When Ben Stein entered Page Auditorium on Parent's Weekend, he announced his devotion to Dr. Dre. When Ferris Bueller's teacher tells your parents that rap is cool, you know it hasn't just hit the mainstream--it's settled in. Anyone? Yo, anyone?
Hip hop is a uniquely American music form, melding African and Caribbean oral traditions with percussive and musical rhythms. It encourages that ubiquitous American value, individuality, and thrives when its rhymes and forms evolve. Hip hop's fan base continues to grow, but it has been largely ignored by greater society, including, until recently, academia. Slowly, however, rap as an academic endeavor has gained appeal. An article in The New York Times entitled "Class with the Ph.D Diva" described a class at UCLA taught by Tricia Rose, the first person in America to write a Ph.D dissertation concentrating on hip hop, in 1993.
Currently offered at Duke is "The Language of Hip Hop Culture," represented in the English, Linguistics,
Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies fields. Next semester, Duke will add "Fight the Power: Hip-Hop," cross-listed between Literature, Music, Women's Studies and AAAS. The hip hop dance form has also had its own class this fall, to great popularity and campus exposure. Obviously, hip hop is widely recognized enough to merit study, but its many forms and differing cultural values mean it often defies categorization.
And what's the effect on hip hop itself? Why suddenly focus on a form of expression that's been around for a generation?
Vibe editor-in-chief Danyel Smith writes in his preface to Vibe History of Hip-Hop that the story of hip hop is "A tale from the dark side... hip hop is all. It's always there. [Hip hop] is about the intense kind of aspiration that comes from having little. About holding and rhyming into a microphone. Mixing and scratching. Guns pain blood. Desire desperation truth true love. Art and mystery and metaphor. The singularity of voice. The magnificence of ingenious sampling. The glory of a beat."
Moreover, hip hop has greater social implications: It has roots as a form of social commentary, within the black community to criticize and perhaps inspire hope and change in its surroundings. As hip hop's audience has grown, so has its profitability and bureaucracy. Mass-marketed music is difficult to sell without sacrificing some of its local, more critical relevance. The irony lies in the inverse relationship between hip hop's acceptance into the mainstream and its emergence as an academic subject. Hip hop's visibility as a music form and cultural indicator, and its entrance into the white world, has brought it to academic attention, but in turn the critical nature of hip hop, in itself so inherently academic, has waned.
Naturally, not all hip hop has lost its roots--that is the hip hop that bears the most study, which it may well receive. After all, can we really get any cultural inquiry out of P.I.M.P.?
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