A brief summary of my dissertation

If you are curious about it

I applied for something that asked for a ten page summary of my doctoral dissertation. Maybe you would like to read it, rather than the full 300 pages?

Learning Something Deep: Teaching to Learn and Learning to Teach Hip-Hop in New York City (summary)

Image: Toni Blackman leads a middle school songwriting workshop

In this dissertation, I present a narrative of learning to teach hip-hop, and of teaching to learn hip-hop. I document my process of learning hip-hop music education methods from practitioners, and of teaching music education students with those methods. The narrative begins with my inquiry into how hip-hop might best be included in school music programs, or more specifically, into the preparation of pre-service music teachers. I profile three hip-hop educators: teachers and teaching artists whose practice uses hip-hop music, aesthetics, and values to advance social justice goals. I then discuss putting these educators’ approaches into practice in a music education course that I taught at New York University. I examine the experiences and perspectives of students in this course in order to assess its effectiveness. Finally, I use all of the above to inform my proposed suggestions for the roles that hip-hop might play in university-level music education programs generally.

Throughout the study, I ask the following questions: What is hip-hop music education? What are its goals? What are its methods? How do we practice it ethically? In order to answer these questions, along with additional related and emergent questions, I situate the study in the larger context of popular music pedagogy in high schools, in teaching artist practices in school and community settings, and in the university programs that prepare teachers to do this work. I explore the role that hip-hop methods can play in the preparation of pre-service music educators. In particular, I examine the ways that hip-hop music education can support critical praxis and challenge the white racial frame of American music education.

As of 2017, rap was the most popular genre of music in the United States. As of 2019, it was the most popular genre with youth globally. In 2020, six of the top ten albums of the year were rap albums. The stylistic norms and creative ethics of rap are markedly different from the Western European classical music that forms the core of music teachers’ training and experience in the US. Hip-hop musicians who wish to obtain music teaching licensure must first gain a range of competencies in the Western “art” music tradition. Meanwhile, music teachers who might want to incorporate hip-hop’s musical content, aesthetics or creative processes must usually venture far beyond their knowledge base and stylistic comfort zone in order to do so.

In order to explore the question of how best to include hip-hop in the music classroom, I must first address larger questions about the goals and values of music education. Hip-hop presents unprecedented opportunities for advancing the goals of culturally responsive pedagogy, and it is a natural complement to the goal of centering student creativity. However, hip-hop also poses challenges to the music education field as a music, as a cultural practice, and as a pedagogy. The purpose of this study is to propose a method for bridging the aesthetic and political gaps between hip-hop and Western art music in an ethical and culturally sensitive manner.

I conducted my research in two phases. The first phase was a multiple case study of three hip-hop educators based in New York City.

• Toni Blackman is a teaching artist and former UN hip-hop cultural envoy who has taught freestyle rap since the 1990s both in the US and internationally in a variety of settings.

• Martin Urbach is a music teacher and Dean of Restorative Justice at a high school in Manhattan, working to span the gap between his own background as a jazz musician and the hip-hop-centric musical lives of his students.

• Brandon Bennett is a producer and emcee who is in the early stages of a career as an educator. I co-led a music production afterschool program with him in Harlem in 2019 called the Producer Club.

All three participants work with adolescents, and all three are motivated by a concern for social justice.

I also conducted an autoethnographic and ethnopedagogical study of my Popular Music Practicum class at New York University. This class was an opportunity apply lessons I had learned from Toni, Martin and Brandon. To create a portrait of the class, I combined my own observations, quotes from and discussions of students’ class projects, and in-depth interviews with four students. In this dissertation, I assess whether this class was a successful application of hip-hop methods in music teacher preparation. Finally, I use this discussion as a jumping-off point to imagine other ways that pre-service educators might learn and teach hip-hop.

I used two primary methods to collect and analyze data in this study: semi-structured interviews and audio remixing. My research data mainly consists of audio recordings of interviews and recordings of music referenced or created by my participants. I have presented the results of the study in two forms: as a traditional manuscript, and as an audio mixtape, a collection of music that tells the narrative of my study using hip-hop music as its medium. The mixtape is available for listening and downloading here. I invite the reader to simply listen through the mixtape on its own, as it is intended to stand alone as a musical experience.

