I finally fixed some of the uncool things about the look of this blog and I think this is going to be a better fit. I figured I would kick it off by posting a huge essay that I presented at NYU at the end of March that I am very proud of. Please feel free to make comments and let me know your thoughts. You are also welcome to email me at sean.mcpherson@mcnallysmith.edu. Thanks!
How do you teach hip-hop the same way you learned it?
I approached hip-hop studies with a practitioner’s reluctance. I appreciated that when I was learning about hip-hop there was no class money could buy to teach me how to write hip-hop songs, how to book a hip-hop show or how to be a member of the hip-hop community. Being a white man born in rural Massachusetts it was and is easy to get laughed out of nightclubs, studios and jam sessions where I go to learn. I earned respect in some circles that at first doubted me because I worked hard, improved my skills and took contributing to the culture seriously. My fear as hip-hop became part of the academy was that everything that was a potential impediment to me gaining respect within the hip-hop community (white, college educated, upper-class) would be inverted in the hierarchy of who had a seat at the table when it was time to start hiring hip-hop studies instructors. My arrogance permitted me an even greater fear; that the folks at the table would be less deserving of a spot than I: perhaps hip-hop studies programs would be staffed strictly by the rappers dressed as historical characters explaining Hegel and Kant from the video clips I receive by the dozens after the “rapping philosopher” gets a write up in the Chronicle.
I value the informality of my hip-hop education. But, by the time the possibility of teaching in a hip-hop studies program came up I believed in formal education in ways I couldn’t have imagined in high school. My time in the African-American Studies and Cultural Studies departments at the University of Minnesota had given me confidence that oppositional, creative and career-preparatory training was possible in an institute of higher education. On the flipside I believe that I could have been better prepared for a career in the arts if my formal education offered curriculum that considered the career demands of a professional outside of the academy. I feel qualified to be an instructor with academic rigor and professional performance experience who can speak to the requirements of both disciplines. As I have started to teach hip-hop related courses at the high school and college level I am committed to providing training that embraces formal and informal styles of teaching because I don’t think the topic can be taught as well with just one. Hip-hop studies needs to embrace a hybrid of teaching styles from informal and formal settings because this will provide our students with the most opportunities for growth in their career and in their lives.
When I speak about informal and formal teaching practices I am referencing experiences in my own life as well as my reading of Paulo Freire and bell hooks’ work on pedagogy. When I reference informal teaching practices I am referring to the acquisition of knowledge from a source other than a person officially labeled a teacher. The knowledge gained from informal teaching practices can come from trial and error, from informal critiques, the response of a crowd or from advice from an experienced person who does not identify their position as a teacher but still educates. When I speak of formal teaching I am referencing the environment of the classroom and the relationship between a teacher and her students. When I talk about the techniques within the classroom I am also referencing the “banking” style of teaching described by Freire where “the teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects” (73).
Given hip-hop’s relatively recent entrance into the academy it is important to note that this paper is not going to question whether hip-hop should be a part of the academy. Hip-hop is a part of the academy; the question on my mind is how hip-hop studies will function in the academy and how it will relate to the much larger and more influential non-academic hip-hop community. I consider hip-hop to be a part of the academy because one can take classes with hip-hop in the title, one can focus their graduate level research on the topic and because we are inviting hip-hop practitioners to instruct in the academy. Much of the academic coursework offered on hip-hop is on hip-hop criticism and is largely geared towards a liberal arts audience. My work focuses on the education of aspiring hip-hop practitioners. I focus on this because this is the student population of the program I teach in at McNally Smith College of Music. Aspiring practitioners also made up a large percentage of the population that took hip-hop oriented classes in the African-American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota when I attended. When a student population is eager to learn how to participate in a culture it is disrespectful to not consider using techniques for developing participation skills from within the culture. It would also be shortsighted to not take advantage of beneficial features of the academic setting and explore how the two may meet to make the best learning environment.
Informal teaching practices often achieve the best results for aspiring performers because they teach in environments very similar to professional engagements. I was first introduced to this by way of the phrase “learning on the bandstand”. To learn on the bandstand does not indicate that one learns only in performance settings, but rather that one’s learning is attuned and responsive to the needs of a performance setting. This type of training is efficient because it doesn’t willfully ignore the skills that might be most germane to a career in hip-hop such as the ability to rap on beat, interact with a crowd and prepare music that is mixed properly for stage performance. Learning on the bandstand is also a teaching style that prioritizes that which is necessary for a performer today, as opposed to the potentially static demands of the common music conservatory standard jury or recital. A person who has learned on the bandstand will possess not only the fundamental ability to perform his work at a professional level but the accompanying interpersonal skills required to be invited back for further performance opportunities because the environment for his learning was not sanctioned by academic leadership. A young performer who has learned on the bandstand will be comfortable negotiating the length and payment rate for her performance and will have the savvy to make her demands and demeanor appropriate to her level of popularity and experience. A young performer who has only received formal training will be naïve to the professional practices surrounding the performance environment.
