Draft dissertation literature review

Read more sections of my dissertation in progress here

In this chapter, I examine the literature on the role that hip-hop plays in American school music programs, as well as the obstacles to its adoption, culturally and institutionally. I begin by comparing school music to the “everyday music” that students listen and dance to. While rap is the most popular commercial music in the United States, it is virtually absent from music classrooms. This absence manifests not just at the product level, but the process level as well. Rappers and other self-taught popular musicians usually begin writing original material at the earliest learning stages. By contrast, creation of any kind is rare in school music. Technology presents the opportunity to teach music as an art class, centered on the production of recordings. It is possible even for novices to produce tracks of good quality. However, music teachers rarely have experience with songwriting or production.

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Students who do create original music naturally want to do so in their preferred styles, but those styles are likely to receive a cold welcome from teachers trained in the Western classical idiom. Schools have generally been more concerned with teaching students to appreciate “good” music than with validating their existing tastes. Because America’s “art” music has largely descended from Europe, and because its popular musics are largely the product of the African diaspora, the conflict between “high” and “low” cultures has a racial dimension. Even though few white music educators espouse personally racist beliefs, they can perpetuate white cultural hegemony merely by declining to challenge the institutional status quo. If music educators are to engage hip-hop, discussions of racial politics will be unavoidable.

For my purposes, hip-hop is a culture, while rap is a musical genre emerging from that culture. Hip-hop has potentially revolutionary significance for music education beyond its musical innovations. For example, the hip-hop value of “realness” runs counter to the typical repertoire of school ensembles, consisting mainly of works that are remote from students’ own experience or context. If school ensembles were to perform rap songs alongside canonical classical works and folk songs, it would not be true to the spirit of hip-hop. It would be more appropriate for students to write their own songs, or to change and adapt existing ones to express their own truths.

Rap’s formal qualities are markedly different from those of school’s official musics. Rap is a producer-driven, recording-centric aural form that is never notated. While rap is more melodic than it is conventionally understood to be, it uses pitch quite differently from other vocal styles. The core structuring element in rap is not the linear melody, but the endless loop, a groove designed for affective emotional response and audience participation rather than detached contemplation. Loops might be played on instruments, but they are more typically created using digital samples and programmed synthesizers. Mediating technologies like Auto-Tune are key foreground elements, not sonic decorations or after-the-fact correctives. While rap lyrics can address any subject, they are usually irreverent and antiauthoritarian. Including this music in the classroom will require many educators to question their received wisdom about what constitutes musical quality.

I conclude this chapter with an examination of potential risks and drawbacks of hip-hop education. Would hip-hop retain its antiauthoritarian meaning in the school context, or would it become another “classical” music, as happened with jazz in the 1980s, and as is happening with rock now? Even if it is possible to accommodate rap as curricular content, is it possible for its radically informal creative processes to unfold in a classroom setting? How should educators address the fact that commercial rap is saturated with violence, glorification of drugs, and misogyny? Finally, how can white students create or perform rap without appropriating or colonizing black culture?

Significance of the study: The state of music education

In the United States, participation in music education in schools declined by 30 percent between 1982 and 2008 (Abril, 2014). This decline has multiple causes, ranging from funding issues to excessive standardized testing. However, there is one factor in music education’s growing marginalization that is within the control of music educators themselves: the disconnect between school music and the musical lives of students. Rap is, by some measures, the most popular music in the US (Nielsen, 2018), yet if your only knowledge of American music came from its schools, you would never know it.

Everyday music vs school music

School music seems to exist in a parallel universe of its own, where choirs, orchestras and marching bands reign supreme. Even those students who find meaning participating in such ensembles would be hard-pressed to continue their participation after graduation. Self-taught pop musicians unsurprisingly have an easier time maintaining continuity of their musical lives from adolescence into adulthood (Pitts, 2017). Meanwhile, “the everyday musical life of concerts, dancing, and listening survives just the same with or without school music programs” (Cavicchi, 2009, p. 101). School music programs eventually came to embrace jazz in the 1980s, and are slowly beginning to embrace rock now. These are positive developments, but schools continue to be decades behind popular culture.

Teaching music as an art class

A fellow music educator once complained to me, “I got a music degree without ever writing a song” (Jamie Ehrenfeld, personal communication, April 29 2017). Her experience is typical. “One of the most startling shortcomings in all of arts education is that too many music students graduate with little to no experience or significant grounding in the essential creative processes of improvisation and composition. In contrast, students majoring in the visual arts could not gain a degree without producing a portfolio of original creative work” (Sarath, Myers & Campbell, 2016, p. 58). Historically, there have been valid practical reasons for students to focus on learning existing repertoire rather than writing their own material. Composing for orchestra or wind band is an advanced skill. However, the digital audio workstations enables students to create tracks even at the earliest stages of learning. The opportunity exists to introduce creativity into every stage of music learning. However, to do so, music educators must first gain experience making music of their own.

Music creation is pleasure in being instead of having

Music creation can be an act pursued for its own sake, a playful way to invent both forms of communication and their content. “A concept such as this seems natural in the context of music. But it reaches far beyond that; it relates to the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure in being instead of having” (Attali, 1985, p. 134). In a world where capitalist excess threatens the ecological support of our entire civilization, there are few more urgent challenges than teaching Americans to enjoy being instead of having.

Students want to create the music they like

When young people create music in imitation of the music they enjoy, “this actual doing of what they experience as consumers of popular music is a vital and affirming part of the creative process. It helps students discern more tangibly that popular music reflects what they know about themselves, each other, and their world” (Rodriguez, 2004, p. 21). However, if students’ preferred musics are unavailable, or worse yet, actively disparaged, it can undermine their creative self-efficacy. “The absence of [personal] relevance in music is perceived by students as implicit affirmation that they lack musical talent… Unsuccessful students assume the problem is theirs, and they may begin a lifetime of music education avoidance” (Myers 2008, 4). My own experience of music education supports this assertion.

Young people listen to every kind of music, but hip-hop is their lingua franca. While rap originated among urban black Americans, Lightstone (2012) argues that it has become the “ethnic music” of youth culture globally, across regions, races, ethnicities and religions. For example, she cites Inuit youth living in remote communities in the Canadian arctic who identify with hip-hop culture. Perhaps some of rap’s popularity can be attributed to the global saturation of American popular culture generally, but it is still worth asking what it is about this specific musical form that speaks to the experience of so many young people.