Over the course of my interviews with the three hip-hop educators, I asked how and why they center hip-hop and other Afrodiasporic musics within their personal identities and practices as artists and educators, and how they use hip-hop to advance their social justice goals. These questions emerged as a result of reviewing the extant research literature, and in the course of conducting preliminary research and interviews with my participants. The interviews inquired into the resistances that these hip-hop educators have faced in their work, both in their own music education experiences and in their present working lives. I asked each participant to give their personal definitions of hip-hop, of music education, and of hip-hop education, in order to learn how they understand hip-hop as a musical genre, as a cultural identity, and as an ethos. I also asked how they reconcile the often offensive and controversial lyrics in commercial rap, especially when working with children. Finally, I asked how they make space for the anti-authoritarian culture of hip-hop within the authoritarian setting of school, and how they traverse generational differences in taste and aesthetics.

My interviews with my own students and my study of their class projects followed similar lines of inquiry. How much hip-hop and creativity has their musical training included? What was their experience of writing rap verses in my class? How do they think about issues of cultural appropriation, about language and content policing, and about the complex issues of race and identity inherent in hip-hop pedagogy?

My data sources included interviews and observation of my participants, as well as their publications, social media posts, musical releases, and, in the case of my students, their class projects. I placed this data in cultural context by mixing audio samples of interviews with relevant hip-hop tracks and other pertinent pieces of music. In conducting these interviews and analyses, I drew on experiences from my own life as a musician and educator. As I entered into hip-hop spaces that are culturally remote from my own upbringing, I used ethnographically informed modes of observation to learn from culture bearers and their music. I continued to apply ethnographic techniques to conversations with my students, and to analyses of their course work. Since the core of this study is in the teaching and learning of creative arts practice, I used arts-based research in analyzing and presenting my data.

The purpose of creating the mixtape was to motivate deep and repeated listening to my participants’ voices, and to the music they cite as important, or that they have created themselves. Hip-hop offers unique opportunities to the arts-based researcher, since its collage aesthetic makes it possible for the same track to be simultaneously the topic of inquiry and the medium for that inquiry. The mixtape format also offers musical context for the study, since I anticipate that many academic readers will be unfamiliar with the music under discussion. I further hope that the mixtape will reach a wider audience of people who may be disinclined to read a formal academic manuscript.

Hip-hop has potential in music education as a space where students learn to use electronic music production tools, where they engage recorded music as raw material, where they develop their expressive voices, and where they speak back critically to popular culture. However, in order for this potential to be realized, the music education field must overcome several obstacles. The largest is the hegemony of Western European classical tradition in the training of pre-service teachers. While music education programs are making admirable efforts to become more “diverse”, these efforts mainly take the form of additions to the Western “art” music core. That core remains substantially intact. Below, I discuss the many points of friction between the traditions of music education and the demands of hip-hop creativity, along with some educators’ efforts to ease that friction.

In considering the role of hip-hop in music education, it is helpful to examine the widely different ways that hip-hop musicians learn their craft versus the ways that young people learn music in school. I have observed young rappers and producers in the NYU CORE Music Program, in the Producer Club, and in my musical life generally. In all of these contexts, the pattern is consistent: rappers and producers begin writing or improvising original music at the immediate outset of their musical journey. This “do it yourself” ethic reminds me of the punk musicians I knew when I was growing up.

In school music, students spend many years learning existing repertoire. In classical music, composition is a rarefied activity, undertaken only by people who have mastered a broad variety of techniques and concepts. Since music teacher training is largely undertaken within classical music institutions, in-service teachers rarely have experience with songwriting or production. Students who create original music naturally want to do so in their preferred styles, but formal music education programs do not make much contact with those styles. Even if we bring popular music into the classroom, that may not be enough to invite authentic youth creativity. Hip-hop educators must find a way 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 educators to rethink the social roles and relationships in the classroom as well.

I asked my research participants whether hip-hop can benefit music education, and whether music education can benefit hip-hop. They agreed across the board that hip-hop can benefit music education by making it more culturally relevant and more supportive of student creativity. However, Toni Blackman and Martin Urbach differed as to whether music education can benefit hip-hop. Martin was clear: “Hip-hop doesn’t need music education. Music education needs hip-hop.” Toni, on the other hand, saw several ways that music education can support hip-hop culture. Institutions like schools can do a better job documenting and transmitting history than the music industry. Also, institutions can shine a light on the wider range of voices than one hears in the commercial mainstream. Brandon argued that schools can not teach hip-hop creativity and should not try to; instead, they should simply provide equipment, space and technical support, and trust young people to do the rest.

