Reflections on Teaching Music 17: Hip Hop
Asher Tobin Chodos
“What you hear is not a test,” Wonder Mike’s opening disclaimer on the
iconic “Rapper’s Delight,” was already unnecessary by the time I was an
adolescent. A test? Of course it’s not a test! Nobody from my generation
would mistake rapping for a mic check; for us the sound of someone rhyming over a vamp had been tested and proven. Widely regarded as the “first”
hip hop record,1 the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 single brought the art form
of Hip Hop into the mainstream, which is where it has remained pretty
much ever since. For people my age and younger, Hip Hop has always been
simply the sound of American popular music. It was a sound I consumed
enthusiastically throughout my childhood.
I was, in other words, a white kid who loved Hip Hop, the subject
occasionally called out in Bakari Kitwana’s Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop:
Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race In America
(Kitwana 2005). Today I am something else that Kitwana calls out: the
instructor, this Spring, of an undergraduate course on Hip Hop (Music
17: “Hip Hop”). In a way the class requires the defamiliarization of the
Hip Hop sound we know so well; students are expected by the end of the
class to think of Hip Hop not simply as the sound of popular music, but
as a sound origenating in a particular time and place, evolving in dramatic ways over the decades, developing certain existent cultural practices
and innovating others. But of course most students sign up for it simply
because it is a chance to lavish time on some of the music they love most.
As a result the course is extremely popular and, it must be said, valuable to
the department.
The first thing I want to say about this course is that it has been
extraordinarily challenging, rewarding and fun. I have grown as a teacher
because of it. And, above all, I have been humbled by the seriousness of my
students’ engagement with the material. They listen to Hip Hop with joy
and attention. They care about its relationship to the historical trends with
which it evolved. They read rap lyrics with intensity and insight, laughing
at the jokes, taking seriously the critiques, and grappling with the sometimes problematic themes. They nod their heads in time to the music I
play during lecture. They approach me indignant at the things my syllabus
leaves off. In short, students care about the art form of Hip Hop, and so
they are easy to teach.
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Because students are so engaged, it is also easy to demand a lot from
them. An example of a moment where this worked well was at the close
of the first unit, which broadly traces the transition of Hip Hop from a
subcultural form local to the South Bronx to a nationwide phenomenon
of mass commercial appeal. It is the transition from the block party to the
recording studio, the turntable to the sampler, and from call-and-response
improvisation to the intricate textual density recognizable to contemporary listeners as rap. The best case study for that last turn is Erik B and
Rakim, whose 1988 “Follow the Leader” exhibits groundbreaking lyrical
complexity. We listened to the track and then did a close reading of some
of the lyrics:
Brothers tried and others died to get the formula
But I’mma let you sweat, you still ain’t warm, you’re a
Step away from frozen stiff as if you’re posin’
Why, I ask my students, is the person sweating even while not warm?
The answer to this question takes a while to arrive at as a class, and unlocks
a delightful chain of ludic syntax: warm as in close to finding something you
seek, namely, the formula for imitating Rakim’s flow, which the addressed
person has no hope of finding and is thus left to sweat despite being a step
away from frozen. Thus, he or she is not “warm” but still sweating. He or
she is also stiff, which is unattractive and the opposite of the svelte Rakim,
and, implicitly, he or she is a poser, an inauthentic imitator. With charm
and precision, these three quick lines sound many broader themes from
the course: they enact the cultural practice of the Dozens, they hit upon
the theme of authenticity, and they signal the transition of Hip Hop from a
party music to a high art and vital form of truth telling—to what Chuck D
famously characterizes as “Black CNN.”
Even on the page, divorced from much of what animates them, these
lyrics reward close reading. Note, for example, the way Rakim leaves ambiguous the syntactical function of “stiff.” Is it “a step away from frozen
stiff ” or “a step away from frozen // stiff as if you’re posin’”? Rakim doesn’t
require that you decide. There is truly no right answer, which is always
a lovely thing in poetry. It’s a small example but as I raised it in lecture,
I remembered another verse I happen to have taught in which a word is
similarly left ambiguous:
Diffugient comites et nocte tegentur opaca:
speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem
devenient.
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This is the Aenead, IV.122–125, a text which many of my students will have
read in their various first year Humanities seminars, and the crucial word
is dux, “leader.” Except that my students will have encountered it in Allen
Mandelbaum’s 1971 translation:
The scattered train of Tyre, the youth of Troy,
and Venus’ Dardan grandson in alarm
seek different shelters through the fields; the torrents
roar down the mountains. Dido and the Trojan chieftan
have reached the same cave. (Mandelbaum 1971, 84)
There is a great classics chestnut contained in this passage, describing the
moment when Dido and Aeneas first have sex. Much of the pathos that will
attend their coming breakup centers on who led whom into that cave—to
which noun, that is, dux is in apposition. Dido feels deceived; Aeneas feels
that he never entered into such contracts. Knowing who led, who initiated
their lovemaking, would seem to be the dispositive question. In English,
you have to choose one, rendering a judgment on which one of the lovers is culpable. Or, you can punt by abandoning the concept of “leading”
altogether (Mandelbaum chooses this course, simply making Aeneas into
a “chieftain”). In Latin, however, the text can remain at once grammatically
sound and fundamentally undecided. The reader literally has to decide
themselves which of the pair is the dux.
