How One Theologian Is Composing a Soundtrack for His Faith and Activism

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

I listen to a lot of music from all different genres. In a single day, you can find me listening to Albert Ayler’s spiritual skronk, Digable Planets’ jazz rap, and Dry Cleaning’s post-punk. When words fail or seemingly disappear, music fills the void.

Lately, I’ve been getting into the postclassical genre — also sometimes called neoclassical. It’s likely you’ve heard a popular song from this genre, Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” which often appears on soundtracks (Arrival and The Last of Us.) The song is a quintessential movie song as the strings rile up something inside you that simultaneously says, “I can’t go on,” and “I have to go on.” It’s that emotional juxtaposition that makes postclassical music so appealing.

Writing for Classical-Music.com, Claire Jackson explains that postclassical music is a “collision of classical-electro-ambient music, a strange juxtaposition of old and new, high versus so-called ‘low’ art.” One of the best examples of this genre is Teodor Wolgers’ Distractions in a Capitalist World, which mixes haunting strings and thick beats with overt critiques of capitalism.

Just as I was getting into postclassical, Sojourners contributor Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo reached out to inform me he would be releasing an album, Palimpsests, A Theology, which would be in the postclassical genre. I had only ever known Melo to be a radical theologian committed to writing about anti-colonial versions of Christianity, so I was interested to see how he incorporated those themes into his music. Also, I was curious: What did Melo think music could convey that words and traditional theological inquiry could not?

In our conversation, Melo and I talk about why he turned to making music in seminary, art in a capitalist world, Kendrick vs. Drake, and the staleness of the deconstruction movement.

Palimpsests is out now and available for purchase or streaming.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Josiah R. Daniels, Sojourners: The first question that I always begin every interview with is a pretty simple one: Who are you and what do you do?

Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo: I’m currently in my last semester at Princeton, doing an MDiv at Princeton Theological Seminary. I study the intersections of theology, politics, and the arts. I’m also a postclassical musician. I’ve been doing this for, God, maybe six years now, but I’ve been producing longer than that.

What is postclassical?

Another term for it is contemporary classical. So it’s drawing from the era of classical music and also from the more recent neoclassical era. In the early 1900s, they tried to recapture the classical sense of minimalism and focus on organic sounds and stuff like that. But what’s unique about postclassical is that it does take its cues from classical music but at the same time blends that with different genres, especially genres like post-rock and even ambient music and also electronic music.

Ólafur Arnalds is pretty much one of the biggest names right now in postclassical. And you can hear it a lot in his music, how he blends different genres. You have Hania Rani as well. Hers is very experimental. I find myself in that realm of music. Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight.” I feel like it shows up in movies every now and then just because it’s so beautiful. But it’s a song that he wrote in response to and critique of the War on Terror, especially the war in Iraq. That song is highly inspirational for me because of the intentions behind making it and the communities to which he was hoping to devote it. Makes me cry every time.

Tell me a little bit about your theological journey and how you now have gravitated toward combining theology and postclassical music.

I’ll start with why I came to seminary. I’m doing my MDiv here at Princeton Seminary. And actually, if I’m being honest, I came to seminary with a lot of questions. I chose to go to seminary, in a sense for career reasons, wanting to actually do theology professionally, but more deeply than that I was actually carrying a lot of questions regarding my own faith. Right before I entered seminary, my family experienced a really painful family tragedy and that was when I was in college. The family tragedy just completely shook my faith.

It brought a lot of doubt, a lot of fear — some of what people have termed deconstruction. I don’t want to use that term just flippantly, but I find myself in that camp. Because of that family tragedy, it just really shook my faith. It’s the ancient theodicy question: Why would a good God let suffering happen in the world?

Seminary really became a space for me to wrestle with these things. There was a lot of grief that I was processing in my writing that was really at the core of what I was asking regarding race and empire, colonialism, and even immigration. Part of my backstory is my family are immigrants, and so we immigrated here to the United States in 2015 from the Philippines, and we’re actually celebrating our 10th year here in the U.S. While at seminary, I realized that with the grief I’m trying to process, words alone couldn’t hold the weight of that grief. That’s where the music became really necessary for me.

