Toni Blackman interview remix – What is hip-hop education?

For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Toni Blackman that I recorded on August 20, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix is made from the eighteen most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of an hour and a quarter worth of audio.

Toni references MC Sha-Rock multiple times in the interview, so I bookend the remix with Sha-Rock’s best-known recording, “That’s The Joint” (1980) by the Funky 4+1. The instrumental groove in “That’s the Joint” is an interpolation of “Rescue Me” by A Taste of Honey (1980), and I use a break from that song under Toni’s speaking rather than the Funky 4+1 so she isn’t fighting with the lyrics.

When Toni talks about studying jazz in college, she mentions buying Thelonious Monk on vinyl, so I use his solo recording of “Round Midnight” (1968). This leads into a discussion of how important it is to spread musical knowledge by word of mouth. She tells the story of a young man she works with who thinks that rap always has to be aggressive and in-your-face, so she plays him some Bahamadia, who has a low-key and even-tempered flow. For this section, I use Bahamadia’s song “Uknowhowwedu” (1996). I continue the Monk samples over the Bahamadia track, because they fit together wonderfully.

Toni talks about being mentored by the musician and producer Ezra Green, and all the formative and influential artists he plays for her, including Alice Coltrane. Toni recollects how her mom listened to Alice Coltrane, and she didn’t think much of it at the time, but she hears it differently in this new context. For this segment, I use Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda” (1970). Toni also describes how Ezra Green expanded her horizons by putting a Louis Armstrong sample over a beat, and how rap doesn’t need to sound like Run-DMC. Here I combine the beat from “Sucker MCs” by Run-DMC (1984) with Louis Armstrong’s recording of “Lazy River” (1931).

When Toni discusses the larger relationship between hip-hop and jazz, she references a jazz recording that 90s hip-hop fans will recognize from its being sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, Jack Wilkins’ recording of Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay” (1973). I continue Wilkins’ track while Toni recounts how her love of music made her study radio and want to be a DJ, but that she was turned off by the male domination of the field, and by its low entry-level pay.

Martin Urbach told me in our first interview that he does not believe that hip-hop needs music education (though music ed badly needs hip-hop.) I ask Toni to react to this statement. She disagrees; hip-hop needs the institutions of music education to preserve its history and traditions, since we can’t rely on the commercial rap industry for that. Here I use the instrumental from “History” by Mos Def ft. Talib Kweli (2009), produced by J Dilla, with those great Mary Wells samples.

I ask Toni to give her thoughts about current commercial rap. She brings up the controversy over “WAP” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion (2020). She doesn’t object to the song per se, but she does wish that all the energy that people have expended arguing about it would have been more constructively redirected toward promoting lesser-known and artistically superior female artists. I had considered putting the instrumental to “WAP” in here, but decided that it would be more appropriate to bring in two of the artists who Toni mentions as deserving more attention: “GPS” (2018) by Mumu Fresh, and “Goddess Gang” by Sa-Roc (2020).

For Toni’s discussion of the importance of mental health support for developing artists, I use two of her own songs: “Why Worry” (2019) and ”Invisible Woman” (feat. Rema & MC Yallah) (2018). This is a rich and fascinating aspect of Toni’s approach, which infuses music education with techniques from music therapy (and regular therapy.) I cut a lot out of this segment for length, and because I want to devote a full interview to this topic. But know that I asked Toni to propose an ideal seventh grade general music curriculum, and she had all these great ideas about teaching the kids to be comfortable in their skins using dance training and drama training. She also wants to teach how to manage jealousy and self-criticism, and also to teach the nuts and bolts of the music business. I look forward to diving deeper into those ideas with her.

Finally, I ask Toni what knowledge of hip-hop she would want music educators to be equipped with. She brings up MC Sha-Rock again, so I bring back “That’s the Joint” and “Rescue Me” briefly. Then Toni moves into a discussion of foundational hip-hop history, the Kool Herc and Bambaataa era. For this section I use “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band (1973), which Kool Herc has called “The National Anthem of hip-hop.” I close with another segment of “That’s the Joint.”

These remixes are labor-intensive, especially in aligning all the different tempos together. It would be easy to brute-force all the samples to a single global tempo, but that would make some sound stretched out and others comically sped up. So instead I keep them all at their natural tempo. It’s not difficult to gradually transition from one tempo to another, but whenever I change out a piece of music for a different one with a different tempo, I have to re-align all the speech segments. It’s tricky, but it makes for the most musically satisfying result.

From listening back to these interview segments repeatedly, I’m struck by how (small-c) conservative Toni sounds. She repeatedly stresses the importance of maintaining tradition and honoring the ancestors. Her pedagogy may seem radical by the standards of typical school music programs, but in her actual approach, it’s all about caretaking and nurturing personal growth. She certainly does defy the hypermasculine emcee stereotype. We’re going to be digging deep on all these matters in the next round of interviews and remixing.