Anti-Climacus

I'd eventually like to say something about P.J. Harvey's Rid of Me, but it will require some explanation of why I feel awkward commenting on the music of angry women with electric guitars. This explanation benefits from a contrast to rap, and the reasons I feel comfortable commenting on it.

I am not interested in co-opting hip-hop; I am not interested in simplifying the politics, including the sexual politics, of those involved; I have no desire to create hip-hop myself or embrace, uncritically, its culture; I am interested in authenticity but do not believe myself to be the best judge of 'authentic' in this context. I believe myself to come as close as possible to simply having developed some taste and preferences, and finding examples which I believe to be superior on the relevant criteria. I can like "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" without endorsing everything about its politics (much less "By the Time I Get to Arizona", which seems to get the essential point correct while wildly overstating everything else). I can appreciate the religious content of "Tennessee" without needed to remove the complicated racial history that drives the song; my issues are not Speech's, nor are they even very close.

Coming to African-American thought via Cornel West and the Civil Rights Movement, and therefore also through the various strains of African-American political and theological thought including, e.g., James Cone's The God of the Oppressed, one learns pretty quickly that the question of the Black Church always implicates the White Church. They are sides of a coin. The honest white Christian in the age of segregation was bound to admit that the oppression of their black brothers and sisters was unjust, and that the very factors that made a White Church and a Black Church exist were a sign that the injustice had made its way into God's house as well.* See e.g. MLK, who was as eloquent on this point as any. Therefore the problem of the Black Church is the problem of the White Church, and all Christians (especially white Christians) have to choose a side and respond; everything depends on discharging these obligations in the proper way. In this context, consuming and responding to** works of African-American culture that illuminate various parts of this injustice and its continued repercussions is the work required to take this responsibility seriously.


*This is a problem of churches, ie congregations, which cannot be institutionally solved by having only one true church. I had an ex-girlfriend who, whatever else we may have disagreed on, was correct to say that there is something troubling, perhaps wrong, about a segregated church (black, white, or whatever) in a multi-racial or multi-ethnic area.

**And here's the point to say that 'responding to' needs to happen critically. The conclusion James Cone reaches in The God of the Oppressed is wrong, and it's important to outline and explain why it's wrong.