Over the weekend I went to a hip-hop education panel organized and moderated by my fellow white hip-hop advocate Jamie Ehrenfeld, featuring four of the brightest lights in the field: Jamel Mims aka MC Tingbudong (rapper in English and Mandarin), Dizzy Senze (devastatingly great freestyle rapper), Regan Sommer McCoy (curator of the Mixtape Museum), and Marlon Richardson, aka UnLearn the World (another devastatingly great freestyle rapper). Several other emcees showed up, including one of my main hip-hop peer educators, Roman The Mafioso, pictured below.
After the panel, all the emcees got into a cypher. At first they were rapping over a DJ, while a few NYU kids tried to play along on saxophones and piano. Then the DJ paused and folks tried rapping over just the NYU music students’ instrumental accompaniment. Roman gently trolled the NYU kids: “Keep it steady, keep it steady.” They did better when Steff Reed jumped on the piano and replaced their uncertain jazz with thumping gospel. Listening to this, I felt what I always feel in a cypher: that freestyle rap is the most advanced and sophisticated form of music I have ever heard in my life.
If you want all of my thoughts about the role that hip-hop can and should play in education, you can read them in my dissertation. But briefly: hip-hop should be a core competency for music educators in the US, not just as a content area, but as a value system. Hip-hop artists learn the craft by making original music from the very beginning: writing their own rhymes, producing their own beats, making their own mixes. They use the music to speak their own truths, to portray their lived experience. There can be fictional characters and stories, but they have to be at least somewhat grounded in the emcee’s own life. The music should be communal, social, and geared toward full-body participation. And while the reality portrayed in the songs is often deadly serious, irreverent comedy is a good way to make that reality bearable.
There were some major differences between the emcees onstage and the NYU music education students in the audience: race, socioeconomic status, amount of formal education. There were more subtle differences too. For example, I have yet to meet an NYU student who is willing or able to freestyle rap. It’s not that they lack the musical or verbal ability; the thing they lack is confidence. I asked Dizzy Senze how you find that confidence, and she said, basically, “Just open your mouth and be willing to fail.” NYU students are standing on much more stable ground than she is, but they are less willing to fail.