The Search for the Tao in Hip-Hop by Alejandro Nava

My earliest, and most indelible, memory of hip-hop’s magnetic pull on my attention dates back to childhood, circa 1983-84 or so, when my brother’s breaking crew, the Royal Rockers, battled for preeminence in the fledgling culture of hip-hop. The group was a motley collective of Latino and Black kids in Tucson, Arizona, all determined to showcase their prowess on the dancefloor, their mastery of rhythm, their wit with the mic. My brother and I both studied Shaolin kung fu at the time, so many of the b-boy’s acrobatic moves came quickly to him, especially the kick-up, back bridges, sweeping kicks, pretzel-like twists, and the thumping flip on one’s back that they called a suicide. Each member of the group had their own signature move and style: some excelled at pikes, head-spins, or one-handed freezes; some at the rippling, undulating moves of a centipede; and almost all of them were capable of contorting their torso at improbable angles, legs fluttering in the air, weaving arabesque lines with arms, legs, and feet. Popping was my favorite: the move started at the extremities of the hands, folding in at the joints of the fingers and then rippling inward, like the thawing of a frozen lake in springtime. It combined robotic, steely coldness with the fluid shuffles and glides of a dancer on ice, the upper body rigid and mechanical, the limbs as sinuous as a snake.

And while each member would be given the chance to prance and strut their stuff as separate and independent bodies, the crew usually ended their routines with some crazy coda that gathered everyone together into one cathedral-like structure, with each member assigned a part—a flying buttress, intersecting transept, soaring tower, menacing gargoyle—to shore it up. I recall one routine, choreographed to the robotic and vocoder-modulated beats of “Egypt, Egypt” by Egyptian Lover, that had the scaffoldings of a ziggurat. Once everyone was in place, they began to rotate and turn as if the structure suddenly metamorphosed into an alien spacecraft. Who knows what inspired it (the Afrofuturism of P-Funk, Afrika Bambaataa, and Egyptian Lover is a good guess), but it was imaginative, grand, and soaring, the b-boying equivalent of the high-flying rhetoric of rappers.

Even at the time, I suspected that there was something spiritual, even mystical, at the crux of these dances and routines. As in the martial arts, there was so much more than meets the eye—the outward movements were a manifestation of something more elusive and immaterial, something erupting from within, like a butterfly trying to break away from its chrysalis. B-boying was an expression of the soul’s desire to be free and footloose, a desire for beauty and grace, and my brother’s crew pursued these things with the seriousness of a heart-attack. They aimed for aplomb and poise, twisting and rotating their bodies while not losing balance, spiraling without losing the groove, like a spinning top. And maybe because my brother and I were enchanted by the magical realism of kung-fu movies at the time—flying monks, spectral-like ninjas, and martial artists with a spiritual prowess that equaled their physical powers—I saw traces of the Tao in all of it, that nameless force that lies at the source of the universe. If the Tao bestows order and harmony on the universe, I reasoned, break-dancers sought the Tao with their bodies and souls, moving their arms like the waters of the sea, their limbs and feet like a rowdy summer storm. In all the theater and violent suppleness of their movements, they aspired for union with the rhythms of the universe, philosophizing through an art form that was part martial discipline, part dance, part spiritual exercise, all soul. And since the “Tao that can be named is not the Tao,” to invoke the first line of the Tao Te Ching, b-boys and b-girls sought to unravel the meaning of the Tao less with words than with the gestures, poses, and gyrations, which is to say that break-dancing, in the end, was as much about the cultivation of the spirit as the flow of the body. The Wu-Tang’s RZA, whose love of kung-fu mirrored our own, would drive home this point regarding the martial arts: “Kung fu is less a fighting style and more about the cultivation of the spirit.” “Wu-Tang,” he goes on to say, “was the best sword style. But with us, our tongue is our sword.” (The Wu-Tang Manual, Penguin, 2005). 

For rappers, as he notes, the tongue is the primary weapon; for breakers, it’s the body and dance; for graffiti writers, the combat is visual, chromatic, and graphic, guerilla warfare with paint; for the deejay, finally, the war is waged sonically and rhythmically, the search for the perfect beat. In either case, the artist in question seeks to render the unseen and unheard in tangible forms, making beauty out of thin air.  

