Introduction
"Rap is supposed to be about keeping it real and not relinquishing your roots in the community. Without that, it's just posturing." Chuck D
"Basically, I make music that represents me. Who I am. I'm not gonna calculate my music to entertain the masses. I gotta keep it real for me." Method Man
From the birth of hip hop in the Bronx, NY, circa 1970 up to the present day, the tenet of "keeping it real," or staying true to one's self in all aspects of life, remains a defining standard and tradition within hip hop—a culture based on the elements of MCing (rapping), b-boying or b-girling (breakdancing), graffiti, DJing, and knowledge. Scholar Imani Perry echoes the sentiment of rappers Chuck D and Method Man when she explains that "the Real is the location where an individual remains committed to his or her community, professes that allegiance, and remains honestly and organically rooted in his or her position in the world" (2004, 88). What does it mean when we take a genre that is rooted in "keeping it real" and teach it in a place where it does not naturally occur? That is, in a space of higher education that promotes formalized learning and is largely structured by systems that many believe oppress those within this hip hop culture, and/or use them as a way to promote their own institutional messages of legitimacy, diversity, and inclusivity? This issue is all the more pressing given the current rise in hip hop curricula in universities, many designed, taught, and consumed by white, upper-middle class individuals, including myself.
While I do not claim to have a singular answer to these complex concerns, and I acknowledge that hip hop is a historically Black American art form that originated from socioeconomic turmoil and has since spread to become a global and inclusive phenomenon, I would like to offer some reflections on my experiences and think through how and why I aim to locate the "real" in my hip hop classrooms across Worcester, MA. In particular, I will draw upon a related inter-collegial hip hop interview web series I designed in Spring 2021 at the College of the Holy Cross (HC) and Clark University (CU). In these interviews, I utilized community-based learning (CBL) experiences that centered student-artist connections through ethnographic methods, including interviewing. In exploring how we can attempt to "keep it real" in our hip hop classrooms, I hope to encourage us all to think more broadly about how music academics can ethically engage in projects that lift up our communities, especially those that are traditionally marginalized.
Ethical Reflections on Teaching Hip Hop as a White American Academic
I fully recognize that hip hop is historically Black American music, and that I enter this field as a white woman with inherent privilege. "My whiteness is an issue," as scholar Mark Katz similarly shares on his experiences within hip hop spaces. "Treating race as a non-issue is a privilege only accorded to those whose skin color does not mark them for different—and often disrespectful, unfair, and violent—treatment" (2020, 21). While there are indeed many ethical concerns involved in teaching hip hop as a white American academic, there are also great opportunities for those of us in these social positions to leverage our privilege to support our local hip hop communities. For those of us teaching hip hop at predominately white institutions (PWI), there is great opportunity in cross-race education, including "participants becoming more aware of their own cultures, learning about the other's culture, and using cultural knowledge to better communicate and understand each other" (Barker 2007). Teaching a new and antiracist hip hop curriculum to primarily white, upper-middle class students as well as black students at PWIs, for example, allows me to engage students, and myself, in personal reflection of our social identities and how they impact our role within hip hop (and society writ large). As I tell my students on day one: "I don't look hip hop—let's talk about this."
One way that I approach this issue is by telling my students that I've chosen to focus on this global phenomenon not only because I enjoy the music, but also because it allows me to realize my full potential as a scholar, educator, and, most importantly, contributing member of society. As an outgoing person, I enjoy meeting with and interviewing artists as well as facilitating conversation around a shared love for hip hop among diverse members of the community. As a social activist, I am grateful for the opportunity to teach a living art form that is, by nature, socially conscious. As a scholar, I am best suited to conduct work focused on ethnography and critical reception theory—the two most important methodologies for my work in hip hop pedagogy. While I explain to my students that I continue to reflect on my role as a scholar and educator of hip hop culture, I'm beginning to gain confidence in my "version of the tradition." This is because it is "grounded in ongoing experience," whether that entails conversing with pioneers or learning to scratch with local DJs. I feel similarly to ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen when she explains her experience teaching and performing Middle Eastern music: "I am an outsider, but I am also in a sense a culture bearer" (2004, 183).
White scholars can leverage their privilege by finding ways to collaborate and uplift the communities within which they work and live through service-learning projects. Robert Sigmon suggests that there are four types of service learning: one where there is no connection between service and learning, two where preference is given to one or the other, and one where there is a clear connection between both (1997; Jenkins 2020). Community-based learning (CBL) is a particular kind of service learning where the students learn while being equal partners with the members of the community. Holy Cross's Donelan Center for Community-Based Learning maintains that CBL classes offer students the ability to "connect academic learning with civic engagement ...that meet community identified needs." Hip hop ethnography projects can be one form of CBL, as I learned first-hand in Spring 2021.
