In this post, I present a remixed recording I made of hip-hop educator Brandon Bennett running a session of the afterschool Producer Club run by TechRow Fund at New Design Middle School in Harlem. From the beginning until 1:18, you hear Brandon lead a game of his own devising, where he raps lines with missing words, and the students have to call out what they think the word is. From 1:18 until 1:58, you hear a second round of the game. Finally, from 1:58 until the end, you hear Brandon coaching the kids as they write their own bars.
After Brandon led the game, then the kids took turns on the mic. Everyone was rapping over a beat playing from Brandon’s phone through the speakers. The mic ran into Ableton Live on my computer, and then out through the same speakers. That way, I could apply effects like compression, delay, and Auto-Tune as needed. I could also record whatever was coming in on the mic. I like to record the sessions, because if a student comes up with something good, then we have it documented for their future reference. Brandon and I will sometimes edit the high points of their freestyles into “proto-songs”, with the hope that they will inspire the students to expand on them in future sessions.
Getting permission to use recordings of kids for research purposes is complicated and requires a lot of paperwork. Using a recording of Brandon is easier; he’s an adult and can simply give me his consent, which he did. Maybe after going through the IRB process I’ll be able to share the kids’ raps too, but my main research interest is in educators like Brandon: his musical sensibilities and teaching methods.
Michael Viega describes three roles for hip-hop educators: teacher as producer, teacher as engineer, and teacher as fan. On this recording, I’m acting as an engineer, and as producer after the fact. Brandon is both producer and fan. His fill-in-the-rhyme game shows off his rare ability to write G-rated verses that aren’t contrived or corny. And he’s an an enthusiastic supporter of the students’ creativity. At one point in the recording, he gently points out that something doesn’t rhyme, but otherwise, his comments are all encouragement: “That’s a fire one.” “Facts.” “Okay!” (Note that all the references to guns are in the context of a kid who’s writing a verse about Fortnight, they’re not about actual guns.)
If you want to present edited versions of musical ethnographic field recordings, hip-hop is both an ideal subject and an ideal medium. Because the entire session was set to a steady beat, I could edit everything on the grid, following a foursquare phrase structure. The recording stands on its own as an enjoyable music experience. Brandon’s rapping flows seamlessly into his speech and vice versa; both sound equally at home on top of the beat. Also, the close-miked style of rap suits the less-than-optimal sonic environment of the noisy classroom, since the SM58 doesn’t pick up anything but whatever is close to it.
As I write my dissertation, I’ll be creating a series of tracks, remixed interviews and observations, with hip-hop as both their subject and their medium. I’m doing this in part to make my study more engaging for people who don’t want to read 300 pages of dense academic prose, and in part because creating hip-hop tracks is integral to my understanding of rap as an art form. I am not much of an emcee and haven’t done much lyric writing, but I’m a terrific producer, and that gives me deeper insight into hip-hop practice than I could get as an observer only.
Peter Dunbar-Hall takes an ethnomusicological approach to studying music educators, which he calls ethnopedagogy. The idea is that both music and its teaching are culturally loaded and specific. Furthermore, the aesthetics of a musical style necessarily inform its teaching, and vice versa. Brandon Bennett isn’t just teaching hip-hop as a subject; he is also performing it as an artist. His beats play all the way through his lessons, which gives them the feeling of continuous cyphers, or just long rap tracks. The groove in the room is palpable, and it is worlds away from the numbness, anxiety and anger I have felt in some of the formal music learning settings I inhabited as a student.
You can’t get a sense of the groove that Brandon creates just by reading about it. You need to hear it, to experience the affective warmth of his voice, not just the cleverness of his words. If my track inspires you to nod your head in time, you’re already entering the bodily experience of being in the room with us. I consider myself to be a good writer, but there is no substitute for music as a medium for conveying musical experiences.