The “break,” at any rate, is the fundamental building block of rap music, the percussive and rhythmic core of the song, the section stripped of all extraneous vocals and instruments. More cyclical and repetitive than linear, the break is the explosive moment of a song when the drumbeat or bass line attacks the listener with big wallops of sound, the rhythm rousing the body into action, exhilarating the senses. Instead of moving in one direction, it spools backward in endless loops, picking up force as it spins round and round, jarring the hips loose. Music, whose etymology implies inspiration by the Muses, is nothing if not mysterious and mystical in such ways, capable of shocking the flesh, electrifying the soul, and sometimes, if only for a transient moment, granting a taste of rapture. No wonder T.S. Eliot spoke of dance as an experience of the still point, a sudden union of the body with the rhythm and order of the universe, the moment when the mind loses self-consciousness and operates without intention or aim, like an athlete “in the zone.” If one achieves this rare and fleeting state, dance can be all-absorbing and liberating, a break from the grind and drudgery of daily life, a dissolution of the self in the crashing soundwaves.

Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” (1982) is the quintessential anthem for breakers, a parable that spoke volumes to the insiders of the culture but mystified outsiders. The song was parabolic in another way, too: it contained a utopian ideal consistent with biblical dreams, one that would integrate people of different races into one nation under a groove, all differences fading away on the dance floor, all cultures and classes melting into one as the revelers sweated, sashayed, and partied the night away. In its kaleidoscope of fragments—Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” and “Numbers,” Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican,” electronically distorted vocals, a Japanese-made Roland 808 drumbeat, synthesized orchestral stabs—we were offered an alternative vision of America, a future that welcomed difference and strangeness, a poly-cultural pastiche of sound, dance, poetry, and culture. In contrast to life on earth, where patterns of division and inequality were the norm, planet rock joined everyone together in one sweaty horde.

If you think all of this sounds too sublime for the art of breaking, you’re wrong. While breaking always pointed back to the hard streets of the barrio and ghetto, moving outward more than inward, it also gave free reign to the play of the imagination and to the cravings of the soul, combining the earthbound attack of a hawk with the floating grace of a butterfly. “They were about,” Jeff Chang has written, “unleashing youth style as an expression of the soul, unmediated by corporate money, unauthorized by the powerful, protected and enclosed by almost monastic rites, codes, and orders.” (Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, Picador, 2005). B-boying is a combination of the spiritual and street, the transcendent and immanent, an artform that integrates the movements of the body with the throbbing pulses of the spirit. In lieu of gang violence, it champions style and art as a means of garnering respect, baptizing its devotees in the raging rivers of dance, music, and spirituality. For full initiation into the subculture, in fact, there are gnostic elements that must be learned, including breathing techniques, a history of the forms and movements, strategies for improvising, a general understanding of dance, and so on: “Foundation,” explains Joseph Schloss, “is a term used by b-boys and b-girls to refer to an almost mystical set of notions about b-boying that is passed from teacher to student.” (Foundation, Oxford, 2009).

All of this is to say that the Tao is the secret cornerstone of hip-hop, the ultimate source of its genius. And though I didn’t have the exact words for it in childhood, I felt this to be true in my own experience of the culture, in the deejay bone-shaking arrangements, in the rhythms and codes of breaking, in the emcee’s introspective and philosophical musings. While my brother was drawn to b-boying, I was particularly taken by the art of language in the culture of hip-hop, how the emcees made their words dance and whirl with the beat, skip and bounce through the verses. Instead of a medley of limbs, as with the breakers, rappers employed a colorful medley of syllables and slang, adorning the meager surroundings of their world with a rich verbal palette. In their compositions, they envisioned new possibilities and new worlds, and the art of it all mesmerized my young mind. Since I didn’t grow up surrounded by books (I was the first in my Mexican American family to graduate from college), rappers were the first to enchant me with words, their rhymes and incantations like some kind of magical spell. They introduced me to the rich possibilities of language, how vowels can be stretched or swallowed, how meaning can exist on the surface of the sound alone, how alliteration, assonance, or onomatopoeia can add delicious flavor to a verse, how words can flow and move together like a school of fish. And they introduced me, long before I read the words of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, to the presumption that God could be found in surprising and unexpected locations, that the word of God could carry in the wind and fall on one’s ears like a “shout in the street.”     

