At the same time, there is something more to this portrait of blackness that takes us beyond the urbane and highbrow genius of Du Bois, deeper into the heart of the profane. In honor of Leslie Fiedler or Melville, we might call this the Faustian path of soul, or in honor of Lorca, the way of duende, or for hip-hop, the raw, vernacular version of soul.105 In each case, the path of soul requires us to swerve from piety and polished erudition to travel into more dangerous and forbidden domains of human experience. In straying from orthodox paths in this way, we open ourselves to the wilder, funkier, and more eccentric possibilities of soul, something closer to the streetwise imagination of Jean-Michel Basquiat than the classic mind of a Michelangelo, closer to the gritty, vulgar insights of hip-hop than a Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Richard Wagner. In confining our search for soul to conventional piety or classical music and art, we risk lulling the creative imagination to sleep and consequently neglecting the moments of clarity and beauty that happen in surprising and unexpected locations: in the boisterous and crowded realities of urban life, in riotous and insolent music, in forbidden dances, and in strange and raucous thoughts. It could be that the blasts of noise in orthodox traditions—dreary dogmatics, hypocritical piety, and repressive righteousness—drone on and prevent us from hearing new sounds or from seeing the pied beauty in “all things counter, original, spare, strange.”106
In the modern era the legacy of spiritual, aesthetic, and moral revolt—inspired by the example of Jesus in his agitation with religious authorities—finds many disciples in America, including figures as disparate as Melville and Du Bois, Howlin’ Wolf and Tupac. In their flirtations with blackness, the traditional patterns of soul are battered and smashed, then suddenly reconstituted again to make something truly original and unforeseen. Based on their examples, exile from society and conventional institutions is not only a handicap; it may lead to unique possibilities in perception, vision, or experience. Melville’s Ishmael describes these possibilities thus—“a long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery”—and then adds, “I myself am a savage.”107 By identifying a dimension of savagery within his own being, he essentially establishes his likeness to everyone beyond the pale of the civilized world. Like his namesake in the Bible (the biblical Ishmael is exiled along with his African mother, Hagar), Melville’s Ishmael will wander the earth with other exiles and savages and come to the realization that they all share the same humanity. In the course of his unlikely relationship with Queequeg (the tattooed heathen called “Son of Darkness” by Captain Bildad), Ishmael reaches the conclusion that this “wild idolater,” worshipper of a black god, is nothing less than his fellow man, to whom his respect and love are owed: “Consequently,” he concludes, “I must unite with him in his (religion); ergo, I must turn idolater.”108 Rebellious syllogisms of this kind—a mutiny against the legal and moral laws of his day and an embrace of outcast lives and estranged sensibilities—are the basis for Melville’s own judgment that he had written a wicked book.109
In this reading, if one attained the power of soul, it would be achieved by mirroring the human cargo of Melville’s ship, freighted as it was with the meanest sailors and savages, renegades and castaways, maroons and rogues (including an American Indian, a Zoroastrian, a Polynesian, an African, black Americans, Quakers, etc.). Soul in Melville would thus contain the whole cosmos; it would be one of the roughs and have its helm and rudder steered by tattooed heathens and sons of darkness. In archetypal American fashion, the soul would become a melting pot for the lives of many people, refined and coarse, graceful and rowdy, with this legion of styles gelling into one, while still allowing space for each one’s unique flavor.
In rummaging through the nether parts of the human soul in these ways and allowing ourselves to be schooled by the renegades and castaways of social and religious life, we naturally enter a battleground on which a life and death struggle ensues with the problem of evil, or in Job-like fashion, with God; this, too, is part of the power of blackness. In this case, the most profound quests of the soul depend on the spirit’s capacity to scrutinize the wreckage of history and to face God in the style of the biblical patriarchs who defied him, moments of the deepest spiritual sublimity, when grace drips into the deepest basins of the soul, only, it seems, in the midnight hours of anguish.
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