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2 Tha Beat Y’all When Hip Hop Pedagogy Goes BOOM! BY KATIE CERCONE Left to right: 1 BoomBoxBoy, New York City, 2012, photo courtesy of Melanie Mosier (pictured), 2 BoomBoxBoy, New York City, 2013, photo credit: Vito Fun, 3 BoomBoxBoy, New York City, 2013, photo credit: Brandon Stanton, 4 BoomBoxBoy, New York City, 2012, photo credit: Pascale M. Duthel. BoomBoxBoy and I were on the 2 train headed back from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Over the course of the evening’s program Higher Learning: Using Hip Hop to Transform Schools and Communities 1 (moderated by Hip Hop Scholar in residence Martha Diaz) I had wrenched out my wrist taking copious notes. BoomBoxBoy had lugged in his box midway through the evening wearing a zazzle brite black and magenta sweater and slept through a good third of the dialogue. When I asked him to talk about his BoomBoxBoy project for my Hip Hop Pedagogy article on the way home he said chuckling, “Hip hop pet a dawggy?” I’m not sure if he knew what I actually said or what pedagogy meant 2 exactly or not, or if that even matters. His rhetorical manipulation of my words - slyly signifying on my white privilege as he, a black man, *cutely* dismissed my intellectual jargoneering – well, that’s hip hop. As the poet Audre Lorde said, you don’t dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools. Hip Hop is an African Diasporic artistry rooted partially in the musical lineages of the transatlantic slave trade, where slave songs talked about killing the master in coded language and used the drum beat to organize massive rebellions. During slavery reading could get you whipped and killed 3 . Numerous scholars have talked about how dance and the expressive use of the voice are a critique of the very idea of ownership. Today, we see and feel the widespread ramifications of our founding father’s strategic xenophobia in ways covert and unequivocal. We see the ultimate worship of the black male, or what many have termed ‘black male posturing,’ in Hip Hop and professional sports at the same time we see systematic societal neglect for the livelihood of black and latino youth en mass. As BoomBoxBoy (real name Prince Harvey) and his performative pet-a-dawggy can attest, Hip Hop as we progressive folk want to know it is alive and well. I’m here to extrapolate on the REVOLT BoomBoxBoy project as well as report just a few of the reasons Hip Hop is still meaningful, radical, and relevant in the New York City community and throughout the globe. For one, hip hop is boosting literacy rates across the country. According to Martha Diaz, who founded the Hip-Hop Education Center at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, there is over 300 hip hop education courses and after school programs in the United States.Under the direction of Diaz, the Hip-Hop Education Center is developing a Teaching Certificate in collaboration with the New York University's Metro Center and Teachers College, Institute for Urban and Minority Education. They also have a Hip Hop Education guidebook you can download directly from their site. Afrika Bambaataa recently became the current Hip Hop Scholar in Residence at Cornel University. Jorge "PopMaster Fabel" Pabon, one of the earliest b-boys (“breakdancer” is not actually the correct terms says Pabon 4 ) teaches a cipher-style hip hop dance class and a hip hop history course at NYU. Today, Hip Hop is being disseminated in a manner which creates a generative space and leads youth toward the embrace of emancipatory knowledge. Although the formulaic raunch of commercial rap may reign supreme in the public eye, there remains the fact that throughout the world thousands of individuals are working collectively to go beyond beats and rhymes and expose the exponential social-emotional uplift that hip hop does. Scholars such as Dr. Ernest Morrell are highlighting the need for culturally appropriate curricula in the schools and articulating how hip hop can revolutionize education in America. As he addressed during the Schomburg panel, a key issue precipitating the 50% high school drop out rate for black males in this country is the fact that our schools still run on a Eurocentric model developed during the industrial revolution. Harkening back to the days when the education of slaves was made illegal in the United States, today black male youth have “wounded academic selves.” Bringing hip hop into schools is providing a space in the classroom setting in which they feel successful and motivated. Maintains Morrell, black male youth in particular are “logically disinvested from their institutions – it’s not pathological. The school system is abusive to young black males.” He sites the rhetorical power of language in hip hop and hip hop praxis - namely how hip hop has been at the forefront of every youth social justice movement globally for over 30 years - as living proof of how 4 decades after DJ Kool Herc inaugurated the first wave of hip hop the culture is still SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER. Let’s not forget that beyond the culturally circumscribed Eurocentric model is the ancient African Diasporic wisdom from which hip hop sprung - Gulla abusive poems, Yoruba song contests, African American language rituals such as the dozens 5 , toasting, boasting and bragging. In societies of West Africa, a social outcast and pariah known as the “griot” is the cultural praise singer and oral historian. Explains Greg Tate, within the “wisdom of African cosmologies, these messengers are guaranteed freedom of speech in exchange for a marginality that extends to the grave.” 6 Fast forward to the supposedly caste-free democratic republic we call America, what will it take to upend the simultaneous worship and denigration of the rapper-contemporary-griot? Another Schomburg panelist and Hip Hop Educator, Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, explained how hip hop is the core expression of black and latino males, “it is their fundamental language.” She is responsible for beyondthebricksproject.com, a grassroots community engagement media initiative promoting community based solutions to increase educational and social outcomes for school age black males. Another organization, called the Posse Foundation, has adopted the hip hop ethos of the “crew” aka “posse” to send promising high school students in groups of ten to college. Providing full scholarships to a 4-year school the Posse Foundation places teens from diverse backgrounds in supportive, multicultural peers groups. The organization’s founder Dr. Deborah Bial was recently awarded a MacArthur genius grant. <strong>Magazine</strong> Number 4, 2013 40