I share Toni’s belief that institutions can support and preserve the music in ways that the music industry cannot, or will not. I agree with Martin that few hip-hop artists have needed or wanted institutional support. And I agree with Brandon that the technical aspects of music will always be an easier fit with formal classroom settings than the creative aspects. It remains to be seen whether hip-hop culture can live authentically in university-level music education programs. However, I will argue that we should try, so that music educators can engage the music constructively when they encounter it in their professional lives. If we exclude hip-hop from educational spaces, then rap fans will be left with the products of the music industry, and those are a mixed bag at best. Meanwhile, formally trained musicians will continue to receive the implicit message that hip-hop is either too unimportant or of too low quality to merit their consideration. I do not expect many university-level music education programs to teach rap anytime soon, but they should at least temper their disdain for it. Toni says that one reason she did not major in music in college was because of the department’s outspoken hostility toward hip-hop. How many would-be hip-hop educators are being deterred from pursuing teaching credentials by similar attitudes?

In hip-hop slang, to school someone means to teach them a lesson. For example, in his song “Medicated” (2012), Wiz Khalifa raps: “Back when I was young I had dreams of getting richer, then my homie Breeze set me down, schooled me to the picture.” In this instance, schooling is a friendly act. However, it more usually carries a connotation of force, humiliation, or dominance. This is the sense that Jay-Z uses in “Hello Brooklyn 2.0” (2007): “Like a mama, you birth me; Brooklyn, you nursed me; schooled me with hard knocks better than Berkeley.” Del The Funky Homosapien equates schooling with punishment and shame in “Mistadobalina” (1991): “Teacher used to put me on a stump and then he schooled me.” Toni, Martin and Brandon may work in schools, but they do not want to school their students. They want to build with them, and to help them build themselves. This may be the most important value I have learned from them. All three participants see a direct connection between the building of whole artistic selves with the building of a more just society.

There are as many ways to write rap songs as there are emcees. However, there is also a strong overarching ethos of speaking one’s own truth. As Brandon puts it, rap is “picking up a mic and saying, you know what, I’ve had a hard life, and this is how I’m going to express it.” Rap is not simply a collection of techniques. It is inseparable from the emcee’s own voice and experiences. To support rap songwriting, we must help young people learn to assert their voice in the world. This ability is useful not just for rappers, but for songwriters of any kind.

It is difficult to overstate how different the typical experiences of music educators are from those of emcees, DJs and producers. As an example, I saw Brandon perform in a showcase concert by the CORE Music Program at the 2017 NYU IMPACT conference, featuring various individuals and groups performing songs they had written. The concert began with all the performers, including the backing band, up on stage together, freestyling a song completely from scratch. These young people, most of them high-school-aged, displayed a level of artistic confidence that few musicians I know can approach. Classically trained musicians rarely improvise at all, much less in front of an audience. I have certainly not seen anything like the CORE showcase in a school music context. It might be too much to ask music education students to freestyle onstage, but they should at least experience it in the safety of the classroom.

In 2021, NYU Steinhardt’s Music Education department was looking for someone to take over the teaching of the Popular Music Practicum course. The class had previously covered “modern band” instruments and pedagogy, centered around rock. I proposed that the class also cover songwriting, specifically in the hip-hop idiom. In advance of each class session, students either did a songwriting project, read and responded to a reading, or both. We listened to the projects and discussed in a format I modeled on art school critique sessions. The intent was not to assess whether each project was “good” or “bad”, but to see whether it attained its creator’s musical goals, and if not, what steps they might take to move it closer. I wanted the students to feel secure in taking musical risks, even if their reach exceeded their grasp, and I endeavored to reward effort and intent over execution.

I laid the most groundwork for the rap songwriting project, because I expected that it would push the students the furthest from their comfort zones, and because of the potential for controversy around cultural appropriation and identity. Before beginning the project, I assigned two readings: a paper I had written examining a problematic rap cover by a white artist, and a blog post about transcribing rap verses into standard notation. I also invited Toni to do a freestyle rap workshop with the class. To further scaffold the project, I followed Toni’s suggestion that the students write to the flow (rhythmic and melodic contour) of an existing rap verse. Toni specifically suggested that the students use “Step Into a World (Rapture’s Delight)” by KRS-One (1997) and Lil’ Kim’s guest verse on “I Can Love You” by Mary J Blige (1997) as templates, because they are well-regarded verses among emcees, and because they do not use any profanity. I provided the students with a notated transcription that I had made of KRS-One’s verse, and asked them whether they considered such a transcription to be a suitable method for learning and studying a rap song. Did they think that representing rap that way is useful, valid, or respectful?