The Project
Worcester, a city in central Massachusetts, would not have been a place that I would have imagined could boast of its hip hop charm when I returned to the city in 2019, after nearly a decade's absence. However, it is now one of the most vibrant and exciting scenes I know. In designing a new hip hop curriculum for the 2020–2021 academic year at HC and CU, I prioritized including voices of hip hop practitioners in the classroom and encouraging students to immerse themselves in the culture. Although the pandemic posed significant challenges to my community-based learning (CBL) approach, I adapted by having students—within the limits of pandemic restrictions—interview members of the local hip hop scene and produce a web series aimed at benefiting the broader community. While interviewing was the central focus of our CBL project, students also engaged with other core ethnomusicological practices, such as participant-observation, learning to sing, play, and dance, and documenting musical traditions (Rice 2004), preparing them for an ethnomusicological adventure of a lifetime.
This project began when I applied for funding from HC and CU (Scholarship in Action Seed Grant - Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Marshall Memorial Fund Grant at HC and Higgins School of the Humanities Grant at CU). From there, I applied for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval with my students. While projects such as this are often easily granted IRB approval, it is important to apply for approval to ensure that you are following the necessary research protocols.
After equitable pay and ethical concerns were addressed, I divided students into small groups. Based on their interests, I assigned them artists to research and subsequently interview. Interviewing indeed can create a system of imbalance due to the insider/outsider dynamic between the interviewer and the interviewee, as well as the issues that arise as ethnomusicologists transmit musical traditions they become intimately involved with over the course of research in their fields (Shelemay 1996). However, in both discussing these issues and also interviewing with the goal of presenting traditions transmitted solely through the words of the artists, we were able to help lessen the imbalance, strengthening the meaning of our CBL experience. The student work culminated in the production of 17 videos: 14 episodes produced by students in my "Hip Hop & the Community"' class at HC under the moniker "Live with the Woo Crew," and 3 from my students in "Hip Hop & Social Identity" at CU using the name "Aux Talks." At HC, where we had two semesters to prepare for our interviews (unlike at CU where we had only one semester), students expanded out their civic engagement by leading various class committees dedicated to marketing, managing our social media page on Instagram, developing related public school curriculum, creating the opening music video and commercial break, and investigating ethical concerns related to our project. The commercial break featured local politician Daniel Donahue, who solicited donations for a local women's shelter, Abby's House.
In a Worcester fractured by racial injustice, our project aimed to build community and hope. By bringing both scholarly and public awareness to the voices of local artists, many of whom are Black, we aimed to contribute to a culture where Black lives matter. The voices of local hip hop practitioners need to "intentionally be shared and celebrated in the larger community spaces of Worcester," as b-boy Taylor Travassos-Lomba rightly explained, "outside of the hip hop community itself" (Aux Talks 2021). This is because hip hop artists in Worcester are often marginalized by the cultural narratives of the city. Only recently has the city started to prioritize Black culture in general, largely through initiatives jumpstarted by former Cultural Deputy Ché Anderson. "It's important for people within Worcester to hear the stories of the hip-hop artists," HC student Randy Johnson reiterated, "people can learn from it—I know I have" (Onwuamaegbu 2021).
Ethnography in the "Realness" Toolkit
Ethnography CBL projects in hip hop classrooms can, in general, bring students into contact with the "real" through 1) their connection to local artists, 2) their evaluations of their own identity as residents of the communities of artists they interview, and 3) many times, their experience of their instructor. I saw all three of these aspects play out in my classes. As one CU student noted in a response essay, "[while] realness [was] great to talk about all semester as a topic of hip hop, nothing compared to the first hand understanding I got from these interviews." Whether learning about how rap serves as a vehicle for self-expression and self-love with Jafet Muzic through discussion of his new album The Art of Embracing Damage (2021), discussing the impact of hip hop on youth communities in Worcester with Ché Anderson and Angel "DOS" Geronimo, discovering the creative energy behind forming a hip hop collective with Danny Fantom, or discussing with Paul Willis how hip hop can and should be defined as "fine art," students identified a deeper understanding of the culture through the interviewing process. This is indeed quite different from re-narrating accounts during lectures from my ethnographic research (Ross 2016), during which I would inevitably speak on behalf of the artists with whom I worked.
In addition to the benefits of students experiencing the "real" from practitioners, the community-building elements of hip hop ethnography encourage steps towards positive social change. My inter-collegial series, for example, opened up avenues for discussing the larger issues of social inequality experienced by members within the hip hop community. While early on, my students encountered hip hop as a vehicle for social change and as a lens into the larger issues of systemic racism that plague American society today, our web series helped to bring related issues to a personal level. Instead of reading Atlanta trap rapper Gucci Mane's autobiography, in which he describes his experiences growing up in poverty and how this shaped his career path in music, for example, they heard similar but more local narratives from Worcester b-boy Alex "Backspace" Diaz. This type of exposure to the "real" is all the more important given that students at PWIs are oftentimes unaware of social inequality issues that individuals from marginalized communities experience. On the other hand, some students in my classes who identify as BIPOC said that it was especially beneficial for them to have a platform to express their opinions and thoughts and get the input of individuals who also identify as BIPOC, many of whom have experience with the issues being discussed. Hip hop ethnography can serve as a stepping stone towards greater understanding and acknowledgment of, and response to, such social inequalities.