Over the years, in fact, as I began to scrutinize the verses and stories more carefully, I started to notice how frequently the subject of God surfaced in rap’s shouts and hollers. If the craving for the Tao is subtle and implicit in breaking, it’s frequently plain and obvious in the emcee’s opuses. Rappers have frequently been the most explicit about the centrality of the Tao in hip-hop, the most articulate about religious purposes. Less a passing storm than a consistent weather pattern, religious themes saturate the genre, appearing in a rich multitude of forms, orthodox and unorthodox, Christian and Islamic, Western and Eastern. Starting in graduate school, with my studies of religion making me more mindful of these things, I began to pay greater attention to how rappers tussled with God, how they turned profane verses into sanctified oratory, whooping and discoursing like an inspired preacher. This interest, after I became a professor, led to the creation of my class on religion and hip-hop at the University of Arizona, “Rap, Culture, and God,” with the spotlight turned on the genre’s soul. If God can be found in all things, as Ignatius of Loyola supposed, and black music in the Americas was regularly suffused with gospel shouts, sweet soul swoops, and emotions that resembled rapture, the crosscurrents of the sacred and the profane shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise, but I have to say that I found myself amazed by the reach of religion in the music. Hidden in plain sight, it was a major affair of countless rappers, from many of the classic emcees of the 80s and 90s to many of the luminaries of the new millennium, a Kanye West, Chance the Rapper, Jay Electronica, MF Doom, Kendrick Lamar, and even reggatoneros like Vico C and Bad Bunny. 

When he came on the scene in the 1990s, RZA became a guiding light for me on these matters: he considered the Tao to lurk in the innermost chambers of hip-hop, its knowledge the ultimate jewel. In his mind, the Tao, or the Way, shared a lineage with many of the metaphors and conceptions of the world’s religions as they struggled and stammered to name what is fundamentally beyond the reach of language, what must not be named. “It is capable of being the mother of the world,” wrote Lao Tzu. “I know not its name. So I style it the Way.” Elsewhere Lao Tzu would play with the metaphor of the “Dark” for naming the Tao, its rich obscurity and blackness an appropriate image for a beauty that can only be seen vaguely, like the chiaroscuro canvases of Caravaggio or Goya. 

In his observant mind, RZA would come to see this principle turning up in a variety of religions. Even when words fail us, we are all grasping and groping, he would conclude, for communion with others and communion with God. “And this basic principle,” he says, “is really the same for Taoism, Buddhism, and Mathematics—to be one with the universe, one with God. They are all the Way.” (The Tao of Wu, Penguin, 2009). It was his cousin, GZA, who first introduced RZA to the Lessons (of the Five-Percenters), and the effect, he tells us, was jolting, setting him on a path in search of the Twelve Jewels. “God, God, God,” his testimony goes, rang and reverberated in his mind until it began to sink deeply into his flesh, helping him come to the revolutionary realization that he had divine worth and dignity. (The Tao of Wu, Penguin, 2009). He would share such teachings with others in the projects and ghettos, too, using his music and words like scriptural texts. Those who seemed to fall through the cracks of the world, shunned by church and state, would become his cherished disciples. He would offer them an alternative education, steeped in the mystical and righteous path of the Tao, and the elements of hip-hop—breaking, graffiti, deejaying, emceeing, knowledge—were parts of this Way, their search for the perfect beat, the perfect verse, the perfect harmony and rhythm all a means of probing and reaching for transcendence. 

