NIETZCHE GOT SOMETHING RIGHT about the soul: namely, that music is essential to its survival. In reacting to philosophical tendencies to marginalize or ignore the place of music, dance, poetry, and painting, Nietzsche would insist on the central importance of the arts in any philosophical investigation.
In my own discipline of theology, a similar concern is justified: When theology has taken its cue from modern philosophy, it, too, has slighted the role of music in considering the question of God. The result is a portrait of soul in monotone pitches, without color, without polyphony. Instead of a guiding rhythm in one’s reflections, music is often relegated to a footnote or to an echo that reaches one’s ear in barely perceptible, muffled sounds.
The most glaring exception to this general rule is the portrait of soul in black and Latin traditions. As James Baldwin famously noted, it is almost solely through music that black people have been able to tell their story. The same can be said about Latin cultures: Music has been a crucial medium for communicating with the modern world, with one’s ancestors, and with God. It has been a defining feature of black and Latin-American identities—a key ingredient in the stew and spice of these cultures.
Given the storytelling capacity of music in these cases, I believe that any theology worthy of the Christian conviction of incarnation—where God is embodied in the vast rainbow of human cultures—might want to begin by calibrating its body and soul to the frequencies of music. With music booming in our ears, we might get an alternative history of religion and culture, told at a sonic level, in the beats of a drum, a bass line, chant, or grunt. We might learn about cultural styles and struggles left off the written record of modern European accounts of the West, that exist only as oral and folk traditions.
Consider, for example, the role of drums and bass instruments in Afro-Latin traditions (such as the batá, bongó, and marímbula of the Cuban son music style): They are all considered sacramental objects, with particular drums and beats corresponding to certain Orishas and ceremonies. With the right stroke and caress, the drums are taught how to speak the language of the divine, and people are taught, in the process, how to use sound waves, timbres, and rhythms—in lieu of written texts—to interact with the sacred. Echoes of these drumbeats—dangerous, rebellious, foreboding—can be felt in the entire history of black music in the Americas.
On duende
In Federico García Lorca’s search for soul, the great Andalusian poet drew riches from the legacy of la convivencia—the “coexistence” of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the age of Moorish Spain. He saw in the music of Iberia a deep river of Arab, gypsy, African, Jewish, and Christian currents, all converging into a spinning whirlpool of grace that he called duende. Roughly equivalent to what African-American traditions have called “soul,” duende is a mysterious force that floods the mind, body, and spirit of a great artist: singer, dancer, poet, mystic, or painter. Duende is an overpowering gift, one that sets its recipient apart from other talented, proficient artists. It separates the great from the ordinary, the inspired from the conventional, R&B from disco, Nas from the Chingys of the world.
Because duende pays little respect to the distinctions of wealth, education, or class, it is naturally unpredictable and surprising, as variable as weather patterns over the tropics. It blows where it wills, and seems to especially appear in the peripheries and shadows of the modern world, among the dwellers of swamps, prisons, gypsy caves, and ghettos. Unlike the refined and ethereal figures of Olympian muses and Christian angels, the duende emerges from below, from the lowest and poorest strata of society, from contact with the earthly and carnal, from experiences of suffering. It is gritty, coarse, and guttural—an epiphany of beauty in raw and unstudied forms. Keats could have been speaking of the duende when he described the process of “soul-making”: “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”
Though duende may visit any artist, Lorca emphasized its special affection for musicians and dancers in the throes of passion, the ones who burned brightly but briefly, the meteors of the spirit. The flamenco singer La Niña de los Peines was the epitome of this, with the duende erupting through her body, convulsing her spirit. Like the Dionysian spirituality of the black church, the duende came to La Niña in ecstatic displays: writhing undulations, galloping and stomping feet, syncopated clapping, piercing cries, haughty eyes, hair like the wild tresses of Medusa.
