hip-hop – Radio Free

Hip-Hop Can Document Life in America More Reliably Than History Books

A.D. Carson — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 05:47:39 +0000

Image Source: Homepage of aydeethegreat.com

Describing my 2017 appointment as a faculty member, the University of Virginia dubbed me the school’s “first” hip-hop professor. Even if the job title and the historic nature of the appointment might have merited it, the word was misleading.

Kyra Gaunt, a Black woman who is a foundational figure in the study of hip-hop, worked as a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Virginia from 1996 to 2002. Her book “The Games Black Girls Play,” which focuses on Black music practices, was published in 2006. I cited her in my work and in the interview I gave before accepting the job.

Also cited in my doctoral work, presented in my interview with the University of Virginia, was scholar Joe Schloss, who worked at the school from 2000-2001. In 2009, he wrote “Foundation: B-boys, B-girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York.” And in 2014 he wrote “Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop.”

After pushback from readers online, UVA Today amended its original headline documenting my appointment and added Gaunt’s contributions to the article.

As a rapper and scholar, I have experienced and seen misleading hip-hop stories that highlight an impulse to inaccurately document the genre’s history and present. I raised this issue recently in a TikTok “office hours” video – part of a series in which I respond to audience questions from the vantage of hip-hop art and research.

Misleading hip-hop stories

After Johns Hopkins University announced that Lupe Fiasco had been hired to teach rap there in fall 2025, some online platforms, including The Root, incorrectly reported on his assignment.

They described his upcoming job as the first instance of a rapper ever hired as a professor at a university.

This is obviously incorrect. I’m a rapper who since 2017 has worked as a professor of hip-hop while releasing music, which was part of the basis for my earning tenure in 2023. Besides this, I’m certain there were rappers with university teaching jobs before me.

The trend of misrepresenting hip-hop history isn’t unique to communications from places such as Johns Hopkins University or the University of Virginia.

In 2024, the publisher of musician Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s “Hip-Hop is History” described it as “the book only Questlove could write: a singular, definitive history” of hip-hop.

Questlove’s book is not, as the publisher claims, a definitive history. It might more accurately be described as Questlove’s take on hip-hop history, or a memoir. Without this necessary distinction, unknowing readers might misinterpret the publisher’s claims.

Questlove writes about finally coming to appreciate Southern rap in the 2000s. But Southern rap history predates Questlove’s appreciation by decades. It doesn’t begin when someone like him finally recognizes its importance.

Similarly, hip-hop doesn’t begin when it’s finally recognized by an exclusive institution or when someone gets a degree for it.

Making hip-hop history

I published these concerns as academic questions in 2017 in an album called “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions.” The project served as my doctoral dissertation.

“Owning My Masters (Mastered)” is the next phase of the dissertation album project. Published in 2024, it contains new audio, video, images and historical context. It’s published with University of Michigan Press through the same process of an academic book.

‘Owning My Masters (Mastered): The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions’ album cover. University of Michigan Press

“Owning My Masters (Mastered)” demonstrates how hip-hop resists the ways American history often excludes Black resistance, Black achievement, Black storytelling and, ultimately, Black people.

But the exclusion that my work highlights is muted when the seeming novelty of my job appointment or my dissertation album are the focus. When I’m asked if I’m the first person to earn a Ph.D. for making a rap album, I try to answer more expansively to avoid misleading anyone, or ignoring what might be more informative.

It’s also important to understand the barriers that might have made a project like mine impossible before 2017. These include technological barriers that made recording and releasing music prohibitively expensive. And, more specific to hip-hop, it involves a mistrust based on racist history that prevented students from even proposing such a project.

No such “first” happens without the unsung work of others creating the conditions to make it possible.

Learning from hip-hop

Hip-hop’s documentation should not repeat the same flaws of the recording of American history, which can omit important people and events, and which can misrepresent the legacies of racism and systemic violence.

Undeniably, I believe important hip-hop texts, albums and moments should be studied and documented with academic rigor. But this should not solely focus on “firsts,” record sales or prestigious awards.

Such stories fail to accurately illustrate that hip-hop is as much about how people live day to day as it is about how institutions use it to bolster credibility or how companies make money off it.

Important aspects of hip-hop’s diverse culture are excluded when the ordinary is overlooked.

Creating hip-hop is one among the many ways Black people have persevered in the U.S.

Universities and other exclusionary institutions helped sustain – and, in certain ways, continue to benefit from – hellish conditions like those created by slavery.

Hip-hop is, in part, a response to this history.

At its best, hip-hop documents American life more reliably than American history.

Some academic publishers have started to embrace this reality.

My 2020 album “i used to love to dream” may be noteworthy as the first rap album to be peer-reviewed and published with an academic press. More importantly, its contents are about historic erasure of Black people and Black history in my hometown, Decatur, Illinois.

Hip-hop’s popularity, its constant revision and its accessibility make it a powerful vehicle for disrupting inaccurate, exclusionary and fabricated tales passed off as objective facts.

The genre has documented events such as the Tuskegee syphilis study – the 40-year experiment, conducted without informed consent, on Black men by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the effects of the disease when left untreated.

Hip-hop has also cataloged tragedies such as the 1921 Tulsa race massacre – a two-day assault by white mobs on their Black neighbors – and the 1995 Million Man March, a large gathering of Black men in Washington, D.C.

The media ecosystem in which hip-hop has thrived is also steeped with the scapegoating of its art and artists. This scapegoating is weaponized by critics to devalue the culture.

