When hip-hop journalist and former emcee Davey D, a.k.a. David Cook, turned in his undergraduate thesis titled “The Power of Rap” in 1987, he didn’t think he had a problem with sources.
“I handed it in with no footnotes,” he remembers in a phone interview, “and my professor was like, ‘Cool. This is good but there aren’t any footnotes. You need footnotes.’ I mean, I’m talking about something I was a part of, something I knew a lot about, and he was like, ‘Footnotes omething. There’s got to be books about hip-hop.’ “
But there really weren’t any source books on the subject, so Cook the student ended up footnoting emcee Davey D — himself — as someone who had been quoted in Bomb magazine. “I got an A and left,” he says. Today, Cook would have no trouble filling a bibliography. With hip-hop itself hitting its third decade, hip-hop studies has become one of the most explosive subjects to hit academia in decades — as UCLA Professor H. Samy Alim says, “It’s reinvigorating the academy.” But Cook’s story highlights some of the tensions inherent in the ivory tower taking on a street-born culture such as hip-hop: namely, who are the experts? David Cook from UC Berkeley or Davey D the emcee? According to a 2005 survey by Stanford’s Hiphop Archive, more than 300 courses on the subject are now offered at colleges and universities across the country.
“There is a literary flood,” says Jeff Chang, a writer, UC Berkeley graduate and sometime Chronicle contributor, whose award-winning book “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation” is one of the primary texts in many classes. “It’s becoming a tidal wave. Right now, I have six or seven books on my desk for me to review or blurb. They weren’t there a year ago.”
And that might only be the beginning. “What has been published to date doesn’t tell the whole story, because a whole generation of young scholars is coming along, at the moment, and those researchers will produce a sudden gush of publishing within a few years,” says Peter Monaghan, a correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education. “This is already becoming evident in academic publishers’ catalog listings of forthcoming books.”
Historically black Howard University is ahead of the pack: After being the first to teach hip-hop in 1991, it now offers a minor in hip-hop studies (as of fall). Not surprisingly, the impetus for teaching and studying hip-hop tends to come from the younger members of the academy. In fall 2006, a group of UC Berkeley graduate students, led by sociology doctoral candidate Michael Barnes, formed the Hip-Hop Studies Working Group to increase “the presence of hip-hop studies in academia,” which includes, as a long-term goal, to recruit more faculty who are interested in hip-hop. Similar groups already exist at the University of Michigan and UCLA, and there is one in the works at UC Davis. The group’s participants number at least 20 and hail from a wide array of disciplines: African American studies, American studies, history, linguistics and ethnomusicology, among others. Some come to the group as active contributors to hip-hop, such as Larisa Mann, a.k.a. DJ Ripley, and spoken-word poet Aya de Leon, as well as scholars.
Mann, who has been a DJ for 10 years and is doing an ethnography on Bay Area rap, says that there is a direct connection between hip-hop as she studies it and hip-hop as she lives it. “I’m studying how people relate to law from the music industry,” she says. “They find it threatening or ignore it altogether and make awesome music.” The study of hip-hop is contentious — the definition of what hip-hop is, for instance, never fails to provoke passionate debate. Many point to the Bronx, circa 1975, as a historical starting point. “It’s really tough to pin down,” says Barnes. “It can be less tangible — more of a feeling or energy that comes from performance techniques, DJs, emceeing, dancing.”
“My working definition? Oh, no,” laughs Rickey Vincent, a group member and author of “Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One.” “Here goes: an urban, youth-oriented culture based on rhyme and color that originated in black and Latino communities in New York in the ’70s. “But that’s just a frame of reference, a starting point.” Chang calls the Bay Area ground zero for this swelling field.
“There is so much incredible hip-hop intellectual talent here,” he says, listing hip-hop journalists such as Davey D along with San Francisco State University Professors Shawn Ginwright and Antwi Akom and Stanford Professor Marcyliena Morgan. “When you look at what’s happening with a broad scope, you see the Bay Area emerging as a center.” It’s hard, actually, to find people inside academia who would dismiss the study of hip-hop as simply specious and silly (although media coverage of UC Berkeley’s class on Tupac Shakur and Syracuse University’s course on Lil’ Kim would suggest otherwise). Ever since the various social movements of the ’60s and ’70s opened up the university canon, African American history, women’s studies and pop culture became subjects for research and study.
While cultural thinkers, such as Greg Tate and Steven Hagar, and magazines including Bomb began dissecting hip-hop in the ’80s, a few key books in the mid-’90s provided roots for the current conversation. Brown University Professor Tricia Rose’s 1994 book, “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America,” along with the writings of University of Pennsylvania Professor Michael Eric Dyson and University of Southern California film Professor Todd Boyd, provided the first layer of academic inquiry. Many point to the evolution of jazz studies as a blueprint for hip-hop’s growth.
Actually, according to Ginwright, business schools began studying hip-hop before it surfaced in the humanities. But the study of hip-hop does have its critics. Some, such as Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam — who, in December, devoted a column to praising the “great books” curriculum at St. John’s College while disparaging Morgan’s Hiphop Archive — find it to be unworthy of serious study. Others, like Davey D, critique the narrow confines of what constitutes “legitimate” academic inquiry.
“Now it’s like everybody is dealing in hip-hop,” says Davey D, “but they have nothing to do or no connection with the culture at all. The edicts that drive academia — publish or perish, for instance — aren’t hip-hop. “You have an interesting phenomenon, where the ‘hip-hop experts,’ with university appointments attached to their name, have no credibility whatsoever in hip-hop circles. That, coupled with the fact that academia in a lot of places has always kept a distinct separation between what goes on in community and what happens on campus, is a source of tension.”
It’s a concern shared by many who work within the confines of the university. “Our hip-hop class at San Francisco State University began in an effort to close the gap between theory and practice, academics and activists, ‘descent and street,’ ” Akom says by e-mail. Vincent started the San Francisco State class in 2001. It was clear from the occupied seats and vocal participation that students in the San Francisco State class were responding well to the material. At a recent lecture focusing on race, Ginwright opened the class by playing Public Enemy’s classic “Fear of a Black Planet” (which was also part of the homework), diving into the notion of race as a social construct.
Later, Adam Mansbach, author of the award-winning novel “Angry Black White Boy,” spoke. Ginwright says that the race lecture tends to be one of the most explosive discussions of the semester, as the class talks about personal experiences. “Hip-hop is a space where we can dialogue,” he says to the class. “It’s a space where, as my colleague Dr. Akom says, ‘We can have ‘courageous conversations.’ We peel open the cover and expose issues of race and power.
“Hip-hop forces those in the academy to examine a people’s culture, so to the language of this generation. If you don’t want to speak it, you don’t even understand the language, and you’re not engaging with the population that needs to be addressed the most.”
“Remember,” he continues, “the academy needs hip-hop more than hip-hop needs the academy.”
E-mail Reyhan Harmanci at rharmanci@sfchronicle.com. -
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Copyright 2007 SF Chronicle
