Is God Funky or What?: Black Biblical Culture and Contemporary Popular Music(111 Black Studies and Critical Thinking)

About the Book

Black music is a powerful art form. Artists’ creations often go where words cannot. The music is special—sacred. However, it’s still frequently shoehorned into the ambiguous categories of secular and sacred. Is God Funky or What?: Black Biblical Culture and Contemporary Popular Music complicates the traditional categories of sacred and secular by exposing religious rhetoric and contexts of contemporary popular black music and by revealing the religious-based biblical references and spirituality that form the true cultural context from which these genres emerge. The personal beliefs of black music artists often include, if not revolve around, the heavens. How come we are bombarded by the "thank Gods" in televised award shows, liner notes, or interviews for songs by musicians that some millennials might call "ratchet?" Is God Funky or What? shares anecdotes probing connections between specific forms of popular black music and religion. The qualifications of sacred and secular typically depend on context, lyrics, location, and audience (age, race, religion). Through a woven narrative of lyrics, godly acknowledgments, recorded and original interviews, biographies, and recordings from various genres of black music, this book explores how artists have intertwined views of God, perspectives regarding a higher power, spirituality, and religion in creating their music. Their creations make up an organic corpus called the Artistic Black Canon (ABC). Using the ABC, this book shares and explores its remarkable interpretations and ideas about life, music, spirituality, and religion. Is God Funky or What? also shares how we can better make use of this music in the classroom, as well as better understand how essential it is to the lives of many.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements – Introduction – Blues – Jazz – R&B/Soul – Funk – Hip Hop – Gospel – The Extensions – Epilogue – Index.

About the Author :

Theodore W. Burgh is a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He has a BA in music from Hampton University, MA in religious studies from Howard University, and MA and PhD in Near Eastern studies from the University of Arizona. His first book, Listening to the Artifacts, received the Klaus P. Wachsmann Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Review :
“Theodore W. Burgh gets down into an idea we’ve all had some kind of intuition about: the notion that the sacred and secular elements of black music are branches from the same tree. On pages of revelations braided together with an easygoing tone, this spiritual man explores what it is about the funk that puts that hump in yo’ rump. With in-depth interviews, on-point analysis, and his own personalized musical experiences across the black musical spectrum, Burgh tells us all how to party on the one with ‘The One’!” —Rickey Vincent, author of Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of The One “Anyone who loves black popular music will find this work to be a masterful blend of scholarship, memoir, and nostalgia. Told with warmth and humor, Theodore W. Burgh cites his own musical coming-of-age to argue that secular forms, including jazz, R&B, soul, and hip-hop, have the capacity to trigger experiential outcomes that are decidedly spiritual in nature. He shows how this ostensibly secular music functions as sacred ritual, embellishing and intensifying the kinds of moments that, for many, shape and articulate black identity. Is God Funky or What? is another fine example of black music scholarship boldly situated within the telling of first-person narrative.” —Teresa L. Reed, Professor of Music at the University of Tulsa and author of The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music and The Jazz Life of Dr. Billy Taylor