No abstract
At the 2010 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion held in Atlanta, GA, a group of young scholars organized a wildcard session titled “What’s This ‘Religious’ in Hip Hop Culture?” The central questions under investigation by the panel were 1) what about hip hop culture is religious? and 2) how are issues of theory and method within African American religious studies challenged and/or rethought because of the recent turn to hip hop as both subject of study and cultural hermeneutic. Though some panelists challenged this “religious” in hip hop, all agreed that hip hop is of theoretical and methodological import for African American religious studies and religious studies in general. This collection of essays brings together in print many findings from that session and points out the implications of hip hop's influence on religious scholars' theoretical and methodological concerns.
This chapter explores the relationship between humanism and music, giving attention to important theoretical and historical developments, before focusing on four brief case studies rooted in popular culture. The first turns to rock band Modest Mouse as an example of music as a space of humanist expression. Next, the chapter explores Austin-based Rock band Quiet Company and Westcoast rapper Ras Kass and their use of music to critique religion. Last, the chapter discusses contemporary popular music created by artificial intelligence and considers what non-human production of music suggests about the category of the human and, resultantly, humanism. These case studies give attention to the historical and theoretical relationship between humanism and music, and they offer examples of that relationship as it plays out in contemporary music.
Based out of Atlanta, GA, rap group Goodie Mob emerged in 1995 and gained critical and commercial success in large part through their ability to maintain a lyrical and musical balance between prophetically biting social commentaries concerning racism, poverty, violence, and sexism with an overtly theistic (and often Christian) metaphysical program responsive to these concerns. One way Goodie Mob maintains this balance is through the heuristic of death. Often, the group suggests death - the fear or exaggeration of it - is responsible for the individual and social sufferings that offer a starting platform for their prophetic critiques. At other times, death is deemed the only real solution to suffering. During these moments, death offers an end to suffering and the discovery of a response to the absurdity and arbitrariness of death and suffering. Using Goodie Mob's lyrics, this essay explores the relationship between metaphysical constructions and social injustices like white supremacy, and ultimately concludes that white supremacy might be thought of as a metaphysical system.
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