What does our music say about how we see our humanity? Few would deny that music engages multiple aspects of what it means to be human—our bodies, our intellect, our emotions, our relationality—or that music has spiritual power. But is there a danger that the music we listen to can reinforce a sort of reductionism in who we are? Disney songs can inspire our emotions, but offer little to stretch us intellectually. Electronic dance music can help us feel more at home in our bodies, but won’t (usually) help us process grief. So what does a fully human music sound like? Does it exist? ". . . is there a danger that the music we listen to can reinforce a sort of reductionism in who we are?"
Snarky Puppy is an American instrumental pop band which combines elements of jazz, rock, funk, gospel, hip-hop, and electronic music to create a unique sound.1 I invite you to listen to Snarky Puppy playing Michael League’s tune “Thing of Gold” from their 2012 album GroundUp.2 As you watch and listen (preferably with some friends), try to pay attention to what part of you is paying attention. Are you trying to understand? Are you feeling the music in your body? Are you engaging with others around you?
This music engages the body. Here we’re experiencing the groove—the rhythmic feel of the song. Now the groove of this song is interesting, because instead of the conventional stress on beats 2 and 4, here the stress is on beats 1 and 2. And that solid yet interesting groove makes you want to dance—you can see the audience moving to the music. And yet, we need our intellect to work out what they are doing, since the rhythm is unfamiliar and complex—this music challenges us intellectually.
Despite this complex rhythm, the melody is relatively simple—giving the music stability and accessibility. Shaun Martin (keyboards) speaks of Michael League’s (the composer's) ability to write “these strong melodies. ... In the midst of all the improvisation that goes on, you can still sing the melody.”3 Singable melodies also invite listeners to become participants, as they sing along, pointing to the communal nature of Snarky Puppy’s music. These songs manifest community as 19 world-class jazz musicians play together, shining in their individuality, yet without competition or crowding.4 But they also create community beyond the band, as they invite listeners to sing, move, and wonder with one another about what they are experiencing.
“Thing of Gold,” therefore, engages multiple aspects of our humanity. It cannot be reduced to any one of these aspects, because “mature” groove and melody stabilize and integrate the work.5 League explains how Snarky Puppy tries to avoid “pander[ing] too much to either one of [head and heart],” hoping to avoid both the “cerebral, snobby ... mentality” of modern jazz and the “saccharine” effect of substance-lacking pop music.6 He attributes this unifying feature of their music to the profound influence of gospel music on many of the band’s members, saying it led them to “something groovier, funkier, more communicative with the audience. ... Less nerdy.”7 It is simultaneously accessible and deep. It’s “music for brain and booty.”8
"Snarky Puppy’s music gives us a taste of this non-reductionist vision of humanity through its holistic engagement with multiple aspects of our humanity." Snarky Puppy’s irreducibly human music embodies a helpful corrective to reductionist accounts of humanity. Throughout history, many theologians have reduced the image of God to a particular aspect of humanity, something in us—whether our rational and free nature (Irenaeus), our intellect or reason (Aquinas), the soul (Calvin), our relationality as male and female (Barth), our relation to God (Brunner), or “the newness of life to which we are restored in Christ” (Berkouwer).9 This approach inevitably leads us to elevate one aspect of what it means to be human above others, while denigrating those in whom that aspect is less pronounced. This isn’t too difficult to see in Western culture: natural scientists have often reduced humanity to the physical, marketers to the emotional, and many educational institutions to the rational. But human beings are more than that. To be God’s image is to be like God. As Herman Bavinck writes: “[T]he whole person is the image of God, in soul and body, in all human faculties, powers, and gifts. ... All that is in God ... finds its admittedly finite and limited analogy and likeness in humanity.”10 Further, humanity as a whole is the image of God—only in community can the image be “fully realized.”11 Snarky Puppy’s music gives us a taste of this non-reductionist vision of humanity through its holistic engagement with multiple aspects of our humanity. For human beings stunted by reductionism, Snarky Puppy’s music reengages faculties that we have neglected and thus puts us back together.
As well as engaging multiple aspects of our humanity, Snarky Puppy’s music offers a thoroughly human account of transcendence. This might seem like an odd thing to say—isn’t the transcendent precisely what is beyond humanity? But perhaps here we are following Western culture’s tendency to “locate both art and [human] spirituality in the domain of mystery.”12 In other words, there is a tendency to assume the “transcendent” or “spiritual” will be found outside our humanity and physical reality.13 Therefore, seeking a spiritual experience entails becoming less human, going beyond our humanity. Like reductionism, this posture presents a threat to humanity, given that we human beings are made of material stuff. Snarky Puppy’s music can help us here, too.
Towards the end of “Thing of Gold,” something happens which we might say takes the music to another level. The melody by this point is recognizable (it has been heard twice) and its accompanying chord sequence is well established. But when the melody returns the chords are slightly altered, setting up a key change, and then another. We feel the heightened intensity when Shaun Martin (synthesiser) takes a solo over these chords, playing higher and faster. Finally the band modulates (changes key) again and the horns play the tune underneath Martin’s solo—we have arrived at something transcendent, but in a very human way.
"The music is spiritual because it is so deeply human." What’s going on here? A small harmonic shift at the end of a familiar progression creates an inevitable ascent, a potentially infinite sequence of key changes. Listeners experience increasing intensity and freshness and yet also increasing familiarity and inevitability, because they can still sing the melody. This sort of “endless key-change” is common in gospel music and in gospel-influenced pop.14 The familiar is made strange in a way that also compounds its familiarity, and the effect is transcendent.15 The music is spiritual because it is so deeply human.
This example can breathe new life into our notion of what it means for human beings to be spiritual or access the transcendent. As Steve Guthrie points out, the Western church has often opposed the spirit to the body, and implicitly taught that if we want to be spiritual we need to get away from the “sensual.”16 But to be spiritual is to be human. We are dust and breath (Gen. 2:7)—inspired bodies. As Jeremy Begbie points out, “God establishes communion with humans not at the perimeters but at the centre of human life, by becoming human within human history, reaching right into the inside of our speaking and thinking.”17 The incarnation means that deep spiritual experience is found at the centre of what it means to be human, not at the edges. In Snarky Puppy’s music, the most seemingly “spiritual” moments are also the most human. An infinite musical spiral not outwards to what we do not know and cannot comprehend, but inwards, deeper into our humanity and into what has been already established. We hear what we are in Snarky Puppy’s music. This music testifies to the transcendent, because it gives us a vision for the fullness of life human beings were always meant to have as spiritual beings, to be the image of God.
Snarky Puppy’s music is generative for our living out what it means to be human in a world which tends to reduce everything, including what it means to be human. In engaging multiple aspects of our humanity it reawakens those faculties which may lie dormant from the reductionist effects of living under modernity. In achieving spiritual moments through what is most human, in particular by creating an infinite spiral into the familiar, it vocalizes that to be spiritual is to be human. Snarky Puppy’s music does not have lyrics, nor is it “Christian” music. But it is heavily influenced by gospel music and perhaps this is one reason it pulls us deeper into our humanity on so many levels. Gospel music is deeply embodied and physical, responding to the dehumanization of human bodies. It is intellectually, imaginatively, and emotionally rich, bodying forth the gospel of transformation. And it draws us into community, modelling Christ’s rehumanizing work in forming a new humanity—“it’s church.”18
