Is God Funky or What?: Black Biblical Culture and Contemporary Popular Music

by Theodore W. Burgh

Overview

Is God Funky or What?: Black Biblical Culture and Contemporary Popular Music complicates the traditional categories of sacred and secular by exposing religious rhetoric of contemporary popular black music and revealing a biblical-based spirituality that forms the cultural context.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433149498
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	12/28/2018
Series:	Black Studies and Critical Thinking Series , #111
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.86(h) x (d)

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.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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

“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

From the Publisher