Fast forward to the new millennium and we can observe similar trends in hip-hop; religious sentiments, pace the secular skeptics, did not remain confined to the hip-hop of the 80s and 90s. They have continued to beat and throb in the music of the 2000s, reaching a feverish pitch and artistic summit with a figure like Kendrick Lamar. While he doesn’t share the same Five-Percenter vocabulary as RZA, the burning appetite for transcendence—what Lamar doesn’t hesitate to name “God”—is also palpable in his music and lyricism, the beats and rhymes almost always journeys within and without, introspective and metaphysical at once. It’s well known that Kendrick Lamar underwent a spiritual metanoia vaguely similar to that of RZA: somewhere between his mixtapes and good kid, m.A.A.d city, 2012, God began to occupy his thoughts and emotions more than ever, and it shows on each of his albums thereafter, his catalog increasingly concerned with spiritual and theological concepts. Any number of songs could offer evidence of this—“How Much a Dolla Cost” narrates an encounter with God in the form of a beggar; “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” considers spiritual needs as imperative as social and political concerns; “Real” challenges the customary views of “realness” in hip-hop and contends that “real” is responsibility, “real” is God; “For Sale?” or “HUMBLE.” advocates for the values of the soul over worldly competitors—but consider the intriguing case of “GOD.,” from his existentially inclined album, DAMN. 

Compared with previous albums, the sound is spartan on DAMN., stripped of the jazz riffs of To Pimp a Butterfly. If anything, the percussion—a return to fat 808s—is more pronounced on DAMN., gaining in force what it lost in complexity. Thanks to the trap flavors that Mike Will Made It brought to the table (famous for his Southern beats), and the loops of 1970s soul, the beats are harder, fatter, and dirtier than Lamar’s earlier music. It makes for a soul-rattling experience, even more pleasing and stirring than good kid or To Pimp a Butterfly. 

The song, “GOD,” is a philosophical track as you might expect with such a title, but it philosophizes not so much in rational terms as in the stuff of emotion. At the heart of the song is that phenomenon, elusive and bewildering, that we call “feeling,” an “amorphous, intangible, gut-borne thing that animates all music and gives it life,” in the words of Amanda Petrusich. (Do Not Sell at Any Price, Scribner, 2014). For those unable to relate to a religious experience, the feeling that the music evokes will be your guide, the song seems to imply, drawing you into its web of sound like a spider that launches forth its filaments until it wraps itself around you. It’s the equivalent, for all the non-mystics of the world, of a beatific and radiant experience. Fittingly, then, Lamar’s entire demeanor is transfigured on the track: where other songs on DAMN. are about crisis and mortal reckoning, his soul undone by angst, this rap is euphoric and epiphanic. Where he unravels on other songs, he pulls himself together here, the song acting as a counterweight to the heavy sinking moments of the album. Ironically, in a song with this title, the lyrics are not very theological; it’s one of those rare songs in Lamar’s repertoire where the meaning of the song is more apparent in the surface of the sound rather than in the lyrics, in the pure musicality and mellifluousness of the verses. The chorus is the hermetic key, with Lamar singing in a honeyed voice, “This what God feels like, huh, heah/ Laughin’ to the bank like, Ah-haa, huh, heah/ Flex on swole like, Ah-haa, huh, heah/ You feel some type of way, then A-haa/ huh, heah (a-ha-ha,a-ha-ha).” 

The website Rap Genius will tell you that the words suggest what it feels like to be God, swollen with confidence, flexing your clout, joyful in your command of life. Maybe that’s part of it, but it misses the key point: that the vibes and emotions that the song elicits—exhilaration, serenity, rapture, bliss—are what it feels like to experience God, what it feels like to be carried away by transcendent waves of emotion, caught up into the heavens like St. Paul. Lamar shifts from rapping to rhapsody on the track because ordinary language is inadequate when aiming at God. He requires a different tactic, more visceral, more tactile, more emotive. What does this line mean, for instance? “You feel some type of way, then A-haaaaa. . .” Answer: Nothing, really, nothing apart from the experience of the music, nothing apart from the way Lamar warbles and croons the phrase, soothing and calming the listener with the melody, climbing into sublime regions with his falsetto. No longer the frazzled and restless soul that frets over his salvation (the title of the album indicates a concern with damnation), he’s found a measure of tranquility and peace here, as if he’s achieved enlightenment in this higher octave. He sings in a language of pure exaltation, his vocals airy and breezy, rapturous but cool. Marks on the page—Lamar’s or mine—are only hints and intimations that are meant to evoke, not expound upon, the experience of God.