Another key player in Hip Hop praxis, Jen Johnson, founded the Hip Hop Debate Institute at the Institute for Minority Education at Columbia Teacher’s College. Based on her contentions that the alienating white male-centric nature of schools has largely shaped the debate community, Johnson founded the Hip Hop Debate Institute to create a platform for students from diverse backgrounds to embrace debate as an empowering activity and political toolkit. Johnson explained how the majority of men and women in congress have a debate background, which means that in America “debate is a pipeline to power” that black and latino youth may not always be granted easy access to within the traditional school setting. Encouraging her students to navigate multiple ways of speaking and being, scholars at the Hip Hop Debate Institute become proactive and multilingual performative pedagogues. As we see scores of educators like Diaz, Morrell, Sealey-Ruiz and Johnson aggressively adopting hip hop to teach an array of subjects including math, science, art, debate, and even healthy eating habits (Hip Hop H.E.A.L.S.), 7 (http:// www.hiphopheals.com/#home) is there a danger of the genre becoming ‘pimped’ by yet another foreign entity? As one Schomburg audience member pointed out, the nature of hip hop is that everyone participates. This means that for hip hop educators, letting the students teach them about the authenticity of the culture they participate in is crucial. And what about the rappers? And the market? And the pressure to conform to the ghettocentric models that sell records? As Darlene Vinicky contends, “a mass-produced culture of consumption and violence only speaks for and to a capitalist agenda.” 8 Concerning mainstream rap, theorist Murray Forman has argued that “the ghetto” is now the “symbolic center that anchors the narrative image portrayed.” With a “gangsta ethos saturating much of its texts,” the current ghettocentricity of hip hop and black culture in general “has continually threatened to override other possible images of lived cultural space among the hip hop generation.” 9 Interestingly enough, as the thorough research comprising his case study concludes, rap’s rogue shift toward gangsta chic coincides with a period of rapid commercial growth from 1987-88. Which is not to say that all gangsta rap is bad, or mere minstrelsy. As Forman contends, the practice of identifying Hip Hop’s locus as the ghetto - as real, imaginary, symbolic and mythic as this space may be in music - also invigorates a powerful global counter-discourse or what Nancy Fraser terms a “‘subaltern counter-public.” 10 Critics such as Davarian L. Baldwin have likewise articulated how the rise of gangsta rap in the West Coast single-handedly dismantled New York City’s monopoly on hip hop and re-opened a discourse that had become increasingly shaped by the middle-class-oriented “politically correct disciplining of black bodies.” According to Baldwin, gangsta rap broke the spell of orthodox Black Nationalism which “obscures the daily battles poor black folk have to wage in contemporary America.” 11 If Hip Hop is at the heart about politicizing youth toward a critique of state and corporate hegemony in an unorthodox manner, it’s important that we see past false dichotomies segmenting “conscious” and “unconscious” lyrics and rappers. Clearly, rappers of all stripes manifest willful spaces of praxis. What will it take to move rap’s positive content from margin to center? In Tanzania, East Africa, for instance, where swearing is considered unacceptable in public, leaders of the local hip hop scene, many youth themselves, act as gatekeepers of rap’s lyrics. Rap songs must be about important social issues and avoid the topics of drugs and sex 12 . The Tanzanian system recalls the recent vilification of southern rapper Rick Ross whose rhyme: "Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it / I took her home and I enjoyed dat, she ain’t even know it.” (Rocko, U.O.E.N.O.) clearly brags about date rape. In the last few days of women’s history month, Ross became the target of a media firestorm that almost sunk his entire career and caused Reebok to pull the plug on his lucrative endorsement contract (nobody bothered to mention how Ross also says “I’d die for deez Reeboks, U.O.E.N.O.” – making him a rapist and a pawn of corporate America). Although Ross may not be any more explicit than the majority of crunk/ trap/gangsta rappers out there, his slip indicates an increased sense of dialogue around artist accountability in rap made possible largely through social media. As Jamilah Lemieux writes in Ebony, Ross’s ratchet rhyme presented “an important teachable moment for young men, boys and even some full-grown adults who don’t understand consent.” 13 Interestingly, periods of enhanced attention paid to issues of racial equality and the successful building of multiracial alliances within American history often coincide with economic depression such as the increased sensitivity amongst whites for racial issues in the massive hunger marches that occurred following the great depression in 1930. 