It seems unwise to me to trust institutions such as universities and the media to determine what’s deemed culturally significant. Along with influencers and podcasters who benefit from hip-hop, they can learn valuable lessons from it.

Their ability to determine what’s deemed culturally significant is especially problematic if their choices are primarily in exchange for revenue or credibility. If hip-hop is viewed as a cultural inheritance, then its value – and what’s considered historically important – may be better arbitrated by people in the culture, not outside forces.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Hip-Hop Can Document Life in America More Reliably Than History Books appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by A.D. Carson.

Hip-Hop Star Macklemore on New Film "The Encampments" & Why He Opposes Israel’s War on Gaza

Democracy Now! — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 14:37:22 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Hip-Hop Star Macklemore on New Film “The Encampments” & Why He Speaks Out Against Israel’s War on Gaza

Democracy Now! — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 12:20:00 +0000

We’re joined by the four-time Grammy-winning musician Macklemore, a vocal proponent of Palestinian rights and critic of U.S. foreign policy. He serves as executive producer for the new documentary The Encampments, which follows last year’s student occupations of college campuses to protest U.S. backing of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. He tells Democracy Now! why he got involved with the film and the roots of his own activism, including the making of his song “Hind’s Hall,” named after the Columbia student occupation of the campus building Hamilton Hall, which itself was named in honor of the 5-year-old Palestinian child Hind Rajab. Rajab made headlines last year when audio of her pleading for help from emergency services in Gaza was released shortly before she was discovered killed by Israeli forces. “We are in urgent, dire times that require us as human beings coming together and fighting against fascism, fighting against genocide, and the only way to do that is by opening up the heart and realizing that collective liberation is the only solution,” Macklemore says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

A montage of West Papuan everyday life from hip-hop to protest songs

Pacific Media Watch — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:32:34 +0000

I came to this evening of short films not sure what to expect.

I have a history with West Papua (here referring to the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea, which comprises five provinces, one named “West Papua”) from my days fronting the legendary West Papuan band Black Brothers in the early 1990s.

During that time, I was exposed to stories of struggle and pride in the identity of the people of West Papua. From their declaration of self-determination and self-government and the raising of the Morning Star flag on 1 December 1961, to the so-called “Act of Free Choice” referendum in 1969 which saw the fledgling Melanesian state become part of the larger Indonesian state, to the next 40 years of struggle.

However, apart from the occasional ABC or SBS news story and the 1963 ethnographic film Dead Birds, I hadn’t seen much footage on West Papua until now.

The West Papua Mini Film Festival is a touring festival of short films organised by the West Papuan community and their allies and supporters in Australia to raise awareness of the situation in West Papua.

The four films I saw, at the first screening in Sydney, were:

My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee)
Pepera 1969, A Democratic Integration?
Papuan Hip-Hop: When the Microphone Talks
Black Pearl and General of the Field

The first two films were quite harrowing portrayals of internal displacement and coercion in West Papua. My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee) follows the lives and families of two children, both named “refugee”, born and currently being raised in parts of West Papua distant from their families’ places of origin.

Their displacement is clearly correlated with the increased presence of extractive corporate interests backed in and supported by a military presence.

In both children’s cases this has been enabled by the gradual breaking up of the region of West Papua into first two, and now five, separate provinces.

A scene from My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee)

My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee). Video trailer: Jubi TV

The second film, Pepera 1969, A Democratic Integration, deals with the history of oppression and coercion under Indonesian rule and the absurdity of the rubber-stamping process undertaken by Indonesia (the Act of Free Choice, the Indonesian acronym for which is Pepera) which enabled it to annex West Papua under the impotent gaze of the United Nations and the complicit support of countries including the US and Australia.

The film documents the process leading into decolonisation and West Papua’s short-lived period of self-rule.

The second two films were insightful celebrations of Papuan identity in the arts, through hip-hop artists like Ukam Maran and the earlier musical group Mambesak, and in sport, with the incredible story of the Persipura football club of Jayapura.

The latter’s achievements as a football team and subsequent discrimination and suppression in the racially charged Indonesian football league provide an allegory of West Papuan identity.

In both cases, the strength and resilience of West Papuan identity, and West Papuans’ pride in their ancient ties to land and culture, are palpable.

A scene from Papua Hip-Hop: When the microphone talks.

What I liked about the four films was that they presented a montage of West Papua from rural to urban, from the everyday life of internally displaced people to the exciting work of hip-hop artists with their songs of protest; from the big picture and history of West Papua to the smaller microcosm of the Persipura football team and supporters.

All in all, I was surprised how much I came out of the festival better informed about a place, its history and current developments. And this despite having the privilege of knowing more about West Papua than many Australians.

For those who don’t know much about West Papua and would like to know more, attending the West Papua Mini Film Festival is a must. It is on at various locations around Australia until 21 April 2024, with details here.

And to end on a happy note, my evening of film appreciation included meeting one of the festival’s organisers, Victor Mambor. Victor is the nephew of the late Steve Mambor, drummer for the Black Brothers!

West Papua Mini Film Festival 2024, 9-21 April 2024, Wollongong, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, Lismore, Hobart, Melbourne, and Darwin.
The films are also available to view with English and Indonesian subtitles on the Jubi TV Youtube channel.

‘Alopi Latukefu is the director of the Edmund Rice Centre. He previously worked for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This review was first published on ANU Development Policy Centre’s DevPolicyBlog and is republished here under Creative Commons.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.