Oliver Kautny, a professor of music education at the University of Cologne, Germany, and founder of the Cologne Hip Hop Institute, invited me to contribute a chapter to a book that the Institute is planning to publish, an edited volume on hip-hop and music education as an open access book by Transcript Publishing. I’m co-writing my chapter with Toni Blackman, a central figure in my dissertation. Our working title is Building Hip-Hop Educators. Here’s the abstract.
How should university-level music education programs address and include hip-hop? How should they prepare preservice music teachers to engage the music and its culture? And why is it important that they do so? We address these questions using examples from the story of the Popular Music Practicum course at New York University, situated within the larger landscape of music education in the United States.
We begin by defining hip-hop music education as a specialized form of culturally relevant pedagogy. We discuss hip-hop’s potential as a tool both for personal and societal development. Hip-hop artists mainly learn through the creation of original music. We argue that producing beats and writing songs is the most effective method for preservice music teachers to learn the music as well. Learning in this way makes the technical aspects of the music more vivid and meaningful, and more importantly, the creative process also opens up opportunities for personal expression, growth, and transformation.
Hip-hop is both hugely popular and contested in its cultural and political meanings. It is therefore an invaluable focus for larger conversations about culture and identity. Writing and producing rap songs forces music education students to confront issues of identity formation, cultural appropriation, and the politics of race, class and gender. These issues are present in any act of music creation or performance, but hip-hop throws them into unusually stark relief.
As an anti-authoritarian street music, hip-hop fits uncomfortably in formal institutions. It is not enough to determine the most practical approach to teaching hip-hop. Music education programs must do so without doing violence to the music and its meanings, if indeed such a thing is even possible. We argue that in order to prepare hip-hop educators, universities must enact larger changes to the culture of their music education programs, to challenge their white racial frame and general aversion to political controversy. Hip-hop educators must create brave spaces in which to confront harsh and caustic language, depictions of violent and antisocial behavior, and general defiance of authority and convention.
Finally, we address the question of who can teach hip-hop in our current institutions. Music education programs’ admissions standards pose a serious obstacle to any hip-hop culture bearers who might wish to apply. We therefore propose alternative methods for bringing emcees’ and producers’ voices into music education spaces.