> I think the problem here is that standard black preaching, with all
> its sing song, and exaggerated voice and facial gestures, looks and
> sounds to secular white intellectuals like a clown act: inherently
> ridiculous and impossible to take seriously.
This is a little too broad in the brush.
Can't speak for anybody else, but as it happens, for me personally, the homiletic idiom of the black church is both quite familiar and intensely congenial. What bugs me about West is something peculiar to him. He's not a very *good* black preacher, for one thing -- he doesn't have, at all, the combination of ecstasy and gravitas that characterizes good pulpits in Harlem. He doesn't have well-distinguished distinct registers and he doesn't switch among them with the virtuosity that most any Baptist preacher acquires in seminary. The real thing is worlds away from West. It's hard to put one's finger on it, but to my ear it doesn't ring true, and I have heard the real thing, and lots of it.
-- --
Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com