Conceptual framework: Critical race theory

Expanding the canon to include a greater diversity of musics would appear to be a worthwhile goal for progressive educators. However, in doing so, we will fail to challenge the basic fact of the canon’s existence and its role in academic culture. “[T]he canon is an epistemology; it is a way of understanding the world that privileges certain aesthetic criteria and that organizes a narrative about the history and development of music around such criteria and based on that understanding of the world. In other worlds, the canon is an ideology more than a specific repertory” (Madrid, 2017, p. 125). Diversity is of no help if we simply use it to perpetuate and legitimize underlying privilege and power inequalities.

Racial hierarchy and authority

Educational institutions are main agencies of transmission of an effective dominant culture. Every tradition is an act of selectivity, a process of choosing to preserve and present some meanings and practices and neglecting or concealing others. Within the meanings that comprise a tradition, “some of these meanings are reinterpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture” (Apple, 1979, p. 5). When cultural authorities educators issue blanket condemnations or dismissals of hip-hop, they are not just stating an aesthetic preference; they are reasserting political dominance.

The cultural politics of knowledge

Cultural figures as diverse as Roger Scruton and Jerry Garcia dismiss rap as non-musical due to its lack of melody (Scruton, 2014; Benz, 1995). Similar discourse can be found within music education as well: “[A]s a blend of words with state-of-the-art sound and visual collage, the artistic potential of hip-hop is great. But without the addition of melody and harmony, its strictly musical potential will remain limited” (Bayles, 2004, p. 83). However, dismissal of rap and other black musics more often takes the form of exnomination, exclusion by omission: “[T]he message conveyed is that the reasons for the exclusion—namely the intrinsic unworthiness of that which is excluded—are so obvious, so self-evident, that they need not even be stated” (Sarath, Myers & Campbell, 2016, pp. 121-122, emphasis in original). The terms “new music,” “contemporary music” and “art music” are examples of such exnomination. A more subtle example can be found in Todd (2016), a music appreciation textbook that presents African-American music among its coverage of “non-Western” traditions. I have found passive neglect of black music to be far more common in education circles than outspoken hostility or contempt.

Racism without racists

White music educators of the present day do not need to personally harbor racist beliefs in order to benefit from the centering of their culture in the curriculum. “Whiteness maintains power and privilege by perpetuating and legitimating the status quo while simultaneously maintaining a veneer of neutrality, equality, and compassion” (Castagno, 2014, p. 5). To preserve white privilege, it is not necessary to be hateful; passivity and conflict aversion are sufficient. White people are inclined to see racism as an individual character flaw, rather than a systemic issue. As a result, “whites are usually more receptive to validating white racism if that racism is constructed as residing in individual white people other than themselves” (DiAngelo, 2011, p. 61). It is easier to condemn individual bad actors than to recognize one’s own complicity in a racist system.

Racists of the Jim Crow era argued that black people are biologically and morally inferior. White people in the present are less likely to openly espouse such beliefs. Nevertheless, they may continue to covertly hold them, cloaking them in more socially acceptable guises like a condemnation of the supposed “culture of poverty,” or advocacy for ”meritocracy” over affirmative action (Bonilla-Silva, 2013). Many white people are insulated from the racist consequences of such beliefs due to simple ignorance. “[M]embers of the dominant group in any society do not necessarily have to know anything about those people who are not like them… This privileged isolation is not a luxury available to people who live outside of dominance and must, for their survival, understand the essential social nuances of those in power” (Howard, 2006, pp. 14-15). Because hip-hop gives voice to poor and working class black people and other marginalized groups, it presents opportunities for educators to guide white listeners into difficult conversations about their own biases and blind spots.

Mass incarceration shows racial ideology at work

The United States has the dubious distinction of imprisoning more of its population than any other country in the world, and it incarcerates racial minorities far in excess of their percentage of the population. “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid” (Alexander, 2012, p. 6). When white Americans see the racial disparities in the prison population, it confirms their existing biases about “those people,” which in turn increases their support for harsher punishments (Nellis, 2016, p. 11). The equation of blackness with criminality is so strong that a white job applicant who discloses a felony drug conviction is more likely to get a callback than a black applicant with no criminal record at all (Pager, 2007). We can not address such implicit and unstated racial biases without addressing their cultural foundation. Eurocentric music education is part of a larger cultural ecosystem that favors the flourishing of such bias.

Teaching whiteness in American music education

Music teachers are more likely than their students to be white, and to come from suburban, low-poverty areas (Doyle, 2014). Participants in elective music classes and ensembles have a similar demographic profile—privileged groups are overrepresented, in terms of race, socioeconomic status, English fluency, and parents’ education level (Elpus & Abril, 2011). This is true even in schools that supply free instruments, suggesting that wealth disparities alone can not explain the lopsidedly white and privileged face of school ensembles. University music education programs emphasize European-descended classical tradition over all other forms of musical competency. A study of the undergraduate music education program at a large university found that students spent 93% of course time on Western art musics, as opposed to 0.5% of course time on all forms of popular music, and even less on all non-Western traditions (Wang & Humphries, 2009, p. 25). The hegemonic whiteness of music educators’ own training poses the greatest challenge to adopting hip-hop in the classroom.

Whiteness as the universal standard

A core tenet of whiteness is the supposed objectivity and universality of its perspective. This belief, “coupled with positioning white people as outside of culture (and thus the norm for humanity), allows whites to view themselves as universal humans who can represent all of human experience” (DiAngelo, 2011, p. 59). European-descended musical culture is no exception, cloaking itself in the language of “objectivity, transparency, universality, rationality, necessity, teleology, and the finality (the irreducibility) of (its) origins and ends” (Finn, 1997, p. 74). As a result, music textbooks commonly make statements like this: “For in the symphonies of Haydn, as in the works of Mozart and of the other masters of the era, there speaks a musicianship that is universal, timeless, and valid under all circumstances. This music is not one solution or one aspect, nor is it a personal matter; it speaks to all peoples” (Lang, 1997 (1952), p. 38). By the same logic, education in the Western canon has universal applicability: “[T]raining in functional harmony and voice leading establishes a basis for understanding music that can serve as a foundation for the study of virtually any musical style, western or non-western” (Gagné, 1994, p. 23). Hip-hop is evidence that the norms of the Western canon are not even universal within Western cultures, much less globally, and it has the potential to stimulate long-overdue challenges to curricular Eurocentrism.

The whiteness of art and the blackness of pop

American popular music is “a term which, in large measure, is just a euphemism for Afro-American popular musics” (Feld, 1988, p. 31). Western musical “high culture” has a long history of defining itself in opposition to “Other” of African music (Agawu, 2003, p. 206). As Europeans of the nineteenth century developed a more rationalized understanding of their art music, they contrasted it to the “pre-discursive,” “natural” musical practices of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993). America’s “high” musical culture has followed Europe’s lead in maintaining a polar opposition between popular against elite, with popular equated to both “low” and “black” (Middleton, 2000, p. 60). The dismissal of popular music by American cultural authorities therefore has an inescapably racialized dimension.