However, when preparation is focused strictly on the demands of performances there is the possibility of missing key awareness in historical and cultural issues that could ultimately improve public performance. The academic classroom provides the opportunity and latitude to provide instruction that is not as “bandstand” based as informal teaching techniques. When students enroll in an educational program they are co-signing on an institution’s decisions on how best to teach a given subject. This co-signing permits a program to teach those skills that may not be immediately germane to a performance but are deemed by instructors to be positive skills to possess in the final reckoning of preparedness. This space allows us to teach a rapper African drums, to teach a DJ the skills necessary to write a persuasive essay and to teach an aspiring business manager the history of the Civil Rights movement. This awareness can inform the topics that a hip-hop lyricist will choose to write about, the rhythmic sophistication he might use and the persuasiveness of his writing to his listening audience.
Even with hip-hop’s wide influence on mainstream America there are aesthetics at the core of hip-hop culture that are oppositional and/or foreign to mainstream American culture. Some of those most oppositional to mainstream American culture include a prioritization of the black voice (Rose 2) and a recalibration of the relationship between the individual and the community (Caponi 12). Beyond just paying these aesthetics lip service, a hip-hop practitioner must find ways in their life and career to manifest these positions. Aligning one’s career with a duty to their community might raise eyebrows as a goal for an educational program. It is easy for these topics to be subdued in the presentation of our courses as they may be viewed as too oppositional or lacking career relevance. In informal settings the clarity and honesty with which an experienced professional can share his views on the mandate of an artist in our culture is less mitigated by the duties one may feel to their employer.
The classroom can provide the opportunity to support the practice of these oppositional views with valuable skills learned in our programs that are not directly aimed at hip-hop performance. By aligning some assessments in our programs with generically beneficial skills such as persuasive essay-writing, accounting, Western musical literacy and entrepreneurism our students may have opportunity to take their messages further and in more divergent paths. I take great care to state that I do not believe that teaching these skills is the sole domain of classroom instructors. I do however believe that some of the most universally taught academic skills are useful skills for being a citizen of the world and advancing your agenda.
Although students could be well-served by the period of exploration and curriculum options that a strong hip-hop studies curriculum could provide their education may suffer from academic failures not carrying the gravity of failure that informal education provides. Earlier I mentioned the absence of potential hip-hop camps available to me as I was growing up. I did take a handful of jazz workshops growing up. In these workshops teachers had a responsibility to the campers and the parents to provide a safe and supportive environment for students to learn in. No such controls surrounded the informal education I experienced as an aspiring hip-hop performer. If you were weak you didn’t get to rap again. If your set was bad you got cut off early and they didn’t have you back. These harsh experiences had a much stronger impact on my improvement than the kid-gloves support of educators who are also aiming to please a paying mom in addition to teaching jazz. In a college setting the price tag shoots up compared to a weeklong workshop. But the gravity of failure is still more muted than in the professional world because it is named. An “F” is a grade that many have gotten at some point during their academic career and it may not carry the unique burn of a professional failure. I recognize that a counterpoint to this argument is that an “F” at the college level is a grave failure and one that is taken very seriously. I can only speak to my experience in the classroom where I feel that students are much more concerned with their status in the larger hip-hop community as it relates to performance and collaboration opportunities than they are with the stigma and financial burden of a failed class.
Thankfully the gravest of failure opportunities will be awaiting hip-hop studies students as they work and perform outside of the academic setting. Currently students who receive training inside the classroom will not have the respect in the hip-hop community that learning the same things outside of the academy would provide. This can often manifest itself in a special level of scrutiny reserved for those students that learned their craft inside a college. This is welcome scrutiny and we should aspire to have our students command the respect of the biggest doubters of our mission. If we educate students that graduate to command the respect of their instructors and their fellow students they will not have careers as hip-hop practitioners. The best way to insure against this is to engage with the criticism, learn from it and make it clear that the criticism is welcome and necessary. We will grow from the criticism from those outside of the academy, as it is in our organizations’ best interest to satisfy many more subsets of our community than fit into our halls.
The benefits of different teaching styles can be combined to provide an education that is academically rigorous and is recognizable as demanding and pertinent to professional practice by current practitioners. To provide career preparatory education in our classrooms professional performances need to be integrated into classes. As students progress through their course of study the amount of oversight and support of professional performances from the institution should lessen. These performances should be diverse in the performance environment and purpose of the show. It is during these events that students can also explore the role of music in a community. Students will learn quickly that if they are only broadcasting their view of a hip-hop performance for their own financial gain they will see less success. This will model the need for the performer to be a community member who engages, critiques and responds to community needs and feedback.
The hip-hop studies community needs to work with the larger hip-hop community to define benchmarks for proficiency within the culture. Benchmarks that are determined by the academic community alone will weaken the pertinence of our offerings. These benchmarks also need to be reviewed frequently to honor the rate of change in hip-hop.
