In Search of Soul. Alejandro Nava

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      And now, in our own modern context, these examples have multiplied in direct proportion to the troubles of our age, so that such ordeals have become the signs of the most credible kind of soulfulness. In American musical traditions, whether the blues, jazz, R & B, soul, funk, deep song, son, or salsa, the power of blackness surely includes refrains of agony and quarrels with God. As American musicians found their voice, they channeled their experiences of marginalization through their music and directed some of their “blues” against the guardians of the sacred. In many cases their art appeared to many as a delicious but dangerous, demonic power, a dark enemy of societal and ecclesiastical norms. As if to feed this judgment, many of these artists channeled the trickster or “bad man” temperament by bringing the noise to genteel society, wreaking havoc in their lyrics and dances and in general playing their music for the demonized others of society. Considered vulgar and coarse, many of these artists would be accused of making deals with the devil at the crossroads or ghettos of American society.

      Worship as Defiance

      In weighing the nature of “soul” in this study, I devote considerable space to black humors, the products of untamed and raw power, prophecies that unsettle the prevailing rules of society. If it’s true, as music critic Jon Pareles writes, that most music “implies that a set of rules is in effect, governing where notes can be placed in pitch and time, and what the acceptable timbres might be,”¹¹⁰ then we can say that the most memorable of American musical styles have challenged these rules, allowing the right amount of anarchy and dissonance to make something unexpected and new, for example, the introduction of an Otis Redding rasp, a Billie Holiday quiver, a flamenco’s piercing cry. In the scarred, trembling timbres of these voices, a surfeit of pain seeps into the music and interrupts the orthodox rules of music or society, making for the perfect, dissonant music of the soul. To the ears of genteel society, this is all some kind of black magic, but for those who can appreciate a broader range of creativity, there is a blessed rage for order in these howls of the human voice.

      If anything, black musicians in this vein have only proliferated in the post–civil rights generation. The hip-hop generation has brought together a host of trickster figures and organized a coup of civil rights etiquette and propriety. In its mutinous postures, hip-hop took the soul and funk music of earlier generations and made it harder and edgier, deep-fried the funk, so to speak. In “funkifying” this older tradition, hip-hop introduced the speech patterns of street hustlers, thugs, and pimps to the smooth grooves of R & B. With the street vernacular as its medium, hip-hop picked up the scraps of language that other, more refined styles had discarded and disdained; tattered and frayed words seemed more fitting symbols of the lives they lived in the alleyways and projects of the ghetto. So rap music culled the “shunned expressions of disposable people,” as one critic put it, and made beats and rhymes out of these castaway vocabularies.¹¹¹ By using prohibited idioms in a revolutionary manner, hip-hop sought to break free of the prison of language. (Adam Bradley reminds us, after all, that “vernacular” originates from the Greek word for a slave born of his master’s house, verna, so hip-hop represents the liberating energy of the vernacular, breaking free of incarcerating conventions and realities.)¹¹²

      And if hip-hop is not always revolutionary, it is almost always crafty, astute, and wily. It uses logos—reason, speech—in both modern and ancient ways. As Bruce Lincoln points out, long before the word became synonymous with reason in the age of the Socrates and his disciples, logos was primarily a speech of cunning and guile, employed by the weak and the young against the strong. Homer and Hesiod associated the term with the ruses of deception and duplicity used by trickster figures to compensate for their relative powerlessness (e.g., Hermes, called master of guiles, used his “seductive logoi” to trick his older, stronger brother, Apollo; Odysseus is given the epithet “clever” or “cunning” throughout The Odyssey as he is shown outwitting stronger opponents).¹¹³ In the case of hip-hop, whether rappers are conjuring Greek or African tricksters, their sly skills can be considered a rendition of this ancient view of logoi, in which subversive slang, outlaw expressions, and irreverent counternarratives are employed by the poor and young to outwit the enemy. In these instances, the playfulness of the trickster, or the Faustian pact as I have described it, is a symbol of defiance, a prophetic disturbance of the repressive aspects of the Puritan American sociopolitical order.¹¹⁴

      I think of J. Cole’s description in “Dead Presidents 2” as a combination of the kind of profane cunning and sacred inspiration I have been discussing here: “my flow like a devil spit it, and heaven sent it.”¹¹⁵ In this compact sentence, J. Cole encapsulates many of these disparate experiences in black music. His lyrics, he suggests, are gritty and slick like the devil’s language or perhaps twisted like a serpent’s tongue, but finally inspired by God. At its best, the genre of rap is a forked tongue in this way, sometimes venomous and poisonous, biting hard at social decorum and political perfidy, but then, in the same breath, spitting faith and hope, transforming the poisons of ghetto life into a cure. With traces of both poison and potion, hip-hop turns music and lyrics into a wily form of speech (logoi), against the black holes of the bourgeois capitalist order that suck light from the lives of the poor and disenfranchised. “I pay the toll fighting for my own soul,” Lauryn Hill remarks, “’cause the bourgeois type of mental sucks like a black hole.”¹¹⁶

      In these examples the meaning of “soul” swings back and forth between the sacred and profane, high and low culture; it can signify spiritual complexity as well as a culture’s street wisdom and cool aplomb, especially in music, dance, and verbal virtuosity. In her reflections on soul and hip-hop, Imani Perry clarifies the issues: “By soul I mean that which has some spiritual depth and deep cultural and historical resonances to be felt through the kind of music and sounds made by the vocalists. . . . Soulful music is music of joy and pain, unself-consciously wedding melody and moaning, the sound of the dual terror and exultation of being black in America.”¹¹⁷ In this reading soul gives voice to many layers of style and substance—struggle and suffering, terror and jubilation, vulgarity and sublimity—and stitches them together like an auditory collage or mix-tape of various sentiments, beliefs, and values.¹¹⁸ The product, as Nas once said about his own style, is a wild arrangement of poetry, preaching, and straight-up hustlin’.¹¹⁹

      Ultimately, then, I view the power of blackness through the eyes of these spiritual and cultural styles, in which flirtation with the profane, vulgar, and foul is an instrument of salvation and a disguised form of love and justice. One might say that this construction of blackness contains a heavy amount of irony, in which blasphemous and forbidden thoughts conceal a virtuous interior and saintly soul. In other words, as Kierkegaard and Melville tried to warn us, looks can be deceiving: Beneath the glitter and glamor of Christendom, beneath all of its moral rectitude and sanctimoniousness, there may be hidden sin, a charnel house underneath clean white sepulchers (Melville’s image). Conversely, it could be that true goodness remains unrecognized by the rulers of the world or the guardians of holiness, so that if we want to search for God, or search for soul, we need to turn to the parts of our world where poverty and desperation are rampant: in the trials of the streets, in the crowded despair of prisons, and in the crosses of the hood. This is to say that the path to redemption in Judaism or Christianity is never a straight line but rather something more rambling and unpredictable, like the trail of a vagabond, or the shuffling, whirling, and winding of a break-dancer, or the sly contrivances of a rapper. Yeats was right, in this sense, to call good and evil “crude analogies,” because sometimes the path of soulfulness requires the intrepid and bold daring of a soul rebel in the mold of Bob Marley, Dr. King, or Cesar Chavez, and sometimes it requires the impiety of a blues or rap artist in the mold of Billie Holiday, Jelly Roll Morton, or Tupac Shakur.¹²⁰ It seems to me that this is what Emerson meant when he said that the soul becomes when the saint is confounded with the rogue, or what Melville meant when he channeled Job’s defiant roar: “I now know that thy right worship is defiance.”¹²¹

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