Journal of Popular Music Education - Volume 2, Issue 1-2, 2018

Engagement with hip hop – a cultural form that emerged from Black communities in New York City in the 1970s (Chang 2005) – as White listeners, musicians, educators and researchers requires asking thoughtful questions about race, racism and power. This introduction considers ethical issues that may arise from hip hop pedagogy and scholarship and explores the imperative to grapple with Whiteness when centring hip hop in our praxis. Power relations intricately shape hip hop education and hip hop research; as such, developing a practice of questioning and ‘second guessing’ ourselves as educators and researchers may allow us to develop an ethical practice for engaging with hip hop that centres race, racism and Whiteness, and refuses to reinscribe structural racist and salvationist power relations.

This article deals with Hip Hop and its cultural intricacies. Hip Hop transcends the mediated tropes of sexualized PoC bodies only yammering for money, fame, fortune and to ‘be the best’. Hip Hop is much more than tattoos, arpeggiated high hats and snares, gold chains, fancy grills and baggy pants. No, Hip Hop is a culture; a lifestyle; something that we in the academic community must take into strong consideration and begin to not just analyse it for tenure processes, but begin to ask, what does and can Hip Hop offer pedagogically and how might it inform our own scholarly work? Hip Hop is larger than the radio, commercialized artists and record industry branding. It is a culture, a people, a movement, a growing community of people that live, breathe, eat, love, hate and work just as anyone else does. Hip Hop cannot be easily understood or defined. This article gives an overview of both the academic pursuit of Hip Hop Studies and the subfield of Hip Hop and Religion.

This article examines the critical pedagogy of Lupe Fiasco’s music video ‘Bitch Bad’ (2012). Situating Fiasco’s work as an instance of hip hop teaching, we propose an analytic model to facilitate the interpretation of genre conventions evident in the multimodal music video text. We place genre theory into dialogue with critical discourse analysis in order to bring forward the ideologies, social values and cultural norms invoked in Fiasco’s portrayal of hip hop video actors and spectators. The analysis reveals Lupe Fiasco’s and videographer Gil Green’s critique of racist and misogynist stereotypes perpetuated in the music industry. Fiasco and Green present the hip hop performer as a labourer who is asked to portray specific conventions of gender, race and class. They explore the impact of the genre conventions upon children who grow up in the context of these cultural norms; they situate Fiasco as a cultural critic and teacher; and they demonstrate the potential of the music video to function as a pedagogical text.

Hip-hop music practice contains a rich matrix of creative methods within its paradigm, which can inform and inspire music production pedagogy. The techno-artistic trajectory of rap production consists of numerous performing, engineering and production phases, while it may also involve self-contained developmental practices, such as the creation of intermediate content for sampling. The well-documented issues affecting phonographic sampling have given rise to alternative approaches, inviting both live musicianship and a dependence on synthesized sonics within hip-hop practice. As a hybrid production vehicle par excellence, Hip-Hop provides a fertile context for the application of diverse techniques in pursuit of inter-stylistic aesthetics. The article explores the spectrum of creative opportunities that lie between live performance, sample-based processes and notions of ‘composition’ as encompassed within the hip-hop paradigm. The aim is to identify under-represented aspects of contemporary music production and unexploited synergies in popular music curricula that may benefit from further integration.

Through directing focus towards hip-hop culture and aspects of young people’s learning in after-school hip-hop activities for participants 13 years and older within Swedish state-funded study associations, this article is guided by the following question: What meanings do hip-hop activities have for participants and rappers who function as ‘organic’ educators within Swedish study associations? The empirical data were produced through interviews with participants and rappers who function as organic hip-hop educators in Swedish study associations. The term ‘organic’ is used to underline how rappers, without formal education, have developed pedagogical skills through educating others. In light of holistic educational ideals, rappers and their pedagogical work can be understood to contrast the dominant trend in western education of instrumental and narrow perspectives and approaches to learning.

