Rhythm and rupture

While Rhythm and Rupture is, at it’s root, a conversion narrative, it is much more – it is a nuanced story of music and spirituality traced across generations, genres, and history. From jazz and pop in 1957 to jungle and hip-hop in 1994 and on to a tune like Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” in 2016, the threads are disentangled to reveal rhythmic intensities that essentially caused me, a white male from the South (Thomasville, NC!), to accept Islam from a Senegalese Sufi “Shaykh” at the Hilton in Times Square. It is rooted in the belief that there are no accidents and that everything is connected. The premise is simple: songs in particular years are examined against what else was happening at that moment, both personally and culturally, to create a “secret history of rhythm” that links across disciplines, genres, and time. It is a braided memoir that weaves my story with events and culture at the same moment, tracing their contours across time. Integral in this work is exploring contrasts – North Carolina and San Francisco, New York City and Senegal, the contrasts between concepts of whiteness and Blackness, contrasts between regular and irregular rhythms, between consciousness and transcendence, between unity and mind/body dichotomies. It pits the music of REM against Toni Morrison, the writing of Mailer against the words of Malcolm X, the music of bluegrass against the boxing of Muhammad Ali, Nirvana against Nas, the Wu-Tang Clan against Pulp Fiction, bell hooks against Fredric Jameson, Sufism against wi-fi.