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Between God and Gangsta Rap (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Defining himself as an ordained Baptist minister, a university professor, a radical democrat, and a public intellectual, Michael Eric Dyson, an influential African American cultural critic, can claim to live at the intersection of varied expressions of American society and black culture and to bring to the study of that culture, in its internal structures and in its relationships to the society at large, a viewpoint constructed out of multiple perspectives. His abiding position is that, while differences must be acknowledged and affirmed, all segments of black culture can learn from the others and from the larger world. As a black writer who engages in sustained dialogue with the white community, he obviously implies further that the larger world has much to learn from black culture.

Dyson’s religious commitment is most explicitly expressed in the “Invocation” and “Benediction” that constitute the book’s first and last chapters and in his tribute to Gardner Taylor, a great African American preacher. The “Invocation,” in substance an open letter to Dyson’s brother in prison, and the “Benediction,” addressed to the author’s wife, both give poignant personal application to one of Dyson’s compelling themes, the struggle to achieve authentic intimacy. In the tribute to Taylor, Dyson celebrates his subject’s prophetic witness, his charismatic personality, and his style.

“Style” perhaps suggests a secular turn, from the concerns of the Christian to those of the critic. Sensitive readers will recognize, however, that for Dyson this is a false distinction. Thus his criticism of secular culture—of “gangsta rap,” for example—is constantly informed by an active and uncloistered faith. There is, for Dyson, no point at which the religious yields to the secular; rather, the secular can be truly seen only in the light of the spiritual. His attentiveness to style in the music reviews he includes, as in his essay on Taylor, urges us to recognize in style the epiphany of spirit.

Dyson carries his spiritual consciousness to his discussion of such public issues as the guilt or innocence of O. J. Simpson and the controversy surrounding gangsta rap. Unfortunately, the format of the book, a gathering of pieces, tends to fragmentation rather than to the full and coherent development the book’s themes deserve. Dyson’s defense of gangsta rap as cultural representation requires a more sophisticated analysis, not to say deconstruction, of the concept of representation than the author provides. Here, in fact, is material for a book in itself; Dyson could be the man to write it.