Y’all, I am so tired.
LESSON PLAN 4.2: Intro to Cone
1. Spend some time with the Table of Contents. What does it teach us about the subject matter of this book? About the questions Cone will ask?
- What is Cone like as a speaker? What are his aims in this text? Anyone look at the year (1972)? Context?
- Explain that even though this book is hard, it gives us a theological vocabulary with which to discuss “I’ll Fly Away,” “Spaceship,” “Jesus Walks” and “Never Let Me Down”
2. Groups of 3-4: After we all read pp. 5-6 together, split into 5 groups and each group is responsible for fully understanding and explaining to the class one of the 5 claims Cone makes about black music:
Black music is unity music. … Black music is functional … Black music is a living reality. … Black music is also social and political. … Black music is theological. (Cone 5-6)
Speaking of which, what’s the difference between theology and religion? What does it mean to claim the spirituals are “theological” as opposed to merely religious?
3. Listen: “I’ll Fly Away” + Spaceship”
- What does “I’ll Fly Away” add to “Spaceship”? In other words, what might we miss in the latter if the former was excluded?
- Do we see any concepts from Cone resonating in “Spaceship”?
1. Collect their first final papers! Then congratulate them, then… reflective writing!!
- List the different steps you took to write this paper, as though it was a lab report, from receiving the assignment through turning it in today.
- Which step was the hardest and which was the easiest? Why?
- Assess your process – not the product but the process. Did you set goals? Did your steps work? Would you change them?
2. Discuss Cone ch. 4 “God and Black Suffering” and ch. 5 “The Meaning of Heaven in the Black Spirituals”
- What is the relationship between faith and suffering in the spirituals? What attitude to the spirituals take?
- What are the multiple meanings of Heaven Cone sees in the spirituals?
- What kinds of questions does Cone ask of the lyrics he analyzes?
3. “Jesus Walks”
“God show me the way cuz the devil tryna break me down.
I wanna talk to God but I’m afraid cuz we ain’t spoke in so long.
Jesus walks with me…
- Can we apply Cone’s questions to Kanye? What is the image of God he gives us in his lyrics, or of Jesus? What about the devil?
- A music video makes choices about how to represent a song: is it literal; does it draw our attention to certain storylines, sounds, or themes; how is the artist positioned in the video, if at all; etc.
- Compare 2 versions of “Jesus Walks” video, asking above questions of each.
LESSON PLAN 5.2 (meet in computer lab)
1. Cone- “The Blues”
- What’s the relationship between the spirituals and the blues?
- p. 100 Cone says the two genres share the same “ethos” – what does that mean?
- What does Cone mean by absurdity? “But absurdity int he blues is factual, not conceptual. The blues, while not denying that the world was strange, described its strangeness in more concrete and vivid terms” (101). What, in the view of the blues, is so absurd? “The blues…recognize that there is something wrong with this world, something absurd about the way that white people treat black people….The blues caught the absurdity of black existence in America and vividly and artistically expressed it in word and suitable music.” (112)
2. Introduce a PARADIGM SHIFT: From doing primary source work to secondary source work
- Remind me what primary vs. secondary sources are?
- In the first part of class, we wrote about primary sources and read texts that wrote about primary sources. (Anderson had his transcripts, Cone has his lyrics.) But now we are going to write about primary sources and secondary sources together, just like Tricia Rose will in the next book we read.
- Strategies for using secondary sources: VERBS!! Verbal weapons with which we wage our wars!! acknowledge – add- admit – agree – argue – assert – believe – claim – comment – compare – confirm – conclude – contend – declare – deny – dispute – emphasize – endorse – grant – illustrate – imply – maintain – note – opine – point out – reason – refute – reject – report – respond – suggest – think – write
3. (For today, everyone had to analyze a music video of their choice and post it on the class blog.) Teams of 2: pick a post neither of you wrote, read it, watch the video. Then summarize the author’s take on the video and challenge or expand their analysis using 3-5 of these verbs.