In my first official interview with each of my three dissertation research participants, I asked them to answer the question, “What is hip-hop education?” To analyze their responses, I edited their answers down to their most salient moments and remix them by laying them over related music. The next step was to compare the remixed responses to see what resonances and conflicts emerged.
I exported the “acapellas” from each first-round remix and edited them down to what I consider to be their most crucial segments. Then I organized the sequences into a kind of “cypher,” where the three participants virtually pass the mic. I put all this over the instrumental from “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth, not for any special thematic reason, but because I consider it to be an exceptionally powerful and meaningful song.
Note that I did not try to align the interview segments thematically; I just arranged them in the order in which they originally occurred. Here’s a transcript, with a few edits to remove minor verbal stumbles and interjections.
I think hip-hop really is… picking up a mic and saying, you know what, I’ve had a hard life, and this is how I’m going to express it.
My experience has been in spaces where the students are learning technique in order to create.
Music education to me is like salvation, a way of staying alive, a way of finding meaning.
Brandon:
A lot of our young people, a lot of our generation, the first thing they’re going to consider when they think about music is what’s current in hip-hop. They’re not really going to think too much about classical, or house, drum ’n’ bass, techno, reggae, bachata, they’re going to think about what’s going on in hip-hop, and what part of hip-hop culture applies to myself.
Toni:
You can acquire the discipline, the understanding through training, but you acquire self-actualization through creation.
Martin:
To me, the music education part is when you can amalgamate, you can synthesize the consumption of music with the production of music through a critical understanding of it and a critical engagement with it that is deeply personal.
Brandon:
You know, [in] my experience as a teacher, I’ve encountered many young people, until they pick up a mic, until they get on a beat, until they find a lyric that really relates to them, they might live in a bubble, or a space where they think they don’t have a voice, or what they want to say is in a confinement.
Toni:
“Hip-hop is supposed to be aggressive… you’re supposed to get in people’s face!” That’s not true! That’s not factual.
Martin:
Music education is so that you learn how to assert your voice in the world. Like, that’s what songwriters do.
Brandon:
When we think about hip-hop, it’s exactly that, saying how you feel, without feeling like those limitations are there.
Toni:
When [my mentor Ezra Greer] sampled Louis Armstrong, and then put it over this beat, I was in a space of, like, “Oh, I didn’t know we could do that.” He was like, “You can do whatever you want.”
Martin:
When you afford [students] the possibility to practice asserting who they are, that’s music education.
Brandon:
Everybody can feel that experience of, “Hey, it’s your turn to pick up the mic, it’s your turn to tell me how you feel, it’s your turn to tell me where your head is at.”
Toni:
I say, get your mental health together, and be centered and grounded so that you have resilience when things don’t go your way, and so that you can manage failure.
Martin:
[According to] what Freire would say, we learn by the process of being, together.
Brandon:
I think the biggest part about being an emcee comes from your confidence. You have to know what you’re saying has meaning to you because if you, as a creator, if you seek value in other people’s confirmation, then you will never be as good as you want to be.
Toni:
We have to teach the community, to show the community, that this is valuable, that this is about craft, that this is tied to traditions that came before us.
Martin:
I can focus on connecting with [students], and I can focus on, like, “Hey, sit up a little straighter, ’cause you’re going to hurt yourself,” or, like, “I see you’re not having the greatest day, let’s talk about it.”
Brandon:
As an emcee, master of ceremonies, you should be able to know that what you’re saying has meaning. When you’re confident in what you have to say, then people will resonate with what you’re saying. You’re not looking for people to confirm whether what you’re saying is cool or hip or great. If you’re rapping about, “I went downtown, I lost my shoe, and I have a hard life, maybe you do too,” a person listening is going to say, “I do have a hard life, and I did also lose my shoe, so I relate to what you’re saying!” It doesn’t have to be for everybody, but whoever it’s for, is going to pick up on that, you know what I’m saying?
Toni:
History is not going to be passed on by us sitting on the porch or singing songs by the campfire. Nobody does that anymore.
Martin:
Hip-hop is a black music (not only black!)… a black music of resistance and of transformation.
Brandon:
Sometime in your life, you’re going to get put on the spot for a freestyle, you know. So it becomes a part of your everyday. When we think about the school system, it’s not just, you go to lunch, you go to class, you go home. That becomes a part of the school system: the freestyling, the expressing yourself, you know, the banging on the table.
Toni:
I think music education [for hip-hop] is not only valuable, but it’s necessary. And, I think the challenge is, who’s writing the book? Who’s writing the history, is the challenge. And are the people creating it giving voice?
Martin:
Paying homage to the artists from before, to the emcees, it’s been about connecting, it’s been about keeping it real, but also about partying, disk jockeying… All the things about hip-hop are the things that I value about jazz: the improvisation, the making something out of nothing, the connecting.
