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From Our Shelves: Psalms of my People

by Angel Rivera on 2024-07-29T09:00:00-04:00 in African & African American Studies, African Americans | 0 Comments

Welcome to another edition of "From Our Shelves," where I read a book from our collections and give you a short review to help you decide if you want to read it. This week I read Psalms of My People by lenny duncan. The author takes us on a learning tour of Black History in the United States through hip-hop. In the book, the author selects key works in hip-hop and looks at them as religious texts. The author then writes a psalm on the specific work and looks also at context and broader history. Initially I was not sure what to make of the book, but once I started reading, it drew me right in. I just kept reading. It is an accessible text, and the psalms format gives the material a bit of rhythm. There is a musicality as you read. Overall, this is a book that packs a lot of wisdom, and I really enjoyed it. Thus I highly recommend it.

Here are the details from the library catalog so you can find it in our library:

Psalms of My People by Lenny Duncan

Call Number: Stacks 782.421 D911p 2024

ISBN: 9781506479026

Publication Date: 2024-01-09

If you want to understand the Black experience in the US, you have to understand hip-hop. James Baldwin, in his famous talk "The Struggle for the Artist's Integrity," suggests that "the poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us." And to understand the truth about the history of Black peoples in America, argues lenny duncan, we must look to the modern Black poet: the hip-hop artist. In Psalms of My People, artist, scholar, and activist lenny duncan treats the work of hip-hop artists from the last several decades--from N.W.A, Tupac, and Biggie to Lauryn Hill, Jay-Z, and Kendrick Lamar--like sacred scripture. "Who else but the hip-hop artist," asks Duncan, "has embodied the cries, pain, and secret concrete ? Whose art? Our art. Whose story is written in the book of life with crimson lines dipped in a well that is 400+ years deep? Whose story? Our story. For whom does God bring down empires? Us."

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