The Quest For Certainty: Slave Spirituals

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1. The reason these three regions and genres of music were selected was to help us understand the problems of real current day and prior past Africans throughout the world and how even through war, genocide and slavery Africans still managed to resist in anyway possible through forms of different types of music that are highly influential today. From Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat in Nigeria, Reggae coming out of Rasta societies in Jamaica and Slave Spirituals/Hip Hop coming out of oppressed black communities in the United States the music touches the hearts and souls of many throughout the world facing discrimination currently and those who have resisted against it. The readings all connect together through means of struggle, coping and resistance …show more content…

The songs had experiences, religion and nonreligion. In “A Question of Origins” we see “Slave Spirituals” being discussed here. It begins by discussing the topic of slave religious music and how the music has created a large sum of literature and the views “early collectors and students had and how different the music had sounded to anything else” (p. 11) and how attracted the music was. In “The Quest For Certainty: Slave Spirituals” discusses the most commonly known form of slave music such as “sacred song” in which the author uses the term “sacred not in present usage as something antithetical to the secular world; neither the slaves nor their african forebears ever drew modernity’s clear line between the sacred and the secular”. The Slave songs seem to target both religion and …show more content…

Alridge, Alridge connects the “hip-hop worldview” and stated “it is nothing other than an updated face on the old-far, crude, anti-humanistic values of hedonism and materialism….It is ironic, in fact, that black youth in poverty-level and weak working class families, who struggle to design a regime of self-respect and discipline in matters of education and interpersonal friendship, get no assistance whatsoever from these respects from hedonistic, materialistic, nihilistic, sadistic and misogynistic ideas and values propagated by most hip-hop entertainers” (p. 227) but this was not always the case, as during the civil rights era hip-hop was formative and the author argues that although “Hip Hop has not dramatically changed oppressive institutional structures of organized itself at anywhere near the level of civil rights organizations, it shares a critique of the problems that plague U.S African Americans and other oppressed people throughout the world. These shared ideas and common ideology present possibilities for an improved discourse between the two generations” (p. 228). This connects together because like the other forms of African created music through language and resistance, Hip Hop is using the same formula of vocalizing and combining serious problems that still affect Africans today. The author makes this connection with several points. Hip Hop reinvigorates and expands these four ideas and

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