Hip-hop, heartbreak, and Him

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, September 23rd.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a classics professor with a doctorate in philosophy and a gift for hip-hop.

Nathan Oglesby manages to blend heartbreak, theology, and rap beats into one unusual career.

EICHER: Music critic Arsenio Orteza now on Oglesby’s latest album, titled Between Piety and Desire.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Nathan Oglesby may be the only professor of classics with 11,000 subscribers on YouTube and 27,000 followers on Instagram. By the time he earned his Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 2018, he had already patented a uniquely didactic kind of high-I.Q. hip-hop.

MUSIC: [“A Song of My Non-Self”]

Oglesby grew up in Snohomish, Washington, where he attended the United Methodist church before drifting away. Then, gradually—through encounters with William Blake and Martin Luther—he drifted back. Last Easter, he entered the Catholic Church, but, as he has just entered the Yale Divinity School, his spiritual trek may not be over.

His musical trek certainly isn’t. His latest album, Between Piety and Desire, finds him putting hip-hop aside for country and folk. And, as you might expect from an album with Piety in its title, Oglesby’s burgeoning faith plays a role.

MUSIC: [“The Name of Jesus”]

The album is unique in Oglesby’s output for reasons other than its style and its faith-based content. It’s also introspectively autobiographical. Oglesby wrote its 13 songs in the wake of a traumatic romantic break up, hence the Desire part of its title.

OGLESBY: All of the songs on that album are so unlike anything that I’d done for the past 10 years. It was more like writing songs when I was a teenager, feeling, you know, just feelings of passion and pain and, like, self-negation and desire and no way of putting them anywhere except into very crude and rudimentary music, and the songs were arriving whole, you know what I mean? They were coming out just line by line. I certainly wasn’t planning on, like, making an album or anything like that. But they just all arrived, and they saved me.

An album rooted in heartbreak could be a downer or a wound-licking exercise in Too Much Information. To Oglesby’s credit, his heartbreak album is neither. In its jaunty opening song, Oglesby even seems to have achieved a sort of closure.

MUSIC: [“Nothing You Could Do”]

Other songs, however, reveal how bad the post-breakup blues can be, even for someone cultivating a relationship with Christ. Consider, for example, the song “Reading the Bible in a Bar.”

MUSIC: [“Reading the Bible in a Bar”]

I asked Oglesby how autobiographically accurate he was trying to be with the lines “All I’ve got is Jesus Christ and credit-card debt and a car” and “I’m pushin’ 40, and I’ve lost most of what I had.” His answer? Very.

OGLESBY: I lost the girl, I lost the dough, and then there I was, you know, just in this bar. And I’ve been experiencing this draw to faith, but I was also feeling a sense of, like, “Wow. I’ve been trying to follow that path, and so far the path is, like, not leading to milk and honey yet.” So it was like this desert moment, like when the Israelites are like “I kind of feel like we should’ve stayed in Egypt,” you know (laughs)? Like “Slavery was better than this,” because that’s how I felt. I was like “I’m totally free, and nothing encumbers me”—and I’ve kind of always desired that freedom. But it tasted like ash in my mouth.

The bar in question, by the way, is in New Orleans, which really does have streets named Piety and Desire. And when Oglesby says that he’d “lost the dough,” he isn’t exaggerating. For awhile, his skill at making hip-hop videos that addressed serious issues in a clever and engaging way got him not only viral moments but also what he calls “big commissions.” Eventually, however, the number of online content creators grew so large that it became harder for him to stand out. And, anyway, Oglesby admits that he “mismanaged” his big-commission earnings. Having hit financial rock bottom is one reason, other than a sense of “call,” that he has enrolled at Yale’s divinity school (on a scholarship).

OGLESBY: In stepping into this divinity-school path, I want to merge the feeling I had as a professor with the feeling I’ve had as a performer in terms of the practical doing of, like, professing and speaking in that sort of quasi-educational way with the sort of performativity and artistic panache of this, you know, content creation and this—and songwriting. And it’s also not about the transmission of knowledge being an end in itself. It’s actually about the care of the other.

The “other,” in the case of Between Piety and Desire, includes anyone who has ever gone through the failure of romance and anyone who has sought God with his whole heart and mind.

MUSIC: [“I Believe in God and You and Me”]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.