strong verbal component – an element of political exposé, poetry, and dance all rolled into single form. This is an essential component of African holism lost in the U.S., where jazz has become essentially a spectator sport and R&B an impoverished verbal idiom. We like to think of hip-hop as a heroic creation of embattled black youth with their backs to the wall, and of course it is. But it also had to be created in order to fill a void in African secular devotion.