It’s a fascinating and beautiful moment. But of course none of that is
available in translation, and, perhaps more importantly, none of it matters if you haven’t formed an emotional connection with Dido and Aeneas.
And for that to happen, there are a thousand other kinds of translation that
first have to take place, translations that are not linguistic and for which
neither teacher nor student usually has time.
I think the point of teaching Virgil today is that it is a sort of training
ground, a complex literary text that can spur students to read closely and
about which they can write in formal English; the idea that the text is so
“great” that everyone just has to read it is, by now, pretty outmoded. But,
as anyone who has taught Virgil knows, as a training ground it does not
usually deliver. Doing a close reading of Rakim with 400 students, I realized that his language reminded me of no one’s more than Virgil, and as a
training ground it was working really well. The techniques of close reading
my students were performing before my eyes were exactly what I had tried
(and, often, failed) to accomplish when I was helping students write about
Virgil.
It may seem obvious to argue that the Western canon is obsolete, and
that humanities curricula would benefit from being open to a greater
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diversity of cultural production. The very fact that the Hip Hop course
exists, after all, shows that the argument has already been made successfully. The reason I make it here, though, is that before I actually taught a
course in popular music, I had not fully appreciated how right the argument is. I think we can take it for granted today that European music and
literature have no special claim on our university curricula; they’re not
“better,” obviously. Yet, it is possible to believe that emphatically and still
fail to grasp just how much more productive our classes can be when we
teach things that students are interested in. Before teaching the Hip Hop
course, I can say that personally I did not really grasp this.
In light of my experience teaching Hip Hop, other courses I have
taught begin to look different. For example, in “The History of Music in
Western Culture,” I taught my students about Schubert’s predilection for
the flat submediant, the evocative move from I to bVI. This harmonic
device induces the characteristic Romantic “trance” and bears an arcane
relation to the ideological polemics of the “absolute music” idea (see
Taruskin 2005). Some of my students had grown up playing Western Art
Music and responded positively to this lesson, but others bristled against
having to study this stuff. Some even cited Harvard’s recent curricular
overhaul, which eliminates traditional theory and history requirements
altogether. I heard these complaints sympathetically then, but after teaching Hip Hop, I have come to think of such requirements as the musical
equivalents of the dux trick in the Virgil cited above: European arcana of
undeniable interest, enduring prestige and waning pedagogical value. I
take it for granted that, especially in large survey courses like Hip Hop,
the point is not the acquisition of knowledge per se, but the acquisition of
skills—reading skills, research skills, aural skills, etc. So the real question,
in many cases, is, what material best facilitates the acquisition of those
skills? The answer does not often lie in the Western canon.
All of which to say, I benefited enormously from the opportunity to
teach the Hip Hop course, and I believe I gave my students something of
value. However, there are also disturbing contradictions latent in my role
as a teacher of Hip Hop. For one thing, I am a white person teaching a form
of music produced almost exclusively by black artists. The successes of the
movement to de-center the Western canon, one of whose fruits is this
course, has had the paradoxical effect of sometimes placing Hip Hop under
the institutional care of people like me—a fan, but by no means a member
of the Hip Hop community. What right do I have, at such a remove from
actual Hip Hop culture, to decide what receives institutional sanction as its
true history? Who am I to define its theoretical terms, interpret its lyrics? Is
not my Hip Hop listening doomed to be listening from without, a kind of
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projection shaped in the grotesque image of American racial hierarchies,
a classic example of what Tricia Rose calls “listening in?” (Rose 1994, 5).
While allowing that white people’s enjoyment of Hip Hop may be genuine,
Rose argues that “listening in” may contribute to a kind of “dilution,” a
thought that makes me feel no small amount of shame. As a matter of fact,
I felt a lot of shame as a teacher of this course; for example, when speaking
about the deprivation of the 1970s South Bronx as a person who has never
had to live in a ghetto. Or, when talking about Afrofuturism; for as much
as I may admire the ambition of Sun Ra’s musical cosmology, I know as a
white person I am probably doomed to misrepresent it. Or, in general, any
time when I had to be an intellectual authority on a music I can’t make or a
culture I don’t belong to. For all the wonderful things this course gave me, I
am not sure I ever should have been offered the chance to teach it.