Epistemological colonialism

In nineteenth-century America, Western culture was the hegemonic cornerstone of education. “Cultural uniformity was accepted without question, and the dissenting voices of women and minorities were more or less silent. Notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful could be described with relative surety” (Jorgensen, 2003a, p. 2). Music education was no exception. The educational mainstream has come to embrace multiculturalism, and the merits of the Western canon are now subject to debate. Nevertheless, well-meaning educators may perpetuate epistemological colonialism when they embrace “exoticism through token inclusion; superficial celebration of diversity; fear of diversity combined with its exploitation as commodity; and the celebration of hybridity” (Bradley, 2012, p. 427). Discourse around hip-hop in the United States “replays in many ways those reports by colonial officials in the nineteenth century on the primitive customs of unruly natives” (Brennan, 2001, pp. 51-52). Educators who wish to let hip-hop inform their practice must be careful not to colonize or appropriate it instead.

White bodily comportment

Eurological music culture seeks to transcend the body, viewing music as existing in a “realm of pure abstraction” (Scruton, 1999, p. 489). The proper bodily comportment for Eurological musicians and listeners alike is a stiff and restrained one. Gustafson (2008) describes several incidents in which teachers used the norms of white bodily comportment to demean their African-American students’ affective and kinetic musical responses. Hip-hop is utterly incompatible with white bodily comportment. This fact presents both a major challenge to its adoption by teachers, and an opportunity to critically examine the racialized norms of the classroom.

Hip-hop as musical revolution

In order to adapt to hip-hop musical practices, classically trained music educators must question many of their own musical norms and values. Of all the diverse forms that popular music takes, hip-hop poses the greatest challenge to the modes of thought most familiar to the Western classical habitus. Hip-hop is rapped rather than sung; it is cyclical rather than linear; it is produced rather than performed; it uses samples and other forms of intertextuality rather than valuing the “original” expression of a lone composer; it is improvisational rather than score-driven; and it originates in marginalized minority communities of low socioeconomic status rather than among aristocratic or academic elites.

Hip-hop as a worldview

Hip-hop is not a music genre, it is “a distinct worldview with related sensibilities and epistemologies that can inform teaching and learning” (Petchauer, 2011, p. 1412). The hip-hop aesthetic is an adaptation to the urban environment, particularly as experienced by poor and working-class people of color. Beyond music, hip-hop manifests as dance styles adapted to the constraints of sidewalks, subway platforms, and housing project courtyards; as murals painted on ugly urban infrastructure; as streetwear turned into couture; and as a seemingly inexhaustible stream of new slang words. Beyond its formal musical innovations, hip-hop represents an outlook on social and economic organization that stands in opposition to America’s dominant institutional culture.

Definition(s) of hip-hop

This dissertation uses the word hip-hop to describe a culture, and rap to describe a musical expression of that culture. The word “rap” also describes a musical technique, a kind of rhythmic musical talking that appears in blues, R&B, rock, country and many other genres. Conversely, rap is not the only musical genre to emerge from hip-hop culture. Turntablism is a genre sharing many of rap’s formal qualities, but it centers on virtuoso record scratching, often without a vocalist. We might also describe contemporary R&B as a hip-hop genre. Some young people identify trap as a separate genre from older ”boom-bap” styles of rap, which would make it yet another hip-hop genre.

Some aficionados believe that not all rap is hip-hop. They use the term rap for the commercialized form of the music, while hip-hop describes “real” or “authentic” music (Lightstone, 2012, p. 42). By these standards, we might consider P Diddy to be rap, but Goodie Mob to be hip-hop (Krims, 2000). I will not make such value judgments here, but it is worth noting this sense of hip-hop as a term of praise, not just of neutral description.

Music models relationships

Music models, practices and explores the relationships of our world, not as they are, but as we wish them to be. Musicking is a way of knowing “the experiential world of relationships in all its complexity—and in knowing it, we learn how to live well in it” (Small, 1998, p. 50). Turino (2008) distinguishes participatory music from presentational music. In African cultures, music is “an interactive human activity in which everyone is expected to participate: there are no detached listeners, but rather a communion of participants” (Wilson, 2001, p. 161). Hip-hop’s potential significance for music education is greater than its popularity or musical influence, because, in its grassroots organization, it presents a stark metaphorical contrast to the pyramid-shaped hierarchy of the orchestra or marching band.

The blackness of rap

While rap is a culturally hybrid music, it is nevertheless a fundamentally black one: it is derived from black American and Caribbean oral culture and musical traditions; it mainly speaks in the language of African-American Vernacular English; and its political location in society is distinctly ascribed to urban black communities (Perry, 2004, p. 10). Rap is more determined by Afrodiasporic vernacular traditions than rock, jazz, or any other popular form of the past century. It uses little harmony, and even less melody in the traditional sense. When orchestral instruments appear in rap, they are likely to have been sampled or emulated via software. The music is dominated by the voice and drums. Rap’s African and African-American influence is further reflected in its participatory nature (Wilson, 2001), as opposed to the presentational tradition of European art music.

Why should the music of America’s most marginalized racial minority so dominate its popular culture? Small (2011) attributes the appeal of black music to the resistance it poses to America’s Puritanical industrial capitalist culture, which he calls “the rational god.” Capitalism can be incompatible with people’s basic emotional needs, and many people turn to music for relief. “[T]he people of the African diaspora have been intimately acquainted with the rational god for nearly five hundred years, far longer… than any other of the world’s peoples, and their musicking and their dancing have been tools by means of which they have learned to confront the god and his monstrous system, and to survive” (Small, 2011, p. 481). While rappers who have attained wealth ostentatiously celebrate it, this is not the same as celebrating capitalism, as I will discuss below.

Keeping it real

Hip-hop culture holds “realness” as a core value. It therefore “foregrounds identity with an explicitness well-nigh unprecedented even in the ethnically and gender-loaded world of popular musics” (Krims, 2000, p. 9). Realness, in the autobiographical sense, is at odds with the value that music educators place on performance of repertoire from far outside students’ own culture and experience. “Singing another person’s song void of its contexts would not be keeping it real. Nor would creating music that does not connect in anyway to one’s individual local experiences” (Kruse, 2016, p. 54). Realness is not the same thing as originality, but the two are intertwined. Rappers frequently use existing beats and loops, and sampling and quotation are ubiquitous. However, there is a stigma against “biting” (stealing) from another rapper or producer (Söderman & Folkestad, 2004, p. 323), and rappers rarely cover each other’s songs even with attribution. Performing standardized arrangements of rap repertoire in ensembles would not be keeping it real; having students write their own lyrics would be more in keeping with this value.