14 In the wake of the recent market collapse, scores of young people who feel that they are being ‘skipped over’ by the job market are looking to rappers as inspirational figures. As Jay Z says it, “[hip hop] brought the suburbs to the hood.” 15 When I think of racial justice oriented entities such as the Black Panthers more than leather jackets and raised fists comes to mind. What comes to mind immediately rather is the $200 I get in credit each month I can spend on food because I make less money than it costs to breath here in New York City. The Food Stamp program was created by the American government when they noticed that the Black Panthers were gaining an inordinate amount of attention and support simply by offering free breakfast to inner city children. In “What is the Current Direction of Hip- Hop?” 16 a webisode hosted by Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, hip hop academic Dr. Tricia Rose alongside emcee Jasiri x and Pharoahe Monch discuss hip hop’s radical future potential. Says Jasiri X, “We’re at the best of times and the worst of times. On one hand you have a hip hop industry that has been completely corporatized and pushing some of the most soulless pop music that we’ve ever heard and on the other hand you have technology that’s allowed artists like myself to come with a grassroots perspective, to connect directly to their audience and get a positive message out.” For many, technology seems to epitomize what is both most wrong and most righteous with regard to today’s rap. While folks like Darlene Vinicky are pinpointing technology (the internet, iPods and transnational corporations to be exact) as the reason hip hop has shifted from a collective, physical and participatory event into a spectacular and problematic space that ultimately “lulls us into complacency and isolation,” 17 the truth is, hip hop was born of technology. Without repurposed electronics and the creative appropriation of prerecorded albums and sounds, there would be no hip hop. When hip hop went global, it was largely due to the internet and MTV. Personally, I like to situate the internet as a collective type of isolation, a collective postconscious or super-conscious if you will. And in the defense of the internet, I’d say that the rapid dissemination of all dis supafly bangin sh*t we call hip hop does lead to the formation of real allegiances and coalitions. It might also be the case that while American rap is lost in some gilded cage of a pimp-hoe minefield the rest of the world has picked up where the real hip hop left off. Says Jasiri X, “Overseas a lot of times the culture of hip hop is more respected…and even the revolutionary aspects of hip hop. You have hip hop artists really responsible for creating the soundtrack that set off the Arab Spring and some other movements around the world.” According to Bocafloja, an artist largely responsible for politicizing rap in Mexico, the gestation point of the global hip hop movement was a festival that began in Cuba in the early nineties. Bringing people of color from around the world together to organize around hip hop as a social justice platform, Bocafloja says that it was these festivals, which by their third year were being funded by Fidel Castro, that cemented important cross-cultural allegiances still in existence amongst today’s global raptivist network. 18 There tends to be a sentiment among the academy that the revolution is always happening “over there,” which ignores the myriad grassroots movements here in the States and underestimates exactly how and why the sheer power of the American entertainment industry has carried the torch of hip hop to lands near and far. Either way let’s face it – hip hop is American. It was and will always be about enterprise: black jobs, black owned companies, black commerce. It’s the first black musical genre to broadly take the power back from the whitey parent companies. Which doesn’t excuse the parading of substance abuse as leisure or violence against women as the norm in rap. And by identifying hip hop as a black power thang I also don’t mean to steamroll the multicultural beginnings of hip hop, particularly it’s early Nuyorican, Caribbean and Latino influence and innovators. Bracketed by three males on Lamont Hill’s series is Tricia Rose, who basically wrote the bible of hip hop academia Black Noise. For Rose, the power of hip hop pedagogy, and black music in general, is the oral history which speaks to an African Diasporic experience not recounted in mainstream narratives. Word up, the pimp-ho sh*t is about as transgressive as free pancakes at iHop. As Beth Coleman has hashed out, the pimp is an age-old figure whose black male iconographic celebrity in the United States trajectory descends from the American slave economy: “The male African got wise, ‘What does he do to you when you are with him?’ ‘He makes me have sex and offers gifts like pork chops.’ Being that he was in a precarious situation, being that we were in a negative disposition the African at the time who was a slave, he said, ‘Alright, what you do is ask him for two pork chops’…and the system of manipulation began for survival.” 19 Says Rose regarding the most problematic elements of hip hop’s current commercial mainstream, “I think we have lost a long historical value of black music speaking not just to politics but to the black condition, to what it means to be African American or part of the black diaspora that really has been reduced to the kind of BLING BLING, what I call the hip hop trinity: the gangstapimp-ho trinity has produced the most money ever and it continues to drive youth interests. I think until we unlock that it’s going to be a hard way.” Rose’s point is really important. I for one can attest to the fact that as much as I am seduced by scholarship mythologizing the guerillastyle collective street renaissance that was early
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Page 48: Dominique Claire models Revolt Wear

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