{"id":3744,"date":"2021-08-09T16:11:37","date_gmt":"2021-08-09T21:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/read.streamapse.com\/?p=3744"},"modified":"2021-08-09T16:11:37","modified_gmt":"2021-08-09T21:11:37","slug":"a-music-form-that-began-at-a-back-to-school-party-in-the-bronx-hip-hop-holiday-signals-a-turning-point-in-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=3744","title":{"rendered":"A Music Form That Began At A Back-To-School Party In The Bronx – Hip-Hop Holiday Signals A Turning Point In Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

A.D. Carson<\/a>, University of Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Whenever I teach courses on hip-hop at the University of Virginia, I provide a brief overview of where hip-hop music began. One of the important dates I use is Aug. 11, 1973. That\u2019s when DJ Kool Herc, who was 18 at the time, threw a \u201cBack To School Jam\u201d for his sister Cindy in the South Bronx \u2013 in the rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave., to be specific.<\/p>\n

\"Flyer
Flyer for the Back To School Jam hosted by DJ Kool Herc.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The landmark back-to-school party thrown by the Jamaican-American DJ, whose given name is Clive Campbell, will be officially and rightly recognized on Aug. 11, 2021, as Hip-Hop Celebration Day<\/a>, as designated by Congress. August 2021 has also been designated as Hip-Hop Recognition Month, and November 2021 will be recognized as Hip-Hop History Month.<\/p>\n

The hip-hop holiday, if you will, represents yet another milestone for hip-hop as its stature and prominence as a literary art and musical form continue to grow.<\/p>\n

Multiple origins<\/h2>\n

Of course, the true genealogy of hip-hop is far more varied and complex than a single back-to-school party in the Bronx.<\/p>\n

In his introduction to the \u201cYale Anthology of Rap<\/a>,\u201d historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that the first person he heard \u201crap\u201d was his father, who was born in 1913, as he was \u201csignifying,\u201d or playing \u201cthe Dozens<\/a>,\u201d a pastime in which participants trade searing insults about one another\u2019s relatives, typically their mothers, as a way to teach mental strength<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the 1968 memoir of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, \u201cSoul On Ice<\/a>,\u201d Cleaver \u2013 in an entry dated Aug. 16, 1965 \u2013 describes a type of rap he heard in the wake of the Watts uprising<\/a>, a six-day-long rebellion in the predominantly Black neighborhood in Los Angeles sparked by a violent exchange between police and bystanders when a young Black motorist was stopped and arrested by a member of the California Highway Patrol.<\/p>\n

He refers to young men he calls \u201clow riders\u201d assembled in a circle on the basketball court after leaving the mess hall in Folsom State Prison that previous Sunday morning. The Watts uprising had been going on for four days by then. The men \u201cwere wearing jubilant, triumphant smiles, animated by a vicarious spirit.\u201d A round of signifying hand gestures turned to speech after one asked, \u201cWhat they doing out there? Break it down for me, Baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cleaver writes that one of the low riders stepped into the middle of the circle and began to speak:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey walking in fours and kicking in doors \/ dropping Reds and busting heads \/ drinking wine and committing crime \/ shooting and looting \/ high-siding and low-riding \/ setting fires and slashing tires \/ turning over cars and burning down bars \/ making Parker mad and making me glad \/ putting an end to that \u2018go slow\u2019 crap and putting sweet Watts on the map \/ my black ass is in Folsom this morning but my black heart is in Watts!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cleaver describes the laugh shared by the men in the cipher \u2013 or small, circular gathering \u2013 as \u201ccleansing, revolutionary,\u201d as \u201ctears of joy were rolling from (the speaker\u2019s) eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

California rapper Ras Kass named his debut album<\/a>, released in 1996, after Cleaver\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kool Herc, the pioneer<\/h2>\n