The informal economy

Hip-hop has a close relationship to capitalism, but while it is loaded with materialistic content and imagery, it rejects bourgeois values. Rappers respect hustle, but are cynical about America’s cherished narratives of meritocracy and the Puritan work ethic. “The majority of the world lives in cities and every city has a slum. Everybody in those slums is trying to get out but is being held back by the system. Every city’s ’informal economy’ provides a way (in many cases the only way) to bridge the class divide. Hip-hop is about THAT” (Gibbs, 2018). When rappers name luxury brands, they are signifying on capitalism more than necessarily celebrating it. “Brands of old-world “foreign” opulence sound better in the escaped slave’s mouth” (McCarthy, 2018, n.p.). While commercial rap songs are not usually overtly critical of capitalism, they do open a space where such critique is possible.

The cypher

A cypher (also spelled cipher) is a round-robin circle of hip-hop improvisors: rappers, poets, or breakdancers. Each participant should pick up immediately after the previous one leaves off, to keep the flow steady (Toni Blackman, personal communication, 2018.) The cypher is simultaneously a competition and a community. Acceptance into the community is less a matter of your technical ability, and more a matter of your willingness to step into the circle, tell your story, and demonstrate your uniqueness (Chang, 2009). The idea of an ad-hoc community of risk-taking improvisors working together to sustain flow has potential applicability in music education far beyond the hip-hop context. Cyphers are similar to jam sessions in jazz and other instrumental musics. But while jazz improvisation can be an impersonal technical exercise, rappers are communicating verbally, and therefore must communicate more directly. The cypher model is not limited to artistic contexts; Emdin (2011) structures science classes around it as well, with students sharing what they have learned or questions they have.

Hip-hop aesthetics

Rose (1994) identifies three defining characteristics of artistic expression in hip-hop: flow, layering, and rupture in line. Layering is easiest to hear in the densely overlapping samples in Public Enemy tracks, a sound that Krims (2000) describes as the “hip-hop sublime” (p. 39). Flow is a synonym for rapping generally, and is also used to describe a particular emcee’s style or technique in particular (e.g. “that verse uses Migos triplet flow”). Flow is also apparent in the fluid lines of graffiti. Rupture would appear to be the diametric opposite of flow, but Rose (1994) argues that rap unites the two in a kind of yin and yang equilibrium: “Rap music relies on the loop, on the circularity of rhythm and on the ‘cut’ or the break beat that systematically ruptures equilibrium. Yet, in rap, the ‘break beat’ itself is looped–repositioned as repetition, as equilibrium inside the rupture” (p. 70). Breaking and graffiti similarly rely on the balancing of rupture and flow for their aesthetic power.

Groove structures

Aside from emceeing, the most conspicuous feature of rap music is its extreme repetitiveness. The loop is the fundamental structural unit of rap, as it is for electronic dance music (Butler, 2012, p. 35) and for the pop genres descending from them. It is common for drum loops or samples to repeat through the whole duration of a rap instrumental, and they sometimes do so without any variation or interruption at all, as in “Kick, Push” by Lupe Fiasco (2006). Predictable, open-ended groove structures are a common feature of participatory musics (Turino, 2008). “In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it’” (Snead, 1984, p. 67). Many formally trained musicians of my acquaintance dismiss rap for its repetitiveness, but this aspect of the music is its central feature, not a defect.

In groove-oriented music, large-scale harmonic movement is usually absent, and medium-scale progressions may be absent as well. Some iconic rap songs, like “Sucker MCs” by Run-DMC (1984), have no pitched content at all. Rhythms and timbres may be densely complex within repeated cells, but those cells repeat in even, predictable groupings. This makes groove musics compatible with the copy-and-paste affordances of digital music tools. “[I]n electronic music, there’s a lot of ways to create something that runs—that is static, but nevertheless, it’s creating something. Take a drum computer: you turn it on and it plays a pattern… the pattern is there, but the action of the person who is playing the drum computer is changing the pattern” (Robert Henke, quoted in Butler, 2014, p. 105). While it is difficult for a human drummer to sustain an identical groove for long periods without getting bored or distracted, computers have no such limitation.

Producers and beatmakers can listen to their own creations at length in an effortless and detached way. The regularity of the groove frees up attentional bandwidth, allowing the listener to focus more deeply on “performance microstructure” (Pressing, 2002, p. 290) and timbral nuance. Hip-hop producers will routinely listen to an unvarying loop or sample for hours or even days at a time, an uncanny and surreal experience with no precedent in musical history, aside from the tape loop experiments of a few twentieth-century avant-gardists. It remains to be seen what long-term cultural effects this suddenly ubiquitous listening experience will have.

Irreverence

African-Americans have a long tradition of irreverent verbal virtuosity, and not just in musical or literary contexts. Blackman (2014) points out that rap battles have a precursor in “playing the dozens,” in which participants compete to insult one another using audacious wordplay. Gaunt (2006) draws a connection between rap’s taunting cadences and black girls’ playground games. Both the blues and the baaadman tales of the nineteenth century have similar lyrical themes to modern rap, and these forms also prefigure rap’s sexual explicitness and depictions of violence. The black vernacular figures of the baaadman and the trickster “embody a challenge to virtually all authority (which makes sense to people for whom justice is a rare thing), creates an imaginary upside-down world where the oppressed are the powerful, and it reveals to listeners the pleasures and price of reckless abandon” (Kelley, 1996, p. 187). Rap listeners are not necessarily supposed to take violent or antisocial lyrics literally, any more than viewers of mafia movies are meant to understand those depictions as endorsements of extortion and murder.

Profane rap lyrics are problematic in educational contexts, to say the least. I am regularly asked by other educators to recommend “clean” rap songs they can play in class. Rather than pointing them to various Spotify playlists, I have started recommending that students simply write their own lyrics. This solves the profanity problem, while also aligning better with the hip-hop ethos of participation and “keeping it real.”

Sampling

Musical interpretation is a crucial form of musical understanding generally. By interpreting the music, we internalize it and imbue it with our own expression and meaning. Recordings pose a problem for musical interpretation because they lock in a specific idea of how a song is “supposed” to sound. This is especially true in current popular music, in which the specific sonic qualities of the recording are as salient as the underlying performances, notes, and lyrics. Hip-hop and electronic dance music present an alternative method of interpretation: using recordings themselves as raw material for new expression. Rather than viewing a track’s familiarity as an interpretive limitation, sampling producers use it as a vector for new emotional associations. Hip-hop lays aesthetic stress on “the sheer social and cultural distance which formerly separated the diverse elements now dislocated into novel meanings by their provocative aural juxtaposition” (Gilroy, 1993, p. 104). The expressive power of such juxtaposition has potential applications for interpretive engagement with recordings in any genre.