Brandon:
In order to bring something into an academic realm, it has to have structure. Of course, music has a foundation, music as a whole has a foundation, you need to know rhythm, you need to know your ones and twos, how to stay on beat, how to write a bar, how to put your story into words. So, you know, writing prompts, and rhythm exercises. But beyond that, the foundation, hip-hop has no structure. So it’s gonna be hard to tame a beast that can’t be tamed.
Toni:
There are hip-hop heads who complain about the institutionalization of it, but they themselves are not institutionalizing it, they themselves are not figuring out ways to preserve it. So are we supposed to just let hip-hop die and that’s it?
Martin:
So for me hip-hop music education is teaching kids to do something out of nothing and to learn how to treat music in its entirety of narrative. Yes, hip-hop is music of resistance. Yes, hip-hop can be twerking music and, just, like, joy. Yes, hip-hop can be problematic, because hip-hop is a mirror of the society where hip-hop is being made.
Brandon:
The history is important, yes, the artists are important, yes. But I think the most important part is the technology. As a whole, hip-hop would never have evolved without the evolution of technology… A lot of hit records would never have grown without the idea of a drum machine, never in life.
Toni:
There’s no archives, there’s no collections, there are no books, is that what it’s supposed to be, like, a folk art?… And then look at how folk arts are treated! I mean, come on now.
Martin:
Hip-hop doesn’t need music education. Music education needs hip-hop.
Brandon:
If we’re going to do the history, it has to be done in reverse. Say, this is what you know now; that came from this.
Toni:
As an idealist, I believe that we all have a responsibility to take care of our world. So if you’re gonna exist in it, you exist in it because somebody took care of the world for you to be here. You get to be on this platform because somebody sacrificed in order for you to be safely on that platform without getting lynched, hung, or shot. So, now, what are you going to do to take care of this world?
Martin:
My job is to create non-transactional relationships with kids so that we can learn about the world together.
Brandon:
White America should have more of an appreciation for hip-hop culture… When we talk about hip-hop culture, we have to think about how a lot of the music that comes out of hip-hop is birthed out of a struggle of some sort. A lot of the history of hip-hop comes from systemic oppression, racial issues. White America should understand that these are the depth of the problems where these things are coming from.
Toni:
We all have a responsibility. And people argue back and forth, it’s just music, it’s just entertainment. I think if we look at the crisis we’re in now, that argument doesn’t stand. Everything is real now.
Martin:
If you’re going to ask students to tell you what they think, and to use their voice, you have to let them tell you what they think, and you have to accept, you have to engage with it, whether you like it or not. If you’re going to ask a young person to show you who they are, you can’t tell them, you’re not something I like, and what you are is not accepted here. Even if you don’t like it.
Brandon:
If you experience hardship, you have a space to say, this is what I’m going through, this is what I want you to know about what I’m going through, here’s how I want to portray it.
Toni:
There should be a day where we talk about the human ego and tendencies for envy and jealousy. And so there’s just some shit to me that’s common sense, but it feels woo-woo and outside the box, but really, I don’t think it has to be. All of this stuff, I teach in my workshop, it’s gonna come up, and we’re gonna go in.
Martin:
In my kind of music education, their choice of music that they bring will never be policed and censored. I have to be willing to do the labor of what it means to have an uncensored space. I have to help build the space so that it’s a brave space. If we’re listening to a song that is, like, deeply misogynistic, and a student is, like, “Stop that, that’s hurtful,” we can stop it and I will be there to help open the wound and then heal it back together.
Brandon:
[Hip-hop] is not just a fashionable hat you can wear out, you know, [for] a night on the town… It becomes a part of who you are.
Toni:
“Wow, Toni’s tough, the kids really like you.” I’m not tough! I’m real. And the kids love the realism. They love the firmness. And then they know, “My mom doesn’t come this real.” [Laughs] So there’s an appreciation, because there’s love and there’s sweetness, and they feel the sincerity of me wanting them to have a good life, and to avoid pain. And you can ask me anything you want to say, even if it makes me feel uncomfortable, so you can get from point A to point B and I can see you shine.
A few themes are beginning to emerge here.
Coming to voice
This is a bell hooks term that I learned from Martin. When Brandon describes hip-hop as “I’ve had a hard life, and this is how I’m going to express it,” he’s describing coming to voice. Toni says that in her teaching, students are doing “self-actualization through creation.” Brandon points out that hip-hop is the musical self-identity of his cohort of black Americans. The same is true of many other young people, as well as plenty of not-so-young people. Both Toni and Brandon describe how emceeing both demands and builds confidence and emotional resilience.
Critical engagement with your own culture
A recurring theme of the pushback against hiphop in the music classroom is that the kids are saturated in hip-hop anyway, so why do they need it in school? Toni’s response is that the music is vastly larger and more diverse than the version of it presented by radio and TV. Hip-hop as an art form is to the music on the radio as film is to Hollywood blockbusters, or literature is to the books for sale at the airport. The big sellers can be interesting, but they don’t give you a complete idea of what the medium is capable of. For example, rap does not need to be aggressive or masculinist, and the sample sources can include anything that’s ever been recorded.