After you go through a crisis of faith, after you change your mind about a variety of things related to Christianity and social justice, after you do some of that deconstruction, where do you go from there?

The piano, honestly, became my best friend over the past three years. The piano was where I went, and the thing about being able to have an artistic practice was that there is the aesthetic space that creates a context in which certain things that I couldn’t really process — with words or with others, whether in classrooms or in personal conversations — the aesthetic space with the piano generated that for me.

In many ways, the piano became a means for me to enter into a state of prayer. There’s a passage that comes to mind for me: Romans 8:26 talks about how the spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. I latched onto that as a way for me to be able to think about my grief musically.

When someone is grieving and going through a crisis, whether it’s deconstruction in their faith or a family tragedy or whatever it is, and they have a friend who’s trying to accompany them and is saying all these platitudes, “God’s in control,” “everything will work out for your own good,” the person grieving will often respond with, “That’s not what I need. I need someone who can just sit with me in these emotions, in the silence, and just groan with me.” I think that was something that I desired so deeply while at seminary that I relied on the piano to be that friend.

Obviously, I have communities that supported me, too. I have a church that is loving and my family, but there’s something unique about that intimate experience with music that opened a space for reflection that I don’t think I could have gotten elsewhere. Not even in my theological writing.

I’ve also experienced those same sorts of platitudes from people who were going through the process of deconstruction. Instead of sitting with the questions, they immediately want to turn to the answer. For example, “Christianity is just this colonial project, nothing good can come out of it.” I wonder what you might say to people who are quick to give answers to folks, but they’re doing it from this progressive or deconstructive mindset.

Willie James Jennings talks about this idea of white self-sufficient masculinity. The way he talks about it in his book, After Whiteness, is that, practically, it looks like all these people who have so much certainty in their faith or so much certainty in the ways that they’ve resolved things. It’s like, “I have the answers, and you can figure this out in the same way that I did.”

I’ve also experienced that not just from the conservative angle of “God’s in control,” but also in terms of “You need to get rid of this concept of God.” To me, that’s not how you sit with someone who is grieving. The way you sit with someone who is grieving is Romans 8:26: groaning with that person in ways that are too deep for words.

I’ve become so much more resistant to conclusivity or certainty as faith.

What does it mean to do theology at the end of the world? And also, what does it mean to make music at the end of the world?

It’s to recognize the immense precarity that communities across the world are facing right now. I use the “end of the world” phrase in two ways. First, there’s the sense that real people’s social worlds are, in the here and now, being ended because of various kinds of state violence, colonial military occupations, imperial regimes, so on and so forth.

We’re seeing this happen all over the world. We’re seeing it happen here in the United States right now. And so there’s that sense in which people’s social communities, their social worlds are ending because they’re being separated at the border, they’re being incarcerated, or they’re being displaced from their homes.

There’s a second way in which I’m talking about this where it’s an apocalyptic move: The end of the world is the reality in which our systems and structures are facing the limits. There is a sense in which this is the time for historical revolution, historical change, and liberation. The world in which we live right now and the ways it works need to end so that new worlds can be formed to address the needs of all these communities whose social communities are being disrupted.

So, talking about God is a response to these conditions of violence that we’re seeing across the world. This is not an abstract reality that cannot be addressed. We need to address it in the here and now. How does that relate to my music? The way I’m writing — it’s always my wrestling with God, trying to urge God to do something in the world. There’s a genuine limit to the power that words have in order to enact this kind of social change that I’m looking for.

I’m writing the album to demonstrate that the words in my thesis can only go so far. I wanted to make music because I didn’t want my theology to just be reduced to these doctrinal specificities that I’m trying to lay out. I wanted it to be able to really affect my heart and hopefully the hearts of those who listen.

This is something that Molly McCully Brown recently said to me in an interview: “In times of repression, in times of violence, in times of suffering, in times of difficulty, we’re hungry for beauty. We need it, right? It is one of the things that art offers, and it offers it not in a denial of what is dark or violent or difficult or unjust, but in grappling with that and making something out of it that is nuanced, something that is musical, something that retains faith in the world as a place that is revelatory and worth saving.”

