Secular devotion

"Popular music in the Americas, from jazz, Cuban and Latin salsa to disco and rap, is overwhelmingly neo-African. Created in the midst of war and military invasion, and filtered through a Western worldview, these musical forms are completely modern in their sensibilities: they are in fact the very sound of modern life. But the African religious philosophy at their core involved a longing for earlier eras - ones that pre-dated the technological discipline of labor forced on captive populations by capitalism. In this groundbreaking new book, Timothy Brennan shows how the popular music of the…