Focusing on two aspects of the experience of African Americans – racism and resilience – this article explores themes in fourteen Hip Hop songs published between 1989 and 2016, selected from the website, Ranker. This website provides a forum for users to share, discuss and vote on Hip Hop songs that relate to racism. A content analysis of the song lyrics reveals three themes related to racism: (1) law enforcement, (2) penal system and (3) poverty. African Americans are resilient in three ways: through racial pride, racial harmony and through a resolve to remain strong. Hip Hop artists encourage resilience through resistance in the form of political activism, through acknowledging individual and collective worth and by envisioning (and working towards) racial harmony.

The author demonstrates the musical richness of Kanye West’s song ‘Famous’, describing its dense interplay of rhythms, harmonies, timbres, vocal styles and nested chains of intertextual reference. Hip-hop is at odds with the performance-oriented traditions of American music education. By developing an appreciation for this producer-driven art form, educators can find ways to make their own practice more culturally relevant and open to student creativity. Students can approach cultural artefacts and texts the way that producers approach recorded music, looking for fragments that could be appropriated and repurposed to form the basis of new works.

This article examines the experiences of females in local, community breaking (dance) programmes. The Toronto B-Girl Movement is a series of programmes offering lessons in breaking led by KeepRockinYou, an arts collective of women. Through ethnographic methods, researchers considered what motivates novice b-girls to take up breaking and what their experience of the scene and programme are. Building on the seminal work about gender performativity (Butler 1990), popular music education and gender (Green 1997), and female-led spaces (Björck 2011), we argue that novice b-girls do not necessarily identify their dance practice as resistant, empowering or ‘badass’ (Johnson 2014), instead these discourses are learned, performed and/or rejected. We suggest that intergenerational exchanges between women are productive in facilitating social rewards for new dancers (friendships, access to codes and conventions of hip-hop culture, mentorship and moral support). A growing number of females participating in the hip-hop scene locally is one result.

This article is a conceptual exploration of Hip Hop culture as a pedagogical resource, not only for students of colour, but for all students who may be disengaged from traditional approaches to teaching and learning. This article explores the idea of Hip Hop as a ‘double-voiced’ practice, a practice that speaks to mainstream educational competencies while articulating dispositions and perspectives drawn from vernacular cultural experiences. Examples of this practice examined the educational preparation of a Black male pre-service teacher and a White female teacher seeking ways to better connect with her Black students. In both cases, Hip Hop provides pedagogical resources which speak to identity and educational possibility which transformed the educational experiences of both individuals.

The growing area of Hip-Hop pedagogy scholarship contains many meaningful implications and possibilities for music education. However, Hip-Hop’s fervent emphasis on authenticity (i.e. keeping it real) may cause music educators and students alike to view inclusions of Hip-Hop in school settings with a healthy dose of scepticism. Is a music classroom capable of keeping it real? Conceptualizing authenticity as a static condition or set of characteristics may impede the intentions of educators and does not reflect the complicated and contested nature of Hip-Hop authenticity. Viewing authenticity as an action offers more nuanced and meaningful examinations of Hip-Hop cultures and provides discursive and performative spaces for students and teachers to experience the possibilities of Hip-Hop pedagogies. In this article, the author demonstrates the complexity of Hip-Hop authenticity and offers ways forward for music educators interested in including Hip-Hop in school music settings.

This is a perspective on UK’s take on hip hop. Better known as UK rap due to its current expansion of musical styles within the genre, including its exposure by social media and the association with another genre, grime, this perspective illustrates why UK rap is not sufficiently explored in English school education. This concept also links with Black British music, which has existed over 100 years, and yet, it still has not been cemented in school education. With the specific focus on UK rap, this perspective discusses its absence in the national curriculum in England by reflecting on the following: (1) the lack of understanding of the genre and its origins, (2) how rap can be included in music education and (3) why learning rap independently is perhaps more favourable in non-educational environments such as creative and public/social spaces.

The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, Justin A. Williams (2015)

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 370 pp.,

ISBN: 9781107643864, p/bk, $30.99

Rebel Music: Resistance Through Hip Hop and Punk, P. Parmar, A. J. Nocella, S. Robertson and M. Diaz (eds) (2015)

Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 164 pp.,

ISBN: 9781623969097, p/bk, $45.99 USD