Description: 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.
Review Quotes: "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