Sampling does not simply juxtapose different source material together. It also juxtaposes the sampled material with itself, by connecting the end of a phrase with its beginning. In so doing, “looping automatically recasts any musical material it touches, insofar as the end of a phrase is repeatedly juxtaposed with its beginning in a way that was not intended by the original musician. After only a few repetitions, this juxtaposition… begins to take on an air of inevitability. It begins to gather a compositional weight that far exceeds its original significance” (Schloss, 2013, p. 137). The hypnotic repetition of digital sampling aligns well with the groove-oriented traditions of the West African diaspora, so it is no wonder that hip-hop and the digital audio workstation are so intertwined and coemergent.

Rap as a producer’s medium

New technologies “do not simply enhance preexisting practices of cultural production and consumption; they help to undermine the producer/ consumer dichotomy itself” (Sinnreich, 2010, p. 75, emphasis in original). The use of music consumption technologies like turntables and cassette decks as production tools is an expression of “black vernacular technological creativity” (Fouché, 2006, p. 640).

Popular music is an aural art created by recording and manipulating audio. “[F]or those who create popular music, whether described as performers, composers, producers, etc., the separation of technical and creative roles is problematic and might not reflect their reality… Composition and performance (and production, for that matter) are so interrelated that any qualitative distinction is meaningless and would not represent the ways in which many people create popular music” (Moir & Medbøe, 2015, p. 151). When I examine the microrhythmic groove of a J Dilla track, am I studying a performance, or a composition? “The development of DAWs, where both the mechanical grid and the ‘deviations’ can be very deliberately controlled, impacts both composition and performance, blurring the line between them” (Danielsen, 2010, p. 214).

Rap namechecks its own mediating technologies

Rap, like contemporary dance music, exposes its mediating technologies rather than concealing them (Danielsen, 2010, p. 3). Rap’s tendency to foreground technology is apparent in tracks that “accentuate the pops and hisses in a sample, assuring us (in a reversal of traditional notions of authenticity) that what we are hearing is not live instrumentation, but a distinctly mechanized sound fragment. In rap, technological mediation becomes the sign of the authentic” (Nielson, 2010, p. 1264). Some rappers go so far as to namecheck the technologies used to create or play back their songs, especially turntables and Roland TR-808 drum machines.

We can also hear rap’s foregrounding of mediating technology in its overt use of Auto-Tune (Strachan, 2017; Clayton, 2016). In pop music, Auto-Tune signifies a kind of detachment and artificiality, but rappers like Kanye West and Drake have used it as an outlet for raw emotional outpouring. The developers of Auto-Tune intended it to be used at the end of the vocal production process, to correct singers’ mistakes. However, rappers tend to use Auto-Tune at the beginning of the process instead, applying it to the playback of their own vocals in headphones during live recording. In such cases, there is no “real” performance prior to Auto-Tune.

Songs vs tracks

Like most other contemporary popular forms, rap songs are aural artifacts whose canonical form is the recording, not the notated composition—it is vanishingly unusual for rap to be notated in any form. Particularly in its instrumental aspects, the distinction between a rap song and its recorded realization is meaningless. “The term “sound” has taken on a peculiar material character that cannot be separated either from the “music” or, more importantly, from the sound recording as the dominant medium of reproduction” (Théberge, 1997, pp. 190–191). While there are instrumentalists who play rap songs “live,” e.g. The Roots, the dominant performance instrument in hip-hop is the turntable, or its digital equivalent. Recording playback is an increasingly common component of pop performance across genres, but while rock bands usually work hard to conceal this fact, rap artists proudly foreground it. Musicians in genres ranging from classical to jazz to country hold the live performance as sacred, and I have heard bitter complaints from all of these groups about the recording-centrism of hip-hop.

Product vs process

Consumerist cultures treat music as a product rather than a process. However, in digital music, any recording can be raw material for new expression, and there need never be any final, stable product at all. Digital audio production therefore renders the product/process distinction effectively moot. “Perhaps the digital musician is making a new kind of music, and the musical situation is once again coming to resemble the informal, process-based, communal activity of some parts of the non-Western world” (Hugill, 2012, p. 222). The communal aspect is particularly visible in sampling and remixing. Some samples, like the drum break in “The Funky Drummer Parts One and Two” by James Brown (1970), appear in hundreds of commercial releases and uncountably more amateur productions. While this sample legally belongs to James Brown’s estate, and perhaps morally to the drummer Clyde Stubblefield, it has become de facto communal property. Conversely, there are some iconic tracks using samples of samples of samples of samples. Consider, for example, “Workin’ On It” by Dwele (2008), which samples “Workinonit” by J Dilla (2006), which samples “King of the Beats” by Mantronix (1988), which samples “Pump That Bass” by Original Concept (1986), which samples “Close (To The Edit)” by Art of Noise (1984), which samples “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes (1983), which samples Stravinsky’s ”Firebird Suite: Infernal Dance of All the Subjects of Kastchei” as recorded by Josef Krips and Philharmonia Orchestra (1965). Such chains of appropriation destabilize the idea of music as exclusive commercial property, culturally if not legally.

Hip-hop pedagogy

Hip-hop education is a specialized version of culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2015). Such pedagogy uses “the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning more relevant to and effective for them” (Gay, 2000, p. 29). Villegas and Lucas (2002) identified six characteristic traits of culturally responsive teachers: 1) sociocultural consciousness, a recognition that our perceptions are influenced by our social identities; 2) seeing students’ diverse backgrounds as resources for learning rather than deficits to be overcome; 3) a sense of responsibility for bringing about educational change; 4) an understanding of how students construct knowledge, and how to foster that construction; 5) knowledge about students’ lives; and 6) the ability to deliver instruction that builds on students’ existing knowledge while “stretching them beyond the familiar” (p. 21). Cultural responsiveness has potentially transformative implications for music education.

Praxialism

Hip-hop education aligns with a praxial philosophy of music education. For praxialists, educative teaching values caretaking of students above all other pedagogical considerations. Such teaching consists of “active reflection and critically reflective action dedicated to supporting and advancing human flourishing and well-being, the ethical care of others, and the positive transformation of people’s everyday lives” and “each instance of music should be conceived, taught and learned as a social praxis—as a fusion of people, processes, products, and ethical ‘goods’ in specific social-cultural contexts” (Elliott & Silverman, 2015, p. 52). A social praxis like music is where people develop virtue, and this is only possible under an ethos of care.

