Mr Ethan, I want to hear you rap

The Producer Club’s goal is to teach music technology, audio production, songwriting, beatmaking, and creative collaboration using a project-based approach. The participants will create a mixtape of original songs, beats and skits and release it on SoundCloud and other streaming platforms. In the course of creating their tracks, the kids will learn about microphones, MIDI, synthesizers, audio manipulation, and mixing. We’re dividing each group into two teams: Artists and Beatmakers. Halfway through the program, the teams will switch, so every participant will experience both roles.

We held our first session last week. The plan was for Brandon, Roman and me to explain who we were. Then we would ask the kids to go around and tell us their names, describe their previous music experience, and name their current favorite song. Finally, Brandon and Roman would share some of their music to establish their hip-hop bona fides. Both of them are adept freestylers, and I figured that they’d dazzle the kids with some off-the-top verses. But something happened that I didn’t expect: the kids freestyled too, even the sixth graders, some of them quite well. After a little encouragement, a Haitian kid who doesn’t speak English dropped a verse in French. The eighth graders had a full-fledged rap battle. This has never happened in any music class of mine before, and it has my head spinning.

Understand: I’ve taught kids of all ages. Usually I have to coax the creativity out of them slowly and gradually. They’re always full of ideas, but are reluctant to share them in front of an audience, even if that audience is only me. But things are different when you have two rappers in front of the classroom, especially this classroom. Most of the kids in the program are black, and the rest are Latinx. The community is of low socioeconomic status. The kids use the terms “music” and “rap” interchangeably. (One girl who also listens to indie rock classifies it as “white music.”) I’ve been listening to rap since I was a kid, but I’ve only recently been getting to know the people who create it. And what I’m learning is that rap is a participatory culture, that it’s something that kids in these neighborhoods do the way they play basketball or video games. Not every kid is equally interested in or good at basketball, but it’s not a remarkable or unusual thing to spend your time doing. So it is with rapping.

One of the sixth graders posed me the challenge in this post’s title: “Mr Ethan, I want to hear you rap.” I declined, in part because it’s more important that the kids connect to Brandon and Roman than to me, but mainly because I was too nervous. I’m a good musical improvisor and am not shy about sharing my music with anyone who will listen, but in that context, I didn’t feel up to it. I do not, as the rappers say, have bars. It’s an aspiration of mine to be willing and able to do this, though, both for future hip-hop pedagogy, and just for my own satisfaction as a musician. But I have to develop more confidence first. It’s strange to be in a situation where a bunch of sixth graders are more confident than me. But here we are. I believe that spending more time in hip-hop spaces will help me build that confidence, and to learn how I can help foster it in others.

In an older blog post, I wrote about hip-hop as a teacher of confidence lessons. I’m going to rework those thoughts some more here. I spend so much time defending hip-hop from its detractors that I haven’t given a lot of thought to why I think it’s so beautiful and great. Usually when I do, I point to formal aspects of the music: the grooves, the hypnotic quality of electronic beats, the intertextuality and timbral invention of sample-based production, and the verbal and vocal virtuosity of the best emcees. But there are more basic emotional reasons why I’m a hip-hop fan. When I listen to the music, I hear effortless cool, the power that comes from strong emotions held in reserve, and a defiant sense of pride. I hear confidence. That is a quality I have been lacking for most of my life. As I get older, I get more self-assured, but when I was young, I was desperately awkward and socially anxious, and that part of me is never far from the surface. I need swagger lessons, and hip-hop is an excellent teacher. I don’t think I’m unusual among white rap fans for feeling this way.

Why are there so many white rap fans, anyway? In America, we take it for granted that our most popular and beloved music comes from racially and economically marginalized communities, but if you didn’t know anything about our culture, would you ever guess that would be true? It isn’t like that in the classical music world, where the canon is loaded with aristocrats and near-aristocrats. A naive observer might presume that America would celebrate the music of its elites too. Imagine if the Roma utterly dominated Europe’s musical culture. There are plenty of Europeans who love Django Reinhardt, but not the way that Americans love the Wu-Tang Clan. White Americans listen to rap for all kinds of reasons, but I believe that many of us are listening to get confidence lessons. In eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, the aristocrats had all the swagger. In America, though, the rich white people seem to conspicuously lack it.

I teach in a couple of music schools, and if I had to pick one adjective to describe the students, “confident” would not be it. Last spring, I was present for two recording sessions in NYU’s James Dolan Studio on two successive days. The Friday session was with NYU undergrads in my Music Education Technology Practicum class, a crash course in audio production for future music teachers. The Saturday session was with CORE Music. NYU music education students are mostly white and Asian, most come from privileged backgrounds, and most are classical musicians, with a small minority who play jazz. The CORE members are nearly all black and Latinx, are from non-privileged economic backgrounds, and are almost all rappers or beatmakers. Everyone in both sessions was recording material of their own choice, but while the NYU students all chose existing repertoire (classical pieces, jazz standards, musical theater songs), the CORE members’ music was all original.

I might naively have expected the NYU students to be confident and the rappers to be nervous, since the NYU students were “on their own turf,” while the rappers were in a new and unfamiliar environment. But the opposite was true. During the NYU students’ session, the anxiety in the room was palpable. Recording can be stressful under the best of circumstances, but this was more than performance anxiety. One of the students was on the verge of panic just sitting and listening in the control room. The next day, then, I was surprised to find that the rap kids didn’t show any anxiety at all. They were similarly new to the studio, and under the same pressures, but if anyone felt any nerves, they didn’t show it. The atmosphere was casual and relaxed.

One of the hip-hop educators I most admire is Toni Blackman, whose practice is based on the group improvisational ethos of the cypher. Toni has the calm, attentive affect of a good therapist, which is effectively what she is. Aside from teaching emcees, she also does public speaking coaching for politicians and businesspeople. In other words, Toni is a professional teacher of confidence. She has methods for bringing people like me into the right frame of mind for freestyling. If you’ve ever meditated, or done improv comedy, or theater games, then her exercises will be familiar. Etymology Online tells me that the word “confidence” comes from the Latin word confidentem, meaning “firmly trusting” or “bold.” A confident person inspires “full trust or reliance.” That describes the feeling in Toni’s cyphers. She isn’t just teaching a confident mental attitude. She locates it in your bodily affect too, suggesting that you keep an open, loose stance, that you “release the question mark from your face,” and that deliver your words “like it’s the dopest shit anyone has ever said.” Her philosophy, shared by all the really good hip-hop artists I’ve met, is that if you are in the right frame of mind, feeling centered and connected and confident, then the music will just flow out of you and be dope because it will reflect how you feel in the moment.

I can tell you from my own experience that if you’re not in that centered flow state, you can still come up with stuff that’s clever, that’s well-crafted, that’s impressive. But it ultimately won’t grab people, because they’ll be feeling the same anxiety you were feeling while you made it. I’m at a place with my technical understanding of music where I know everything I’ll ever need to know about theory, technology, styles and genres and all of that. But the internal side, the emotional side, continues to be a major growth area for me. And I see confidence problems as epidemic among musicians, especially white musicians. I’m aware of the cognitive dissonance involved in a privileged white person like me listening to music that was designed to help non-privileged non-white people cope with being oppressed by the likes of me. To the extent that I can help get artists like Roman and Brandon into classrooms, I’m hoping that I can give back to the culture as much as I’m taking from it.