Rorotoko

In a nutshell

The main argument of Secular Devotion, I suppose, will appear to some people as outrageous. I am saying that popular music in the Americas is popular in part because it is so heavily influenced by neo-African religious practices that attract listeners who want to escape monotheistic certitudes and the rhythms of the modern market. Not all popular music is black in inspiration, obviously, but a disproportionate amount of it is, even in genres like disco, ballroom and Broadway, where the African elements are far from obvious.

At any rate, the living presence of new world African religion in popular music is widely denied. It is thought to have died out in the musical passage from early devotional hymns to the nightclubs, speak-easies, and pop charts of later commercial fame. I spend a number of chapters looking at actual songs, styles, and locales to suggest this assumption is not true. One can even say that there is a scandalous fact underlying the largely negative images of Africa in today’s media: namely, that in the face of this wholesale dissing of the region, there is a massive African unconscious to everyday life and leisure. This is significant. The feel and sense of “Africa” becomes a kind of ethical destination – the place to flee all associations with an earlier and tainted colonial relationship. The listener embodies this unacceptable status, and freely takes it on.

It is important to add, though, that the devotion that fans of various popular styles show (their crazy knowledge of all the minutiae surrounding an artist or group, their emotional investments in sharing music with friends, etc.) is not itself a religious practice. New World African religion presents itself under cover, and as a matter of form rather than content, and so it comes off as secular, and not religious at all. African spirituality in today’s music, in any case, is not what is generally meant by the word “spiritual.” Music is devotion in African religion. Its value system is rooted in relaxation, sexual release, collective oral expression, and satire. All of these are deliberately posed, I am arguing, against the discipline and orthodoxy of Judeo-Christian modernity, which listeners fully understand in the hearing of it. In fact, there is something deeply conservative about the message, but also liberating. Some popular music suggests, among other things, that in a neo-liberal era advertised as the “end of history,” anti-capitalist sentiments still manage to circulate freely in the leisure economy.

The wide angle

A great deal of what I am saying depends on the claim that black musical genres and belief-systems are part of a single, unified complex in the Americas from Brazil to the southern United States. It is not the case, in other words (as many argue) that U.S. black musical forms like jazz, R&B, ragtime, and rap are part of a different musical family than their Latin America and Caribbean counterparts, although that is the impression one gets without exception from radio announcers, popular films, and the holdings of any decent research library. There one finds hundreds of books and articles on ragtime, delta blues, New Orleans jazz, swing, big-band, bebop, rock & roll, r&b, do-wop, Motown, soul, gospel and hip-hop. There are little more than a handful on samba, beguine, soca, son, bolero, tango, foró, charanga, merengue, danzón, calenda, tejano, conga, bachata, vallenato, plena, cumbia, norteño, pachanga or reggaeton. Afro-Latin and African American music belong in the same discussion, and the unwillingness in most writing on popular music to treat them this way has, among other things, prevented people from appreciating the message of neo-African form and its secular rituals.

This is why my primary focus in many of the chapters is Afro-Latin music, especially the Cuban son. We notice something striking and significant about Afro-Latin music from the outset that separates it sharply from the various black musical genres of the United States. The degree of the latter’s deeply Christian and revivalist surroundings is an obvious difference, and it certainly mitigated the more overt African-ness of the popular idiom—partly overcome, though it was, by the constant influx into the United States of Latin musical forms under assumed identities. But there is another factor I would like to highlight at this point.

The global spread of Latin music took place without occupying armies, high-tech distribution networks, or a well-developed advertising apparatus. It did so, some have argued, because of the pathways laid down by the publicity networks of North American jazz between World War I and the late 1930s (the United States being in those years, as now, highly skilled at training foreign ears). But there is at least one important reason to modify the view that jazz played this leadership role or that the United States paved the way for commercialized global popular music by establishing itself as the model for everything that followed. For it could only have been a highly developed outlook, a coherent body of thought and feeling, that gave Latin music its global reach and staying-power without any of the assistance given jazz by Madison Avenue, military occupation, and a media mobilized to instruct the global public in matters of taste. It needed a worldview in order to be passed on and to circulate intact. From a variety of angles, this book is an attempt to describe and assess that worldview.

there is a scandalous fact underlying the largely negative images of Africa in today’s media: namely, that in the face of this wholesale dissing of the region, there is a massive African unconscious to everyday life and leisure