Hip-hop can foster critical consciousness as per Freire, but it doesn’t just happen automatically; educators have to help build that consciousness. As Martin says, hip-hop can be problematic, because hip-hop is a mirror of the society in which it gets produced. Young people shouldn’t just passively consume whatever is available to them; they need to be able to understand what they’re hearing, to identify and resist the antisocial aspects, and to repurpose the constructive parts for their own emotional and social needs. The profane and irreverent language of rap is hard to address in a classroom, but it’s essential to doing the critical action pedagogy that my participants are advocating for. If you’re going to talk about the n-word, you might not always be able to maintain a safe space, so you need to create a brave space, to be able to “open and heal the wound” as Martin puts it.
Hip-hop culture emerges from communities beset by systemic oppression and racism. Brandon points out that white people may enjoy listening to rap, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily aware of the people who create the music. All three participants think that you can only teach any kind of music responsibly in a social and political context, especially African-American musics, and most particularly rap. As Toni puts it, this music is not just entertainment; “everything is real now.”
Hip-hop’s role in music education
Martin believes that hip-hop doesn’t need music education, but that music education does need hip-hop. He values hip-hop for the same reasons he values jazz: the improvisation, the making something out of nothing, the social and emotional connecting. Brandon believes that music educators’ job should be to support the musical creativity that’s already active among young people, by providing studio space and production support, instruction in the technical aspects of music, songwriting prompts, and the like. Toni goes further to say that this support also needs to include emotional support, the building up of confidence and authenticity. She models those qualities herself in her teacher persona with unflinching realness and openness, making sure her students know that they can ask her anything and get a genuine answer.
One of my hypotheses in this project as that the values of centering student creativity and liberatory values would benefit the teaching of any kind of music, and that hip-hop education can be a valuable model. The urgency is greatest for hip-hop, since it is so dominant in the musical identity of so many young people. But if music education can accommodate hip-hop creativity, then it will also be able to make space for other non-classical idioms as well.
Music education’s role in hip-hop
Brandon observes that you can teach music fundamentals and provide songwriting exercises, but that there is an essentially anti-authoritarian aspect of hip-hop that “can’t be tamed.” Martin does not believe that young people need to be taught their own music; they just need the support and the motivation to teach it to themselves. Toni does see a necessary role for music education in hip-hop: for historical preservation, for connecting present-day rap to older and larger traditions, and for amplifying voices that aren’t present in the commercial mainstream.
Martin is adamantly opposed to censoring student voices. Toni is reluctant to do this, but she also wants to push back against antisocial and misogynistic language. She thinks that there’s a balance to be struck between outright banning controversial or offensive language and the “anything goes” ethos of pop culture. When students want to use misogynistic language, for example, she asks them if they would speak that way to their grandma or their little sister. She is fine with cursing and does plenty of it herself; she just wants to make sure that it isn’t a crutch, a way to hide unimaginative writing, or a substitute for genuine creative risk-taking.
About the process
As I have conducted my musicological study of hip-hop over the past few years, I have come to see it as a music that is precision-engineered to focus your attention. This has turned out to be critically important to me in a time when paying attention to anything is so difficult. Writing a dissertation is a challenge even under ideal circumstances, and this year has been very far from ideal. I’m writing this in a New York apartment alongside two homeschooling kids and my wife’s law practice, while the pandemic is raging, democracy is crumbling, and the climate is collapsing. I am constantly interrupted, by my family or my intrusive thoughts and anxieties. I can’t escape to a coffee shop or the library. It’s tough.
In this world, I’m very glad to have had the idea to lay all my interview recordings over hip-hop tracks. My data analysis has mostly consisted of playing the mixtape tracks while doing household tasks, walking around my neighborhood, or compulsively scrolling through the news. I can feel my mind gripping the beats like a life preserver. The ritual of laying out tracks and samples in Ableton is a reliable psyche-calmer, and prepping interview remixes that way has been invaluable in getting myself to pay sustained attention to the data amid all the distractions. I keep trying to work on my big Scrivener document, and I can do it sometimes, but engaging with my Ableton sessions is usually more within my psychological reach. I was only able to buckle down and transcribe all this material because I could do it with segments of “They Reminisce Over You” looping continually.
I believe that hip-hop aesthetics are driven in large part by the emotional needs of people living in a noise-polluted environment. That means the literal noise of traffic and construction and airplanes, but also the metaphorical noise of advertising and media saturation, along with the emotional noise of stress and anxiety. A good hip-hop track affords so many different levels of attention, from the most superficial (pleasant rhythmic background noise) to the deepest (the full immersion required for freestyling, dancing, critical listening). There’s no other music that is so adaptive for me in this moment, that affords my participation, via remixing and editing and recombining, and improvising my own sounds on top or in my head.