Recent talk on the blog about mixtapes brought a smile to my face as I am one of those music fans who is a bit nostalgic for the days of the mixtape. The decision of two bands that I am friends with to release their new albums on cassette (plus digital download, no CD) gave me the same feeling.

As did the announcement of this new book by Jared Ball, assistant professor of communication studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore. The book is called I Mix What I Like!: A Mixtape Manifesto and it’s out this month from anarchist publisher A.K. Press. Here is the description from the publisher’s website:

In a moment of increasing corporate control in the music industry, Jared A. Ball analyzes the colonization and control of popular music and posits the homemade hip-hop mixtape as an emancipatory tool for community resistance. Equally at home in a post-colonial studies class and on the shelves of an indie record store, I Mix What I Like! is a revolutionary investigation of the cultural dimension of anti-racist organizing in African America.

Michael J. Iafrate
Parkersburg, West Virginia

I am very happy to welcome to Rock and Theology our newest contributor, Dr. Daniel White Hodge, whose research focuses on race relations, film, cultural trends, and spirituality. Having received his Ph.D. from Fuller Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, his dissertation focused on the life, theology, and spiritual message of Tupac Amaru Shakur.

Dan is a lecturer in the Pan African Studies department at Cal State Los Angeles and at Citrus College in the Sociology Department. He is also a national speaker for the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) and the Urban Youth Workers Institute (UYWI). Dan has been involved with Hip Hop culture all his life. As a former music producer, Dan helped mix Bone Thugs & Harmony’s first album “E 1999 Eternal,” along with The Beastie Boys’ DJ Hurricane’s album. Dan also helped in the formation of different background tracks for the first two seasons of “New York Undercover.” He continues to remain closely tuned into the music of Hip Hop.

As a social activist, Dan co-founded the youth organization “Youth On The Move,” which worked with pregnant teen moms, helped juvenile offenders find employment, and developed life skills for urban youth. This program went on to partner with Urban Young Life in the Bay Area of California. Dan has worked on a number of different community-based campaigns and programs using Hip Hop to address issues of race/ethnicity, gender-based violence, literacy and immigration.

Dr. White Hodge is the author of The Soul Of Hip Hop: Rims, Timbs, & The Soul of a Culture (InterVarsity Press, 2010), and Heaven Has A Ghetto: The Missiological Theology of Tupac Amaru Shakur (VDM Academic, 2009).

Welcome, Daniel White Hodge!

Fellow blogger Gina wrote the other day about using music to teach theology.  I have done this before– a sort of teaching via mixtape, so that the music I played in class was almost like a secret syllabus. Whether for my intro to theology course, the several iterations of my “Faith, Poverty, & Justice” course , or any of the others, I lay this out by asking myself:

1. what I want students to learn from the course,
2. what music would best communicate that, and
3. how these connect with the readings or other textual engagements.

The music was purposely not all rock; it crossed periods and genres so that students could see the universality or persistence of the issues covered. Some of my favorite matches are:

• Stephen Foster’s “Hard Time Come Again No More” re: relentless suffering (covered repeatedly by everyone from Johnny Cash to Renee Fleming, but my current favorite version is by Mavis Staples)
• Lauryn Hill’s “Final Hour” re: righteous living, final judgment, and eschatological questions
• the Flaming Lips cover of Iron & Wine’s “Waiting for a Superman” re: solidarity
• JS Bach’s Cantata no. 82 “Ich habe genug” re: what it really means to have enough
• old-time labor union songs or Lila Downs’ medley of “This Land Is Your Land/Pastures of Plenty“ re: basic human dignity + worker justice in the context of border issues.

Rachel Bundang
NYC