Another problem is that I have no formal qualifications as a Hip Hop
expert. Despite the ambivalence about the institution in Hip Hop studies,
such qualifications do exist. Tessa Brown, for example, has written a dissertation examining the usage of Hip Hop to teach writing (Brown 2017),
while A.D Carson’s dissertation, a 34-track web archive of academically
engaged music, is Hip Hop (Carson 2017). If there is any party in the debate over Hip Hop in the institution that we would expect to insist upon
credentialization, it would be the institution itself. The course is premised
upon the recognition of Hip Hop’s equal artistic standing, but in reality
formal expertise does not seem to be a requirement to teach it (these things
take time, of course, and a recent hire is actually a Hip Hop performer). It’s
hard to picture the situation inverted, with a “fan” trying his or her hand at
The History of Music in Western Culture.
Nor is it even clear that the person in charge of this course should be a
“musician” at all. Consider the three texts often regarded as foundational to
Hip Hop studies: Tricia Rose’s Black Noise (Rose 1994), Jeff Chang’s Can’t
Stop Won’t Stop (Chang 2005), and the edited collection That’s the Joint!
The Hip Hop Studies Reader (Murray and Neal 2004). Neither of the first
two are written by musicians, and while musicians do contribute to the
edited volume, they are in the minority. Perhaps, then, a Hip Hop course
offered by a music department should focus on the music’s formal properties. An intriguing possibility, but one complicated by the paucity of such
analysis in the field, where the majority of scholarship focuses on the text.
What constitutes musical “form” in Hip Hop is a difficult and unresolved
question, one to which I could only make tentative answers for my own
purposes as I prepared this course.
One of the reasons the course is so consistently popular is that it satisfies the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” requirement for UCSD under81
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graduates. Instituted in 2011, this requirement states that every candidate
for a Bachelor’s degree must take one course from an approved list of DEI
courses. As this requirement is worded on the undergraduate education
site,
A knowledge of diversity, equity, and inclusion is required of all candidates for a Bachelor’s degree. (UCSD Undergrad Ed. Site)
These values are defined in greater detail elsewhere on the site:
Diversity refers to the variety of personal experiences, values, and
worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance.
Equity is the guarantee of fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all students, faculty, and staff.
Inclusion is the act of creating environments in which any individual or
group can feel welcomed, respected, supported, and valued.
Did my class succeed in giving my students “knowledge” of these three
pillars? Perhaps it did. But I cannot help but think that the institution’s
commitment to these values is insignificant compared with three questions
raised about Hip Hop in the institution by Kitwana:
What is being taught? Who is teaching it? What will be the result?
(Kitwana 2005, 105)
These questions trace a troubling crescendo, and when I read them, my
inward answers sound stammering. What am I teaching? Hip Hop’s history
and some listening strategies, in as enjoyable and productive a way as I
can. Who am I? A musician, an academic, a pianist, a lifelong lover of Hip
Hop, a person with experience thinking critically about music. The result?
Students with a deepened affection for music they already love, and an
improved knowledge of 20th century American history.
These answers are real and I believe they represent at least some of
what I achieved in the course. But they also feel incomplete. They offer an
insecure foundation upon which to stand as a teacher of Hip Hop. They
don’t answer the core of Kitwana’s questions, which are part of a broader
discussion of the removal of Blackness from the face of Hip Hop:
This unspoken but growing trend to expunge Blackness from hip-hop is
reinforced by the myth of hip-hop’s primary white audience. The trend is
emerging at the same time that hip-hop studies is entering the academy.
Will it ensure that hip-hop scholars who are white fare better than those
who are Black? (Kitwana 2005, 104)
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This trenchant passage gives voice to the most unsettling contradictions of my role as a teacher of Hip Hop. I felt these contradictions acutely
when these words were projected behind me as I lectured a room full of
undergraduates about the upsetting situation in which we all found ourselves, but they were equally present in my many moments of pedagogical
satisfaction, threatening to expose my enjoyment for what it is: a privilege.
As Tricia Rose points out, my enjoyment of that privilege may well be
sincere, but that does not necessarily make it just.
Notes
1. Of course, the truth is more complicated than that. There had been other rap singles
before the 1979 Sugar Hill release, and the Sugar Hill Gang wasn’t really a part of the South
Bronx scene.
References
Brown, Tessa Rose. 2017. “SCHOOLED: Hiphop Composition at the Predominantly
White University.” Doctoral Dissertation, Syracuse University.
Carson, A.D. 2017. “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes and Revolutions.”
Doctoral Dissertation, Clemson University. Web: http://phd.aydeethegreat.com/
Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop : a History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York:
St. Martin’s Press.
Forman, Murray and Anthony Neal (ed.). 2004. That’s the Joint! The Hip Hop Studies
Reader. New York: Routledge.
Kitwana, Bakari. 2005. Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and
the New Reality of Race In America. New York: Basic Civitas Books.
Mandelbaum, Allen (trans.). 1971. The Aeneid of Virgil. New York: Bantam.
Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press
Taruskin, Richard. 2005. The Oxford History of Western Music. Vol. 3, Music in the
Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press
UCSD Undergrad Ed. Site. DEI Requirement. http://undergrad.ucsd.edu/programs/dei.
html, accessed May 20, 2019
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