Formal instrument tuition often takes the form of training rather than education (Green, 2002, p. 128). If music only consisted of technical procedures, then it would perhaps be acceptable to focus on “purely musical” matters, and not to worry about social or ethical concerns. However, praxial thinking insists that music is intrinsically social, and that educators therefore have a responsibility to recognize this social aspect and its attendant ethical implications. Music is more than just a ”pleasure technology” in Pinker’s (1994) sense. Instead, it exists “within the broader ethical context of human development and well-being—as a fundamental, empathic, and embodied sense-making capacity that plays a central role in how we enact the personal and socio-cultural worlds we inhabit” (van der Schyff et al, 2016, p. 83). Music education can not be limited to “purely musical” considerations, because all music is inseparably entangled with its context.

Embodiment

Schools implicitly accept the Cartesian mind-body split by asking children and teenagers to sit unnaturally still and unnaturally quietly for hours at a time. If learning is something happening solely in the mind, the thinking goes, who cares what the body is doing? Praxialists reject such dualism, instead following contemporary neuroscientists who view the mind as embodied and enactive (Damásio, 1994). If mind and body are coextensive, then educators must take care of students’ physical and emotional needs if they expect real learning to take place. Hip-hop is a African-centered epistemology (Petchauer, 2015, p. 88), which treats affective and emotional experiences as valid and critical ways of knowing the world and building knowledge, which aligns it more with the praxial view, as opposed to the Eurocentric Enlightenment epistemology that privileges disembodied reason and rationality.

The work-concept vs the contextual/social/praxial-concept

According to traditional Western musicology, music consists of context-free objects: composed works and discrete improvisations (Elliott & Silverman, 2015, p. 66). The “work-concept” of music locates value and meaning within the formal aspects of the work: melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre and so on. However, rather than seeing music as a thing, praxialists argue that we should us to see it as a practice, an activity, or a process. To assess the value or meaning of music, we must consider its embodied, enactive and enculturated aspects along with its formal content.

The praxial view has practical repercussions for hip-hop educators. We might understand a rap song to be nihilistic and destructive, or to be prophetic and empowering. The praxial view is that “both are right, which means that there is limited truth in each position. Educators and observers are caught between these two poles when analyses of hip-hop start and end with texts (i.e., rap songs) rather than the broader creative practices, spaces, and lives that make up hip-hop” (Petchauer, 2012, p. 3). We can use the practice of ecological listening (Clarke, 1995) to look beyond works to the broader context in which they were produced. Ecological listening to rap would consider the role that irony and exaggeration play in gangsta rap personas, and the difference between a depiction of antisocial behavior and an endorsement of it. English teachers learn to put violent and misogynistic Shakespeare plays to constructive and educative use; music educators can learn to do the same with rap.

Critical popular music pedagogy

Education in democracies should foster critical thinking and pluralistic values in citizens. Because popular music is culturally prominent and ideologically contested, it is a useful object for critical study. The study of popular music can “develop the kind of critical awareness that makes people less vulnerable to totalizing (universalizing, or totalitarian) thought, to capitalism’s voracious need for willing consumers, or to the potent semiotic forces at work in the musics that now pervade almost every aspect of everyday life” (Bowman, 2004, p. 39). While much popular music is of low quality at best and propagandistic at worst, this is all the more reason to teach students to approach it with analytical rigor.

Musical value is socially contextual

Musical value is a form of social capital and is therefore socially contextual. “Listeners are easily drawn to or repelled by specific social-cultural meanings, by the luster of associations they apprehend in or attribute to particular kinds of musical patterns” (Elliott & Silverman, 2015, pp. 262-263). There can never be a single objective or stable assessment of musical value, “because cultures are never static and there is more than one social group in the world. When value appears fixed or stable or hegemonic—conventional—it is only because there are many people and institutions working to keep it that way” (Taylor, 2017, p. 192). Arguments about the musical merits of hip-hop are political as much as they are aesthetic.

The idea of a “core” music curriculum, a root of the tree of music, is pervasive among educators. Even progressives tend to argue in favor of greater inclusion within the core, rather than questioning the idea of the core itself. However, in order to have any hope of reconciling the conflicts between European classical and hip-hop value systems, it will be necessary to stop thinking of the classical tradition as “the root of the tree.” If hip-hop enters the canon, the canon will lose much of its meaning. This presents an opportunity to reconceive curricular presentation of the world’s musics non-hierarchically, or rhizomatically as per Deleuze and Guattari (1987). “Can we conceive of curriculum as a complex web of plateaus where “neighbors” (and all knowledges are conceived as neighbors) dialogue with and inform each other? How can the study of Ghanaian music inform the study of hip-hop and the study of hip-hop inform the study of Western classical music and so on” (Hess, 2015, p. 342)? A rhizomatic curriculum can be an inviting home not just for hip-hop, but for noncanonical musics of all kinds.

Being hip-hop

Kruse (2016) advocates that we make our goal not just teaching hip-hop skills and songs, but actually being hip-hop. We are being hip-hop when we keep it real, flip the script, make some noise, and stay fresh. All of these ways of being flow from the values of culturally responsive pedagogy.

Flipping the script

Flipping the script refers to “turning the tables, doing the unexpected, or deviating from the norm” (Kruse, 2016, p. 54). Another sense of the phrase is “to demonstrate resourcefulness with limited resources.” This is an ability that is all to pertinent to budget-limited music educators. A sense of scrappy inventiveness is a unifying theme of hip-hop origin narratives. In a documentary about A Tribe Called Quest (Rapaport, 2011), the rapper and producer Q-Tip explains the laborious process of creating “pause tapes” on his home stereo system by pausing and unpausing recording on the cassette deck while replaying the desired section of the source record over and over.

Feelin’ it

Hip-hop is meant to be felt, not just seen and/or heard. “[A] fundamental quality of any authentic hip-hop activity is when the audience or participants experience a deep, affective resonation illustrated through some kinetic response. In other words, they’re feeling it, which is signified by the common refrain I feel you in hip-hop nation language” (Petchauer, 2012, p. 72). Dance is an especially important kinetic response for understanding and appreciating hip-hop. Schloss (2009) has his students dance to the music they will be discussing at the beginning of each class session: “I have found that there are things that one can learn about a song instantly by dancing to it, which might take hours to articulate verbally. When you discover what kinds of movement can be performed to a song—and what kinds cannot—you discover a wealth of information about the social and physical environments in which it was intended to be heard, how the musicians viewed those environments, what their priorities were, and so forth” (p. 10). Among my interlocutors in the hip-hop world, making the listener feel good (or at least feel strongly) is the sole valid criterion of musical quality.

Make some noise

Hip-hop audiences are not passive and silent; they give bodily, kinetic responses, including shouts, call-and-response, and other audience participation—in other words, they make some noise. (Compare this to the strict formal silence of the concert hall.) Kinetic and affective responses to music are only one aspect of hip-hop’s participatory ethos (Dimitriadis, 2009). In urban black and Latino communities, rapping is a regular youth pastime, more of a playground game than a specialized art activity. In the Harlem afterschool program where I am teaching as of this writing, every student in the room can freestyle verses, though with varying degrees of ability and enthusiasm.