I see the presence of duende in various forms of music that have arisen from the dregs and ashes of the modern world: the blues, jazz, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, funk, hip-hop, flamenco, the son, salsa, and timba. Each one of these has been considered forms of “devil’s music” and has earned the suspicion and disdain of mainstream society. There is a certain “power of blackness,” to invoke Melville’s language, in these extraordinary aesthetical achievements. Sometimes mournful and tragic, sometimes comedic and hopeful, almost always prophetic and visionary, these genres have often used their spells and incantations—hexes when necessary—to bring about aesthetic revolutions and cultural upheavals.
A “shout in the street”
In its best forms—when inspired by the duende—music is proof of the power of life and art to bring illumination, like sudden flashes of lightning in the dark clouds of human experience. For instance, in attending to the different genres and styles of Afro-Latin music, theology still encased in a European chrysalis may break out and soar in new directions, exploring fresh regions of knowledge.
James Joyce hints at a venture of this sort in Stephen’s famous line in Ulysses: God is a “shout in the street.” Besides suggesting the potential for revelation in profane and quotidian experiences, far from the church, it could be that Joyce had in mind the lyrical, musical voice of wisdom in Proverbs: “Does not Wisdom cry out and Understanding raise her voice? On the heights along the streets, at the crossroads she takes her stand. ... Blessed is the one that hears me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors” (Proverbs 8:1-2, 34).
Whatever Joyce intended, I submit that Afro-Latin music is a testimony to this wisdom that cries and shouts from the streets, that rises like a phoenix from the ghettos and slums, swamps, and favelas of the world. Hip-hop is the most recent example of this science of the streets, but these themes are evident in many Afro-Latin genres, from the son and salsa to rumba and timba (the term “timba” originally designated marginalized neighborhoods of big cities).
When the question of soul is considered, there is an advantage in coming from the margins, a certain hermeneutical privilege in belonging to an underclass community. In the gospels, recall, it is the destitute and desperate who are the first to recognize the Messiah in the marred and humble Jesus of Nazareth. And the Hebrew Bible, too, attributes a preternatural knowledge to the suffering servants of YHWH. Afro-Latin music is a descendant of this vision. Perhaps it has its moments of genius for knowing the plight of the outsider and alien. Perhaps this music is a creative response to the quandary expressed by the psalmist: How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
As an oracle of this ability to sing and dance in strange and inhospitable circumstances, the music of the Americas is a remarkable record of the soul’s agility: its capacity for survival and creativity in the face of sorrow and despair; its capacity for improvisation and resilience; its capacity for making music out of the experience of being invisible, rhapsodies out of degradation. With some of these feats in mind, the criticism of the concept of “soul” in some disciplines of contemporary science appears awfully small, parochial, and Eurocentric. Though some may be quick to proclaim the death of the soul—as they are with the death of God—the history of American music protests the judgment and offers a wealth of evidence for the soul’s extraordinary vitality and persistent exuberance.
Theology would do well to follow the logic of these musical modes of cognition: experiential, aesthetical, cultural, a lesson in truths that can be felt but not seen. Its apologetics would be much more persuasive if it supplemented the classic handmaiden of theology—philosophy—with the arts, especially music. If it takes seriously the advice of Proverbs in attending to the voice of Wisdom on street corners and crossroads, we might discover forms of knowledge that are only available through music. We might discover the uncanny beauty and undeniable revelations of the soul in Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, James Brown, Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Lola Beltrán, La Niña de los Peines, Lauryn Hill, Nas, Kendrick Lamar, Shakira, Lila Downs, and many more.
In using their music to probe the mystery of the psyche, these artists bring shades of complexity to the most superficial and vapid forms of spirituality, while also summoning impossible dreams to the bleakest and most despairing of circumstances. Sometimes with their lyrics, or just with their moans and melodies, grunts, and grinds, they persuade us of the enduring and indomitable power of the soul. For this reason alone, “the Soul should stand in Awe,” as Emily Dickinson writes, when it comes to the haunting and hypnotizing ability of music to rain grace on our parched age.
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