In the early 2020s, a certain trepidation over ‘RAP music’ (sic) emerged amongst the police in Finland, with allegations that the music and particularly gangsta rap videos induced young people off the narrow path. While the police may have taken the cue to consider the gangsta subgenre a tad overtly literally from their colleagues in Sweden, ethnomusicologists and scholars of popular music could have educated them by simply noting that the only connection between gangsta rap and actual criminals is that actual criminals also make music. The police might have realised their blatant racial and structural prejudices, which transmogrify a creative practice into an area of unwarranted surveillance. Certainly, the police’s understanding of rap as an acronym is an indication of a cultural mismatch in itself.

I was reminded of the ignorance and paranoia of the police in general and everywhere when reading The Disturbing Profane by Joseph R. Winters, because his treatment makes clear the arbitrariness of racial discrimination in relation to rap and hip hop. To be sure, there is very little new in this, yet Winters’ take on ‘the intersections of […] the volatile, left-hand sacred and blackness’ (p. 24) carries a certain novel applicability to critical assessments of the cultural politics of rap and hip hop in general. In this regard, two aspects in particular stood out for me whilst reading. First, Winters’ approach to the sacred extends beyond the explicitly religious realm, and second, he commendably avoids referring to ‘popular music’ in a self-explanatory fashion. Overall, I for one welcome his attempt at interdisciplinary cross-pollination ‘at the intersection of black studies and religious thought’ (p. 7), even if he does not link this explicitly to either popular music studies or cultural studies. Still, I deem his analysis broadly within the remit of cultural studies in its sensitivity towards mediated representations and power relations, thus a somewhat standard approach within popular music studies.

The Disturbing Profane is structured around three chapters, each being partially based on earlier publications, and dealing with ‘Sorrow/Death’, ‘Redemption/Rupture’, and ‘Monster/Monstrosity’, respectively. In the first, Winters sets out to ‘contend that [W. E. B.] Du Bois’s redefinition of sorrow encourages us to listen to key themes and patterns within hip hop’, namely anguish, death, the divine and commercialisation, and the association of all of these to blackness; ultimately, at issue is an ‘attempt to expose and depart from enduring tendencies to treat black people as more tolerant of pain and less capable of internal anguish’ (p. 39). The second chapter ‘foregrounds how certain hip hop artists approach the notion of being rescued from an undesirable predicament’, with particular attention paid to Lupe Fiasco’s American Terrorist ‘as an indictment of US exceptionalism, a disciplinary mechanism that […] affixes terror to an elsewhere and denies the terror intrinsic to (US) nation-building’ (pp. 77–78). In the third chapter, Winters ‘want[s] to think through how [Georges] Bataille’s ideas about the sacred, intimacy, and the monstrous get modified when blackness and racialized gender slide into the foreground’ (p. 112). As with scholarly writing in general, The Disturbing Profane is not targeted at the fans – or, more to the point, the fans of Du Bois and Bataille are likely to find the book more interesting than the fans of Biggie Smalls, 50 Cent, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Nicki Minaj, or Tupac Shakur, to list the artists most often discussed here.

The chapters are examples of forceful argumentation in their own right, and I was particularly impressed by Winters’ discussion of US exceptionalism, not only because of his acute observations on nationalistic terror, but also due to his acknowledgement of the specificity of the USA as a society – even if it remains implicit by and large. At the same time, I feel compelled to remind US and other Anglophone authors that their analyses will be scrutinised practically all over the world, and not least concerning such truly global music genres as rap. In other words, I caught myself recurrently scribbling in the margins: ‘cf. other genres and elsewhere?’ I for one do think that rap and hip hop in general are amongst the most recent truly revolutionary composites of expressive forms, capable of challenging conventional ideas of artistry profoundly, yet many facets of their wider discursive frame – such as debates over authenticity – are not the sole property of hip hop, and less so of the USA.

Still, I eventually found the title of the book slightly misleading, both on the grounds of the ‘profane’ and ‘hip hop’. The latter is less significant, but I nonetheless was surprised, if not disappointed, that there were no explicit references to the other dimensions of hip hop, besides rap music, such as break dancing, graffiti or ‘the knowledge’. Admittedly, the last of these is a constant thread throughout the argument, yet providing the reader with only an endnote about the interchangeable use of ‘rap’ and ‘hip hop’ (p. 154, note 24) is problematic in its insouciance.

A weightier issue is that, conceptually, the notion of the profane remains rather perfunctorily theorised. In general, Winters takes the profane axiomatically as the binary counterpoint of the sacred, yet this is hardly novel or critical enough. It is also conspicuous that between his thoughtful introduction and concluding remarks, the explicit connection to the sacred disappears by and large. Yet Winters’ acute observations about and contributions to the ambivalence of the sacred could be turned easily enough into a question of whether it is the sacred, and not the profane, that is disturbing. Some relief is offered as Winters relies on Bataille’s incitements of ‘the sacred as a kind of profanation’ (p. 17), developed further in the third chapter, yet I remain puzzled by the title of the book. Surely, it can signal merely the creative input of the publishing industry.

All this notwithstanding and as implied by my opening remarks, the points raised by Winters are effortlessly applicable to other societal circumstances, especially in Western and Northern Europe. There is no doubt over the severity of crimes committed by certain ‘gangsta RAP musicians’ in Finland, and I for one might suggest The Disturbing Profane be included in the law-enforcement agency libraries of Finland – not to educate spelling as such but rather to remedy serious ideological prejudices where the simple cultural affinity to blackness serves as an aggravation.