Cornel West is featured a few times in the Call and Response rockumentary - which you really ought to check out and ask your local theatre to host a screening and invite some friends - it has the potential to help change the world and empower a generation. Cornel explains that the black artists that emerged out of slavery in and morphed into blues and have so influenced and shaped the rock n roll genre were a people who understood about 'the funk'. What is the funk? Cornel suggests it's the muck and the mire of life... we are born in a mess and we go to a mess when we die... that's the 'funk' - but the real gift of the African American experience is that instead of avoiding the funk and never talking about it and pretending not to know about it etc... there is an embracing of the beauty within the funk... that in the muck and the mire or hardship, struggle and injustice is a glimpse of beauty, truth and justice. I think I get it. I'd like to get it more - I'd like to (like Mother Theresa) be able to spot God and His grace in even disturbing disguises... to get to the funk in order to emerge dirty but broken and changed. To find the beauty in the broken (also a solid worship song by Starfield).
Anyway, if you haven't checked out Call and response - do it... it's a great tool for urging people forward to change the circumstances of the current slave trade... why not check out the website and then PRAY this weekend for the abolition of sex-trafficking - then be the answer to the prayer... you may just find beauty in the funk.