Decolonizing Gospel Music

Robert Beckford shows how the black British gospel music tradition is in crisis after it became distanced from the 'roots' of the gospel in the US that influenced it.

The book develops a revolutionary gospel music genre or 'social gospel, ' in two stages. The first stage is a reshaping and retooling of the theological and theo-musicological structures of contemporary gospel music, based on a socio-political reading of black British music production. The second stage is a practical guide, a theo-musicological reflection on the production of the author's album: Jamaican Bible Remix.

To reveal how these tracks are cut-and-mixed in the recording studio, the second part of the book consists of case studies of individual songs from the album (Incarnation: no blacks, no Irish, no dogs, ' and 'Magnificat'). The book ends with a call for a post-logocentric black liberation theology situated within the black radical sacred music tradition of the African Caribbean diaspora.

The album can be accessed at www.canterbury.ac.uk/arts-and-humanities/school-of-humanities/religion-philosophy-and-ethics/research/jamaican-bible-remix