Student-artist connections made through hip hop CBL projects can also bring students in contact with the "real" as they reflect on their roles as residents of the community in which they are immersed. In other words, students are asked to think critically about their position as students and residents of their community, which is all the more important because their "home" is often bounded by campus walls. This is a particularly fascinating topic for both of my classes; at HC, students taking my hip hop class are part of the first-year "Self Cluster," and at CU, our hip hop journey is shaped through the lens of social identity. We start off the semester reflecting on our own role within hip hop on a broad scale and later transition to a more topical investigation of our position within our local community and its hip hop scene. One of the most exciting revelations students had at the end of term was their sense of belonging to Worcester. For some, this engagement would mean actively contributing to the scene. Rappers and HC student interviewees Randy Johnson and Jon Abrams, for example, are currently recording hip hop tracks together and hope to perform their new music alongside artists in the community. This CBL experience inspired Johnson to pursue a career as a musician and to increase involvement in the Worcester Hip Hop Congress—a nonprofit I founded and serve as the Executive Director (Onwuamaegbu 2021). Edyth Rojas from CU is now working with Jafet Muzic as a peer reviewer and future musical collaborator. Students who worked on the public-school subcommittee are hoping to apply for CBL funding to continue their education series on a larger scale. Others took on more academic roles to help the local community, including Martell Audate from HC, who served as a 2021 summer intern for the "Living-Local" Worcester Hip Hop Archive and later joined the Congress' Board as Secretary. Anouk Donaldson-Gaul from CU is currently serving as an Events Intern for the Congress as well. Other students engaged the local hip hop community more as fans or advocates, attending performances and sharing information about the contributions of artists on their social media platforms.
Hip hop CBL can also bring students into contact with the "real" through their experience of the instructor. As an ethnographer and hip hop scholar, I share valuable information with my students about the field itself from both an academic and personal perspective. I enjoy mentoring undergraduates through the ins and outs of conducting interviews, from drafting introductory emails and applying for IRB approval to designing questions and learning how to be good listeners and flexible interviewers. It is also exciting for me to teach undergraduates about the historical notions of music "scenes" through various texts and case studies (Bennett and Peterson 2004), as well as engage them in discussion surrounding what constitutes a popular music scene in 2021. These discussions flow nicely into how we should approach the Worcester hip hop scene in the design of our web series.
While music CBL projects are indeed challenging in that they require ample time from the faculty member to forge meaningful bonds with members in the community (Peebles 2017), I was fortunate to plug into the local hip hop scene and community in general largely through introductions made by my friends and community partners, Ché Anderson and Daniel Donahue. I continue to cherish and grow these connections through my involvement with the Congress.
While I would like to remove the scare quotes around the "real" in the hip hop classroom at this point in the essay—it remains. Finding the "real" in these spaces is complicated by issues, such as white scholars teaching an historically Black American art form, the largely informally taught art form entering into the academy for a variety of reasons, and because the "real" is perhaps an elusive and/or evolving concept. However, there is much to be gained by aiming to find the "real"—self-reflection, self-growth, community growth, cross-race mentoring, and the potential to uplift the communities with whom we work, especially those that are traditionally marginalized. While hip hop ethnography cannot serve as a cure-all to the inherent bias of hip hop learning environments at the undergraduate level, nor will it bring us to the "ultimate truth" of hip hop culture to students, this method of teaching is one I have come to cherish and see the benefits from first hand.
Keeping it Real
While there are indeed challenges when it comes to implementing CBL projects while also teaching students about music history, helping them to develop the skills to think critically, write and speak clearly, read closely, evaluate and present evidence, and build digital literacy, I have found that the benefits outweigh the difficulties. At the end of the day, isn't "keeping it real" something we should aspire to as humans anyway? This reminds me of a conversation my CU students and I shared with rapper Jafet Muzic. When asked if he would consider himself a "conscious rapper," he stated without hesitation, "I would consider myself a conscious human!" Whether teaching on hip hop or medieval music, I would encourage all music academics to think about the ways they can facilitate learning environments in their classrooms that "keep it real." That is, ones that offer students a real view of you, as their instructor, and of the art forms you teach. I leave you with rap legend Tupac Shakur's words from his 1998 "Changes": "It takes skill to be real."
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