Ahhh, this stuff is really fresh

Hip-hop pedagogy values freshness. “Like hip-hop, fresh music classrooms are in a state of constant evolution and renewal to not only be fresh, but stay fresh” (Kruse, 2016, p. 56). Freshness and newness often go together, but they are not the same thing. In hip-hop, “fresh” is one of uncountably many synonyms for “cool” or “good.” The hip-hop usage of “fresh“ could be referencing any of the original senses of the word: new, refreshing (“fresh water”), appetizing (“fresh produce”), attractive (“fresh-faced”), or uncouth (“don’t get fresh”) (Hein, 2015). Valuing freshness stands in direct opposition to valuing an official and unchanging canon.

Risks and drawbacks of hip-hop education

The meanings of music derive as much from its social context as from its content (Elliott & Silverman, 2015). When popular music becomes part of the curriculum, “its very presence often means that it ceases to be considered as ‘pop music’ by the pupils… Most teachers would be likely to agree that, as far as pupils are concerned, the Beatles belong to the classical realm… So music that carries positive delineations for pupils inside the classroom is hard to come by, and even harder to sustain as part of a curriculum” (Green, 2006, p. 105). Hip-hop educators face a steep challenge: to maintain the positive delineations of students’ music in the social context of school. This challenge is not only a matter of curriculum design; it requires rethinking of the social roles and relationships in the classroom as well.

Can hip-hop live in the authoritarian culture of school music?

Freire (2000) draws a distinction between authoritative educators, who show mastery of subject matter, ethics, and mentoring ability, with authoritarian educators, who drum knowledge into students without ethical considerations. Music education in the United States has an authoritarian history, as it is rooted in the “distinct yet overlapping cultures” of military bands, church choirs, and European classical orchestras. Each of these cultures values perfection and uniformity, values that are at odds with the constructivist values of individuality, differentiation, and freedom (Cremata, 2017, p. 66). It is an open question as to whether the antiauthoritarian ethos of hip-hop can exist in an authoritarian setting.

Schools define musical legitimacy

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of what we now call ”classical” music was experienced as ”popular,” including opera and wind bands. Before the middle of the twentieth century, music educators worked to foster lifelong amateur participation (Kratus, in press). Why, then, do American schools no longer teach the music that is broadly popular? Humphries (2004) points to several historical causes: educators’ desire to reform mass tastes rather than follow them; cultural bias, particularly a widespread discomfort with youth culture; institutional preferences for teaching cognitively-oriented “art“ music over affectively-oriented social dance music; the conservative tendencies of local control; and classical music’s role as a marker of upward class mobility. Canonical education is oriented more toward elevating students’ tastes than validating them.

Educators have an “ideological power that is disproportionate to the number of people engaged in their species of musical activity” (Cavicchi, 2009, p. 101). It is a truism of music education advocacy that playing an instrument builds a child’s self-confidence (e.g. NAfME, 2014). However, music education experiences can just as easily undermine confidence by making students feel incompetent and unmusical (Ruddock & Leong, 2005). “It is in relation to the dominant school-based genre that pupils form judgements of musical worth, have musical encounters and ultimately decide if the understanding of ‘musician’ presented in the school context relates to their own understanding of themselves” (Saunders, 2010, p. 74). If music teachers music neglect or denigrate some forms of musicality, then they create the sense that those forms do not count as musicality at all. Thus it is possible for a friend of mine to lament that he “stopped playing music” when he gave up classical flute in school, only to tell me a moment later breath that, every Christmas, he sings carols and plays Latin percussion with his family (Elbert Garcia, personal communication, 2015). Fortunately, school music is not the only vector for music education. Like most popular musicians, I primarily learned informally from peers or on my own. Bell (2016) makes clear that as a “high school music dropout,” he ”quit school music, not music” (p. 243, emphasis in original). Still, the stigma of official “failure” is a heavy psychological burden to carry.

School resistance as political opposition

When students reject school music culture, they may do so overtly via classroom disruption or other misbehavior. But most students who find school music unappealing simply muddle through required classes and then opt not to enroll in available electives. Resistance theorists urge us to see such nonparticipation as a form of political opposition rather than mere apathy or disinterest. “The concept of resistance… depicts a mode of discourse that rejects traditional explanations of school failure and oppositional behavior and shifts the analysis of oppositional behavior from the theoretical terrains of functionalism and mainstream educational psychology to those of political science and sociology… it has little to do with deviance and learned helplessness, but a great deal to do with moral and political indignation” (Giroux, 1983, p. 289). This description certainly fits my experience, and that of many nonclassical musicians.

Stereotype threat

When music teachers present canonical musics as more valid than students’ preferred musics, they “challenge the legitimacy of their students’ deeply felt musical experiences and therefore—whether they intend to or not—begin from the position of a threat” (Cavicchi, 2009, p. 100). This threat is most acute when students identify as belonging to marginalized groups. Delpit (2013) defines “stereotype threat” as “the experience of anxiety or concern in a situation where a person has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about the social group to which they belong” (p. 17). A music teacher who wishes only to expose students to “the best” music may in fact unintentionally impose a feeling of stereotype threat.

Authenticity

The word “authenticity” derives etymologically from the Greek authentes, meaning both “one who acts with authority” and “made by one’s own hand.” Its usage has evolved to mean freedom from external pressures, resistance to the dominant culture and institutions, or a more general sense of rootedness, of genuineness, of keeping it real. We can understand authenticity to be a ”plausible narrative of the self” (Spicer, 2011). If students are to be meaningfully creative, then they must maintain the freedom to be their authentic selves amid the domineering narratives of the school’s authority.

Parkinson and Smith (2015) argue that the school context is antithetical to natural expression, and that it therefore intrinsically robs popular music of its authenticity (p. 95). Green (2006) warns that teaching popular music inauthentically defeats the purpose of including it: “If its authentic production and transmission practices are missing from the curriculum, and if we are unable to incorporate them into our teaching strategies, we will be dealing with a simulacrum, or a ghost of popular music in the classroom, and not the thing itself” (p. 107). The challenge of hip-hop educators, then, is to create space in a formal curriculum for the informal and personal nature of hip-hop creativity.

Can (and should) hip-hop be “schoolified”?