It is worth making a comparison with jazz education as hip-hop studies aims to create benchmarks for competency. There are teachable and agreed skills that one can reliably expect a musician possessing a bachelor’s degree in jazz performance to have (New School Curriculum). These include being able to read a lead sheet, perform in a Latin style and improvise over blues changes. Though these three skills hardly represent the entirety of the skill set that a professional jazz musician should possess they definitely represent three skills that most jazz musicians do possess. Currently, there is no analog for hip-hop education. One graduate may have a deep knowledge of communicating about hip-hop lyrics using the language of Western poetic analysis, another may be capable of sampling chunks of music and creating pieces easily recognizable as hip-hop and another may have learned historical context for the societal conditions that hip-hop was born in. We should celebrate that there may be greater diversity in what skills a hip-hop practitioner possesses compared with a jazz performer, but that should not keep us from attempting to list what those skills are. Codifying, advertising and verifying that graduates of our programs walk out with certain measurable skills will be a great help in confirming the utility of our programs.
Jazz education has the advantage of being able to divorce composition from competency. As hip-hop is currently practiced we do not have this luxury. One can be a competent jazz musician without having ever written a bar of jazz music. By and large this is not the case in hip-hop. This mandate for compositional competency requires nuanced benchmarks that require students to create new material for which to be judged. When jazz instructors adjudicate a jazz competition they are evaluating the interpretation and related improvisation of a respected standard such as “How High The Moon” or “All the Things You Are”. A comparable competition in the hip-hop world would involve much more individual composition from each person. There have been unique types of competitions within the hip-hop community for its entire history including improvised rap battles, pre-written lyrics battles, DJ battles, beat oriented battles and more. Competitions that feature specificity but demand individual composition can be modeled from the hip-hop community for the hip-hop classroom. On the musical side many beat battles including one presented by Rhymesayers Radio in 2005 require produces to create a new composition only using one other pre-existing composition (Breakadawn). Such a competition could be brought in to the classroom and would permit scaling based on what pre-existing composition was chosen and the amount of time available to craft a new piece. On the lyrical side many competitions or open mics focus on a single topic or theme and challenge artists to write to a specific topic in a set amount of time. These requirements are also scalable and can provide measurable academic outcomes but originate from informal training.
It is beneficial to analyze academic benchmark measurement techniques from creative endeavors outside of music including creative writing and fine arts. The peer review is a large part of the process inside many colleges that teach these topics. A peer reviewed assignment that permits students to demonstrate creative composition with limits on subject matter, length and style could provide a set of material to judge for progress as a hip-hop performer in a setting that might elicit different and improved results as a student improved her craft. Additionally, by adding peer reviews as a key element to evaluation one is building back in feedback from a student’s peer group which is a key element of informal learning practices easily lost in the classroom as there is often more than a generation of age between professors and their instructors.
There are expectations for behavior, responsibility and composure within the hip-hop community that will not show up in basic benchmark competencies. These include aesthetic sensibilities of honoring marginalized voices, service to the community alongside the confidence and poise needed to succeed in any highly competitive field. It is reasonable to fear that moving hip-hop education into the classroom will create a set of potential practitioners who don’t have the same thick skin and confidence that someone who learned of his own volition would possess. By adding required professional experience with decreasing level of faculty oversight throughout a course of study there will be ample time to judge a student’s character and confidence. It is best in addressing these qualities to make sure that our home departments support assessments and measurements that acknowledge the soft skills, confidence and presence that faculty believe are most helpful for aspiring practitioners. Although it may be a more subjective grading experience there is every reason to make sure that our grading system permits us to adjust marks based on the confidence and composure that we believe are necessary to thrive in hip-hop culture.
I’m writing this paper because I believe that hip-hop studies can make a positive contribution to hip-hop and to the academy. As an instructor and assistant coordinator in McNally Smith College of Music’s hip-hop studies diploma I have fielded first hand many successes and failures for hip-hop education in the academy. As the program started my initial fear was being laughed out of the room when I told fellow hip-hop practitioners that I was teaching in a hip-hop studies program. This fear was confirmed at times when individuals I trusted had negative views of what we were to be teaching and where we were to be teaching it. The program grew from these conversations and we took a lot of the advice about what to instruct, what to add outside of classroom time and our duty to the community. But my greatest fear has changed from a colleague taking issue with the program to instead having a colleague who believes in the program in spirit but is unimpressed with a graduate. This would sting more because it would expose that the plan might look right, the curriculum might be there, but it’s not getting through to students. The remedy is to stay rigorous on standards and expectations for students and to welcome criticism of those standards from the community. The remedy can’t be comforting oneself in thinking that this can’t be taught. If we are committed to crafting programs geared towards educating hip-hop practitioners the ultimate measure of our work is not our syllabi or our awards but the careers and lives of our students.