In fact, there’s almost something mantra like in Lamar’s recitation on “GOD.,” the vowels stretched into a sweet-sounding refrain, where the meaning of what is said is not as important as the litany of sound itself. Instead of merely informing, and plotting a clear narrative arc, a mantra, after all, conjures transcendence by the numinous sounds themselves, their efficacy felt in the pronunciation of the phonemes. A mantra’s impact is visceral, intuitive, and sensory, plucking at the cords of our emotions, acting as a salve for our wounds, and, in some cases, leaving us breathless like the prophet Muhammad upon first hearing the Quran recited.

Lamar’s “GOD.,” in the end, reminds us that there is an ineffable, mystical element in all music that is resistant to intellectualization, and this remains true even in a genre that earns its stripes by the artfully chosen word. “Music, by definition, begins where linguistic meaning stops,” writes Ted Gioia, “yet critics earn their living by breaching the boundary, reducing melodies to words, and somehow convincing the rest of us to give credence to their judgments.” (How To Listen to Jazz, Basic Books, 2017). Theology wrestles with the same conundrum: by definition, it begins where linguistic meaning stops, and yet theologians earn their keep by naming the unnamable, attempting to reason (logos) about what exceeds pure reason (theos). The tetragrammaton, YHWH, registers this logic: the four naked letters, missing in vowels, is a fragmentary expression of what is fundamentally inexpressible. No wonder the biblical authors sketched Moses, the recipient of this awesome, incomprehensible name, as a tongue-tied and stuttering prophet: as I see it, they were making a theological point commensurate with this revelation, namely, that all human language stammers and stutters when speaking of G-d, all language, post-Babel, is jumbled and confused. St. Augustine, speaking of the wordless chants of workers in the fields, makes this point beautifully:

Do not go seeking lyrics, as though you could spell out in words anything that will give God pleasure. . . . Think of people who sing at harvest time, or in the vineyard, or at any work that goes with a swing. They begin by caroling their joy in words, but after a while they seem to be so full of gladness that they find words no longer adequate to express it, so they abandon distinct syllables and words, and resort to a single cry of jubilant happiness. Jubilation is a shout of joy; it indicates that the heart is bringing forth what defies speech. To whom, then, is this jubilation more fittingly offered than to God who surpasses all utterance?

With this intuition in mind, the finest theologians and music critics have sought ways to balance kataphatic speech (what can be said) with apophatic speech (what cannot be said), and then, after pushing language to its limits, they have invited the pupil to hear and taste for themselves. Lamar knows how to employ both of these idioms, of course, but with “GOD.” he bends towards the apophatic, using fewer words and fatter beats, fewer bars and more melodies, fewer noises and richer silences. 

As the years have passed, and hip-hop suddenly finds itself approaching the ripe age of fifty, I have come to appreciate the way it has ventured into the unknown in such ways, searching for wisdom, dropping science, decrying injustice, reveling in fun, and always improvising with language, music, and dance. If the scathing voice of the prophets has been the louder note in the culture of hip-hop for many observers (especially in the age of Black Lives Matter), there are also still and hushed voices in hip-hop that echo with mystical phenomena, voices that bear messages from beyond familiar shores, like the murmur of the ocean in a seashell. They pay witness, these voices out of the whirlwind of urban life, to an element of hip-hop that remains touched by the presence of the sacred. And they pay witness to the conviction that man does not live by bread alone, and that there are intangible realities—call it the Tao or God—that not only can leave one breathless or even speechless, but possibly changed and enlarged, which is what religion is all about in the end.

Alejandro Nava is a native Tucsonan. He received his M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Chicago. He is currently Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona, and the author of “Wonder and Exile in the New World,” “In Search of Soul,” and, most recently, “Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop,” Chicago, 2022.

26 January 2023