Brandon Bennett 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 Brandon Bennett that I recorded on September 22, 2020 in Washington Square Park. The remix is made from the twenty most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of several hours of conversation.

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White people with acoustic instruments covering rap songs

I turned this post into an academic journal article with proper citations–click to read it in Visions of Research in Music Education.

Also see the Adam Neely video!

White people appropriating black music is America’s main contribution to world culture. Black music itself is a big deal, too, but it is dwarfed by the commercial ubiquity of white imitators. It’s easy to dismiss the crass knockoffs, the modern-day minstrels, and the cynical thieves. But what happens when a white person is expressing sincere admiration, with only the purest intentions? What happens when Chris Thile sings “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar, as he did on the February 6, 2016 broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion?

Chris Thile

If you’re unfamiliar with Kendrick’s song, get familiar, it’s one of the most significant musical works of this century so far, and it comes with a devastating video.

This song is a hard one to play and sing, and Chris Thile does it more than capably. He’s a brilliant musician, arguably the best mandolin player in the world, maybe the best one ever. He has spent his entire career transgressing genre boundaries. Based on interviews, he seems like a good person. Who can blame him for being taken by Kendrick’s song? Who can blame him for wanting to learn it, and sing it at home for his son, and then eventually do it on stage?

I have to admire Chris Thile, in a way. He had little to gain by doing “Alright” in front of the Prairie Home Companion audience, and much to lose. I went to a couple of tapings of the show back in the Garrison Keillor era, and while the crowd might have been politically liberal, it was also very old and uniformly white. Thile’s risk paid off, to an extent–you can go online and read positive reactions from people who had never heard “Alright” before, who were impressed by it, and who were even motivated to go listen to the Kendrick Lamar original. So, mission accomplished, right?

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Ch-ch-ch-check out, check out check out my melody

My computer dictionary says that a melody is “a sequence of single notes that is musically satisfying.” There are a lot of people out there who think that rap isn’t music because it lacks melody. My heart broke when I found out that Jerry Garcia was one of these people. If anyone could be trusted to be open-minded, you’d think it would be Jerry, but no.

I’ve always instinctively believed this position to be wrong, and I finally decided to test it empirically. I took some rap acapellas and put them into Melodyne. What I found is that rap vocals use plenty of melody. The pitches rise and fall in specific and patterned ways. The pitches aren’t usually confined to the piano keys, but they are nevertheless real and non-arbitrary. (If you say a rap line with the wrong pitches, it sounds terrible.) Go ahead, look and listen for yourself. Click each image to hear the song section in question. Continue reading

Why do suburban white kids like gangsta rap?

A followup post to White People And Hip-Hop

First, a little on my background. I’m not from the suburbs, I’m from New York City. My experience growing up was an odd blend of the city and the suburbs. I lived in a posh little corner of an otherwise pretty tough neighborhood. I attended a very fancy school, but traveled there by public bus and/or subway through other tough neighborhoods. My social circle included very suburban white kids and very urban nonwhite kids. As a younger kid, I loved hip-hop. As a teenager, I succumbed to rockism, probably due to social pressure from our racist society, and pretended not to like hip-hop anymore. As an adult, I’m more centered and confident, and have resumed loving it. So I think I have some pretty good insight into why white kids in the suburbs like hip-hop, especially of the gangsta variety. It boils down to the fact that the suburbs are lame, and hip-hop is cool.

Hip-hop is cool in general. So why is gangsta rap cooler than Will Smith or Drake? The big thing is that gangsta rap tends to be musically stronger and more creative. It has grittier beats, denser and more ambitious rhymes, more pointed political and social commentary, and darker humor. It’s also dramatically more offensive, but that’s part of the allure. If you’re a teenager wanting to annoy your parents, there’s no better method than to blast the Wu-Tang Clan, especially if your dad is a mountain climber who plays the electric guitar. I myself have been known to climb mountains and play the electric guitar, and the fact that GZA is directing his ire specifically at me makes listening to the Wu a complex experience. But listen I do, because why would I want to deprive myself of the music?

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