Herc is described in the Yale anthology as \u201cthe man most often mentioned as the sonic originator of hip-hop.\u201d He invented \u201cthe break\u201d by using two turntables \u2013 and two copies of the same album \u2013 to extend a song\u2019s instrumental, typically highly percussive, portion. He then took the signifying that Gates and Cleaver describe and performed a version of it over the separated song breaks he blasted on his sound system. His breaks and banter bade dancers to improvise to the music he played. Tricia Rose, author of pioneering hip-hop scholarship including \u201cBlack Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America<\/a>\u201d writes that \u201cDJ Kool Herc was a graffiti writer and dancer first before he began playing records.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though modern graffiti writing is said to have originated in the 1960s when a 12-year-old Philadelphia kid named Darryl McCray began tagging his nickname, \u201cCornbread,\u201d on the Philadelphia Youth Development Center walls, and then eventually all around the city, DJ Kool Herc embodied all of the original elements<\/a> of hip-hop: DJing, emceeing, break dancing, and graffiti writing.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Worldwide phenomenon<\/h2>\n

In the years since that back-to-school party, hip-hop has become a well-recognized global phenomenon. It is one of the most widely consumed musical forms<\/a> worldwide. It is also a widely sampled and highly scrutinized cultural movement.<\/p>\n

Since hip-hop began as a back-to-school party, it follows that it should be taught in the halls of academia. College classes as far back as the 1980s<\/a> have taken up hip-hop culture and artists as the objects and subjects of study.<\/p>\n

In 2013, the Hiphop Archive and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University established the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship<\/a>. The fellowship \u2013 named after the rapper Nas \u2013 is meant for select scholars and artists with \u201cexceptional capacity for productive scholarship and exceptional creative ability in the arts, in connection with Hiphop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kendrick Lamar\u2019s \u201cDAMN.\u201d received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for music<\/a>. In 2019, New Orleans rapper Mia X joined the music industry faculty<\/a> at Loyola University. She is one of many rappers and producers<\/a> to teach at a university. Black Thought from the widely acclaimed rap band The Roots will be hosting a residency at the Kennedy Center<\/a> in October 2021 during which he will talk with contemporaries about art, inspiration and creative consciousness.<\/p>\n

A hip-hop dissertation<\/h2>\n

My own forays into academia are squarely rooted in hip-hop. I accepted my current job<\/a> \u2013 assistant professor of hip-hop \u2013 after I submitted my doctoral dissertation as a rap album and digital archive<\/a> in 2017.<\/p>\n

I had few academic models for my work to follow \u2014 those laid out by Gates\u2019 father, people like the low riders from Cleaver\u2019s memoir, scholars like Tricia Rose and pioneers like DJ Kool Herc. I wanted my work, in rap form, to be the scholarship<\/a> on its own. Hip-hop has always been academic to me, even though it often seems as though making music, DJing, break dancing or doing graffiti painting as scholarship are usually acceptable only outside of formal spaces of learning, as part of an alternative curriculum.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Cover of A.D. Carson\u2019s Dissertation Album, \u2018Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions.\u2019<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Congress\u2019 formal establishment of a hip-hop holiday and month of recognition \u2013 at least in 2021 \u2013 lends credence to the notion that hip-hop finally deserves a place in academia as a discipline of its own. From my perspective, it is long overdue that hip-hop be seen not solely as a subject of study but as a tool to continue to produce new knowledge and new ways of presenting it.<\/p>\n

Hip-hop\u2019s influence on other disciplines is as abundant as its influence on other music and art forms. Perhaps soon, in celebration of Cindy and Clive Campbell\u2019s historic \u201cBack To School Jam,\u201d some students will be going back to school to become fully immersed in the academic rigors of the culture being celebrated nationally on Aug. 11.\"The<\/p>\n

A.D. Carson<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Hip-Hop, University of Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A.D. Carson, University of Virginia Whenever I teach courses on hip-hop at the University of Virginia, I provide a brief overview of where hip-hop music began. One of the important dates I use is Aug. 11, 1973. That\u2019s when DJ Kool Herc, who was 18 at the time, threw a \u201cBack To School Jam\u201d for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3745,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[600,166,39,3,60,601,602],"class_list":["post-3744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-streamapse-reports","tag-began","tag-bronx","tag-holiday","tag-music","tag-party","tag-school","tag-signals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}