HIP-HOP STUDIES

my alma mater represents
Normally, I'd view any story appearing in the mainstream media (MSM) regarding hip-hop in the academy with some trepidation...not b/c it's not a good story but because it's a story that gets written at least once a year...and dating back at least to the early '90s when some of the first hip-hop college classes started to crop up. The fact that the MSM usually treats the topic from an "intro" point of view - vs. recognizing that this is, in fact, nothing new - feeds into my general wariness. However, Reyhan Harmanci's recent SF Chronicle piece actually, for once, builds on what's been noted before and extends beyond the basic, "look at what these crazy professors are doing!" angle you've seen elsewhere (hell, I've probably written that piece myself before).

Most notable is that Harmanci interviews a few folks who take a decisively critical view on how hip-hop has merge with the academy and it's not conservative academics this time around but rather, hip-hop community leaders expressing their skepticism. To wit:

From Davey D:

"Now it's like everybody is dealing in hip-hop 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."

One wants Davey to start dropping names though we could probably take a guess at a few of 'em.

As always, Boots Riley from The Coup doesn't soft-pedal the topic:

""One time, someone came up to me, and said, 'I know so-and-so, they're a professor at Harvard, they're a big fan of your work.' "But that doesn't impress me more than any other people feeling that way. I don't need to be validated by academia because that presupposes that academia is a pure endeavor and not guided by market forces, which is not the case. Anthropology, for instance, was all about studying the natives so they could figure out how to control them. Again, the natives are being studied."

Personally, I'm all for studying hip-hop in the academy - it's obviously a rich cultural field to critically think about and I'm lucky to be on a campus that has some very smart people tackling the topic, especially Dr. Ebony Utley in Communication Studies.

As for myself...I'm still wary of trying to put together a hip-hop class of my own. It would make a good fit with my department (sociology) but personally, I need for the class to make sense to me. It's hard to properly articulate but I don't want to do it just to do it. I'm sure I'll get there eventually (though not earlier than Spring 08).

--O.W.