What do you think about that?

I love that. That’s the hope not just for my own work, but for all artists out there. I think art has a powerful way of making beauty out of ashes or making beauty out of conditions that suppress life. Art is the way that everyday people participate in and persist through life.

I also want to be really specific about what is meant by art. Because there’s this sense in which people might say, “Oh, if you read a good novel, you’ll become a moral person,” or “if you listen to good music or go to the museum, it’ll make you a better person.” I don’t think it’s that simple of an equation. Neferti X.M. Tadiar and Ki Joo Choi helped ground me in not just talking about art abstractly.

I guess one way to put it is this: Think about the rap beef between Kendrick and Drake. When you’re at a protest against police brutality, will you hear Kendrick’s music or Drake’s music? You’ll hear Kendrick’s music. Why? Because Kendrick’s music emerges from those conditions. Kendrick writes from the positionality of marginalized Black communities in LA, right? He grew up in Compton. His music emerges from the long history of all the resistance against anti-Black police brutality and anti-Black violence in general.

To even think about Drake and his music, hearing any song from Certified Lover Boy being played at a BLM protest causes dissonance.

Why? Because not all art is beneficial for the specific ends to which we want to use them.

So if we want to have or develop a moral consciousness that is political and genuinely revolutionary — whether that’s anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, or anti-capitalist — we have to use and create art that addresses those specific ends. And so when artists talk about art and talk about beauty, yes, beauty can, in many ways, bring new worlds into existence. But I also want to be very specific about that: What kind of beauty are we talking about and from where does it emerge?

In terms of there being someone in the music industry who critiques the music industry, racial capitalism, and the United States, I don’t think that there’s a bigger name than Kendrick. But at what point does the empire co-opt certain art forms and voices we label as prophetic?

That’s the challenge of our culture, right? In order to put ourselves out there, we need to use platforms. Social media is an empire, we know that. Social media is complicit in a lot of what the current administration is doing.

But it’s also a center for public discourse and social activism. A lot of organizing happens there. A lot of advocacy work happens on social media. Because of how much access people have to it. It does feel like a contradiction. It’s the same thing with Kendrick. But maybe there is a sense in which these are also the structures, or the tools that we have and you have to discern if we can use those structures or flip them over.

I put my music on Spotify. I put my music on Apple Music. I put my music on Bandcamp. The reason why is because these are the platforms that are available for me to be able to actually connect with people and, hopefully, begin to generate those discourses that I hope my music will, and it feels like a contradiction in many ways.

I guess my ethical conviction about this is this: To do it in such a way that you don’t give in to that culture; don’t give in to how these structures are actually designed to monetize data and monetize attention. Instead, look to disrupt that. That’s why I really love the postclassical and ambient genres. It’s actively trying to avoid falling into the trap of commodifiable music. It’s the kind of music that demands slow, meditative reflection.

How do you resist the temptation?

What’s been really crucial for me in making music is knowing my audience. Is it the Billboard Top 40, and people who listen to the Top 40 radio? Or is it these marginalized communities that I’m a part of?

And I think that’s really important for musicians, for artists generally, to know your audience in order to keep ourselves accountable to our communities. Especially when we’re using these platforms that try to commodify our art.

Tell me a little bit about your creative process.

Here’s what’s really interesting. I normally don’t release them immediately. The reason why is because I’m a big believer in revealing them when the time is right. So this album I’m working on, Palimpsests, refers to these manuscripts or texts that have former iterations, just right beneath the surface that you can see.

It’s a poetic metaphor for my faith experience. It’s always being rewritten, it’s always open-ended, never static, always changing, always evolving, an unfinished reality. It’s something I’ve embraced. But it’s also named Palimpsests because it follows my creative process of writing songs and then letting them evolve. This album evolved over five years.

I wanted them to go through the journey with me. Through all that grief that I carried that seminary and into my writing, I wanted it to walk with me through that process. And now that I’m finishing my time in seminary, it just felt like the right time to share them with people.