Doing Liberation Theology as a Resistive Performance

Abstract

I was five years old when I first heard that rhyme by Melle Mel. The song, “Beat Street Breakdown,” arrested and still arrests my attention. When I hear the song, it is like Melle Mel is right in front of me and forcing me into a crisis. Will I pay attention to him or will I turn my head and ignore his cry? The song is confrontational, loud, bold, searing, and heartfelt. I could not understand everything he said, but the way he spit that verse—the way he delivered his lines made me take pause. When I got older and analyzed the content of the lyrics, non-inclusive language notwithstanding, I realized the historical analysis, hope, and prophetic compassion behind Melle Mel’s wordplay. I realized how performance was a part of any movement for liberation. The struggle to resist injurious, death-dealing, and meaning-defeating events and sagas—this struggle feeds off the quest for life-giving possibilities and often times uses whatever means it can to instantiate itself. Resistance is a dynamic process, which includes economics, politics, religion, communities, aesthetics, etcetera, even music and sometimes hip-hop. A struggle for resistance comes with a soundtrack. And although we could never quantify them or claim that they are the inexhaustible key to transformation, performances—in this case, musical expression—continue to help us imagine and work toward justice, mercy, and peace in an ambivalent world.

Learn from the past and work for the future/…And the future of the world is in your hands/

—Glover, Griffin, and Robinson, 1984