In 2009, McNally Smith College of Music in Minnesota became the first institution to offer an accredited major in hip-hop. Harvard University has founded the Hip-Hop Archive, while New York University has created the Hip-Hop and Pedagogy Initiative (Petchauer, 2012, p. 4). “In American music education contexts, when we introduce topics in school contexts, we ‘schoolify’ them. We make them presentable to groups and digestible to larger constituencies” (Cremata, 2017, p. 73). Is it possible or desirable to schoolify hip-hop?

Flipping the misogynist script

The commercial rap industry has elevated the “gangsta-pimp-ho” trio of stereotypes “to the point where it now dominates the genre’s storytelling worldview” (Rose, 2012, p. 4). While commercial rap is not necessarily any more violent or antisocial than any other part of American popular culture, its blunt misogyny is problematic. Rap videos on YouTube “instruct” young people in “pornographic, sexist models of behavior” (Gaunt, 2015, p. 209). Educators understandably balk at presenting such material. However, Tobias (2014) points out that while rap frequently carries misogynistic content, it also has the potential to challenge patriarchal roles. Hip-hop can be an avenue for students to express, performing, or “doing” their genders. Tobias further argues that music educators have a responsibility to create an alternative space for engagement from the limited roles available in commercial culture.

Can we operationalize rap?

Curriculum developers operationalize school subjects by overlaying them with a “grid of knowledge and experience consisting of “techniques, measurable knowledge and progressive methods of learning” (Stålhammar, 2003, p. 65). When students encounter music in the context of the grid, they may come to associate it with formalism and control. Rap has yet to be formalized in any meaningful way. Anyone who wishes to do so will find that traditional methods of music analysis are of limited validity at best when applied to rap (Adams, 2015). The question of how to formally present “sampling, layering, ruptures, wreck, percussive disruption, and the like in classrooms or at the programmatic level” (Petchauer, 2015, p. 88) remains an open one. The hip-hop educators in my study take an informal and improvisational approach, but it is uncertain whether this modus operandi could work at a large scale.

How do we prevent cultural appropriation?

Gray (2017) usefully separates cultural appropriation into two separate issues: cultural and/or economic exploitation, and cultural disrespect. Our concern about cultural appropriation should really be directed toward preventing exploitation and disrespect. We should ask whether there is a historic record of exploitation between the appropriator and the originating group; whether the originating group and its culture are being respected or degraded; whether the appropriator is claiming to be the owner or originator; and whether the appropriation is generating economic or political value for the appropriator that is not available to the originators.

Will opposing cultural appropriation limit creativity, cultural exchange, and innovation?

If we try to prevent appropriation, how do we determine who owns a given cultural artifact or practice? How can a group give or deny permission for others to use their culture? “It’s not as if each ethnic group has a council or bureaucratic agency that processes requests for cultural exchange like ASCAP licenses music” (Gray, 2017, n.p.). We might challenge the harms of appropriation through strategic anti-essentialism, defined by Lipsitz (1994, p. 63) as identification with a group to which you do not belong, in order to express or become who you are.

A case study in cultural appropriation: Chris Thile and Kendrick Lamar

On the February 6, 2016 broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, the mandolinist Chris Thile performed a cover of “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar (2015). It was an improbable song selection for that artist and that audience. Online reaction was broadly negative—Stereogum included the performance on their “worst playlist of 2016” (Lapatine, 2016)—and Thile later told the New York Times that he regretted performing the song (Streep, 2016). Thile intended nothing but sincere admiration for Lamar and his song, and it was a musically impeccable performance. By the “work-concept” of music, Thile’s performance was a success. To understand why it nevertheless fostered such a negative reaction, we must take a praxial view of music, one that considers social and political context to be intrinsic to musical meaning (Elliott & Silverman, 2015).

Thile’s performance raises questions for music educators who might wish to incorporate hip-hop in their classroom. How does someone like Chris Thile progress artistically without embracing musical influences that challenge him? Can he explore Kendrick Lamar’s music without imitating him? Is his performance cultural appropriation? Would there be a way to perform Kendrick’s music without appropriating it? Indeed, given how much of the meaning of Kendrick’s music revolves around autobiographical truth-telling, is it possible for anyone to cover his songs successfully?

As we step back from the specific example of Chris Thile, we can consider the phenomenon of rap covers by white performers generally. Is this kind of cross-cultural performance always harmful and destructive? If we are to exclude songs like “Alright” from performance repertoire, should we perform any songs whose subjects are remote from the performers’ own experiences? Is performance of existing songs an appropriate approach to rap? Cover songs are vanishingly unusual in the hip-hop context. Lyrics are supposed to be personal and “real.” Some rappers do employ ghostwriters, but this is viewed as a shameful practice, one always conducted in secret. It is more common for a rapper to play a recording of another rapper’s song during a concert than to do a cover of it. This norm stands in marked contrast to the way that rap artists casually sample, remix and quote the work of others. It is common to perform new lyrics rap over another artist’s instrumental; such tracks have been mixtape mainstays for decades.

Summary/Conclusion

For generations, American school music programs have structured themselves around the paradigm of the director-led performing ensemble. This paradigm presumes that performing notated works is a skeleton key capable of unlocking students’ understanding of any kind of music. As progressive educators work to diversify ensemble repertoire to include more popular and multicultural musics, the underlying paradigm remains unchallenged. Among all current popular styles, rap is the least suited to the score-based ensemble model. Rather than trying to shoehorn rap into the repertoire, music educators should approach the music according to the norms of hip-hop culture. Students should write their own lyrics, produce their own beats, and create their own remixes, and they should use these methods for genuine self-expression.

Hip-hop creativities are not only useful for understanding hip-hop. Students can use sampling and signifying to engage any kind of music. They can keep it real even when working with source material that is remote from their own context, using that material in fresh ways. The canonical classical composers “sampled” from vernacular songs and hymns, from one another, and from themselves. Jazz is an art form built substantially on the “remixing” of blues and standard tunes. Students should feel free to continue to converse actively with these musics, rather than treating them as museum artifacts. And just as rap is a musical technique that long predates hip-hop, so can it still be used outside the hip-hop context as well. Toni Blackman has performed freestyle rap as a soloist in jazz ensembles (Snell & Söderman, 2014), and there is no reason high school jazz performers could not do the same.

What is music education for? Why do we teach music in schools, beyond “art for art’s sake”? Participation in music is rehearsal for ways of being both in the world within oneself. Director-led ensembles teach students to be part of an organization, to follow direction, to subsume individuality into a collective, to exercise discipline and focus, and to practice white bodily comportment. Hip-hop prepares rappers and beatmakers to be part of small, ad-hoc peer networks, to assert individuality, to make the most of the resources at hand, to keep it real, to make some noise, and to be fresh. If educators wish to prepare students to succeed in American society as it is, playing in ensembles serves them well. However, if we want them to imagine alternatives, they may well be better served by producing hip-hop.

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