Making some noise: the academy's hip-hop generation: scholarship on the genre moves beyond a project of legitimization into a more self-critical, challenging realm

Black Issues in Higher Education, April 22, 2004 by Kendra Hamilton

A hip-hop archive at Harvard University? Classes at Berkeley, Stanford, Michigan, Yale and MIT? Panel discussions on Jay-Z and Nas sandwiched between Milton and the Harlem Renaissance at the Modern Language Association conference?

The congressmen's wives who pushed for warning labels on music a generation ago have to be singing "What's Goin' On?" these days. From a scorned and misunderstood subculture, hip-hop has grown into a global mass media phenomenon with its own sound, look, films--and now, apparently, its own scholarship.

The sea change under way in the academy started in 1994 with two historians: Dr. Tricia Rose, now of the University of California-Santa Cruz, and Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, now of New York University. Rose's Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America--along with the brilliant final chapter of Kelley's Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class--roiled the placid waters of the academy's consensus on rap and hip-hop: that they weren't really music, that they weren't worthy of critical study.

A decade later, a new group of scholars is coming of age. And they're poised to make a little noise of their own.

LOVE AND SCHOLARSHIP

So how does one get to be a hip-hop scholar? Well, there's a bit more to it than quoting the stray lyric or writing the occasional essay.

For example, some of the journalists and academics who followed in Rose's and Kelley's footsteps in the 1990s have been criticized for being more into than up on the culture.

"Wangstas" and "bourgie critics" is the colorful phrasing used by the self-proclaimed "thug intellectual" Dr. Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California, writer of books on hip-hop and sports and writer/producer of the film "The Wood."

But the current generation of scholars is definitely a "hip-hop generation": they grew up immersed in the culture.

"I might not have been a hip-hop baby, but I was definitely a hip-hop adolescent," Boyd confesses.

"I was in 10th grade in 1979. So I remember the first time I heard 'Rapper's Delight.' I remember the first time I heard Kurtis Blow, 'The Breaks' and 'Christmas Rappin"; Grandmaster Flash, 'The Message.' It's like when Biggie says, 'I remember Rappin' Duke, da-ha, da-ha.' Well, I remember the Rappin' Duke video," Boyd adds.

Dr. Scott Heath, assistant professor of English at Georgetown University and editor of the forthcoming hip-hop issue of Callaloo, is a decade younger, but he shares those memories.

Heath was only five when "Rapper's Delight" was released. "It was my parents' record, and they still have it. I was home (in North Carolina) recently digging through some old records, and I found a relatively pristine copy," he says.

For Heath, living hip-hop culture meant listening to Doug E. Fresh, Slick Rick and Dana Dane and, with the help of an older cousin, recording live DJ shows off the radio--"back in the days when they'd say, 'All the Leos say, HO!' 'All the folks wearing Jordache say, HO!"'

He and his friends tried to "scratch"; taught themselves to break-dance, or b-boy, as it came to be called; and "sometimes we'd pick up a can of spray paint (to make graffiti art)." They might have been living in North Carolina, but "we were performing hip-hop as we understood it," Heath says.

But living the hip-hop lifestyle is one thing; learning that it can be the focus of a scholarly career is quite another. Dr. Kyra Gaunt, a singer and associate professor in NYU's music department teaching ethnomusicology and performance studies, vividly recalls her journey to that moment.

"When I graduated from high school, in 1979, hip-hop was just beginning, but I wanted to be Chaka Khan and Minnie Riperton, so I wasn't interested in that. 'Rapper's Delight' had just come out the summer before l graduated high school; Go-Go was just starting in D.C.--that was like jungle music to me. Except," she says, "I knew all the lyrics.

"So I would listen to all that stuff in the background while I then went on to study classical music because that's all they offered in school. Then in my graduate work at Michigan, a White professor who had not finished his doctorate yet, while I was working on a double doctorate--played Public Enemy in the class, and I thought to myself; 'If he can do that, then I want to go back and teach about Black music from a Black perspective.'"

She did her master's thesis on the sonic aesthetic practices of Public Enemy and how they related to George Clinton and James Brown, and she's never looked back.

A PIVOTAL MOMENT

So a decade after Black Noise, observers say, a pivotal moment in the history of hip-hop scholarship appears to have arrived.

For much of its history, hip-hop scholarship has been engaged in a legitimizing project, Heath notes. "Is this culture worth our time: our research time, our time in the classroom? That work is important and it's still not complete," he says, "but we also have reached a point where we have an opportunity to get beyond that rudimentary stage."