The Song, For Real!

Year 2019, Issue: 51, 97 - 113, 01.11.2019

Özge Özbek Akıman

Abstract

This article emphasizes the primacy of the song (both as content
and form) in Amiri Baraka’s poetics and limits its discussion to the
collection entitled, Funk Lore (1996) and the album Real Song (1994)
in dialogue with each other. In the context of the theories that value
sound and music in terms of their cultural and historical rootedness,
Baraka’s “funk lore” means collective knowledge and behavior that
incorporates body and kinetics. Baraka breaks the Western forms
of reading and writing with his insistence on musicality, orality
and performance, which are more than personal choices—the most
distinctive of African American expressions. In his omniverse, the
soundless ghosts represent the destructive force, whereas the everresisting creative spirit is represented by sound, voice, music and funk.

Keywords

Amiri Baraka, Funk Lore, Real Song, African American Music, Cultural Sounds, Song and Resistance

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