Several students expressed their surprise that rap has a pitch aspect. One said, “I had gotten into hip hop recently without realizing that rap is not just rhyme and rhythm but it's also a melody.” Another similarly observed, “I did not realize that rap songs went beyond a rhyme scheme or rhythmic structure. I didn't think about how specific the pitches and melodies are.” Another said that she had written and recorded her rap verse project before seeing my transcription, and upon listening back to her recording, she noticed that she had unconsciously followed the pitch contours of the flow she modeled her verse on. In a blog post accompanying the transcription, I collected examples of jazz musicians playing instrumental versions of rap verses, including Jason Moran playing “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa (1982) on piano, Adam Neely playing “King Kunta” by Kendrick Lamar (2015) on bass, and Nate Holder playing “Venom” by Little Simz (2019) on saxophone. The class responded to these recordings with surprise and enthusiasm.

A recurring theme of the interviews with my students was the highly compartmentalized roles played by classical and popular music in their lives. While all of them voiced appreciation for and enjoyment of rap, none of them considered that appreciation to be related or connected to their own musical lives. While none of my student participants presently consider rap to be inferior music, they are more used to considering its social and cultural importance than to hearing it as music. It was not a matter of teaching these students about the music; instead, my role was to give them psychological permission to learn about it themselves. This experience helped me understand that preparing preservice music educators to engage with hip-hop is more of a cultural and emotional project than a technical one.

Hip-hop music education does not just treat hip-hop as a subject matter, but rather, as an ethos, a set of values. It insists that we center the perspectives and voices of marginalized youth, and that we be critical of authoritarian institutions. It is therefore difficult to resolve questions about whether hip-hop can live authentically inside the intrinsically authoritarian environment of a school music program. If the goal of hip-hop music education are to nurture student expression, is it possible to do that in the classroom if we must police their language? Jazz has been institutionalized, and rock is in the process of becoming institutionalized; do they give reasons to be optimistic or pessimistic about the institutionalization of rap? Can white teachers who are not part of hip-hop culture responsibly teach it, and if so, how should university music education programs prepare them to do so?

The demographics of music education make it likely that students are going to know more about hip-hop than their teachers for the foreseeable future. Teachers who are hip-hop outsiders can flip the script (and the classroom) by asking their students to educate them. Young people bring significant amounts of musicality and expertise with them into the classroom. Teachers can begin from a strong position by engaging and nurturing this musicality and expertise. However, in order to do so, they first need to build rapport and credibility with their students. This does not mean awkward and forced adoption of current slang; instead, it simply requires us to take young people’s musical identities and preferences seriously, and to treat them as valid.

There are several possible ways to imagine hip-hop’s role in music education. Pedagogies with hip-hop connect hip-hop cultures and school experiences, using hip-hop as a bridge. Pedagogies about hip-hop engage teachers and students with critical perspectives on issues within the music and its culture, using hip-hop as a lens. Pedagogies of hip-hop apply hip-hop world-views and practices within education settings. Music educators can use hip-hop to enhance the cultural relevance of their curricula, and thereby more effectively engage the large and growing percentage of students who identify as part of hip-hop culture. Rather than using hip-hop as ”bait” to lure students into the study of “legitimate” music, educators could use the hip-hop ethos of authentic, culturally engaged expression as a motivation to center the musics that students find meaningful. Sampling and remixing familiar music is a valuable creative processes in its own right, and it can also scaffold other forms of songwriting and composition as well.

I argue that the most appropriate way to bring hip-hop into the classroom is to respect the culture’s own ethos of participation and personal creativity. It is rare for music teachers to write songs or make beats. Beyond teaching them the technical skills required to do so, we also need to help them see themselves as creative artists, so that they can model this stance for their students. I also argue that we should not encourage music education majors to learn and perform existing rap songs. My research participants agreed that it is inappropriate for white musicians to perform songs that speak directly and exclusively to the personal experience of Black artists.

I do not believe that music education programs should introduce a “hip-hop methods course.” These programs already overburden students with requirements. Even if that were not true, hip-hop is too broad a subject for a semester. A one-semester class can include a few beatmaking or songwriting exercises, some listening and discussion, and a cursory introduction to sampling and remixing. However, it is not enough time to effect the immersive experience and inner transformation that might orient a future teacher toward culturally relevant pedagogy, to overturn deeply learned bias against rap aesthetics, or embrace improvisation as a core learning and expressive method. It is also not necessary to fit the entire ethos and value system of hip-hop into a single practicum. I argue that any musical experience can be informed by hip-hop.

It is not difficult to imagine a hip-hop approach to music technology or popular music ensembles, but it is also possible to bring hip-hop into band and orchestra, into music theory and history. To do so does not require that teachers “pander” to students or “lower their standards”; in fact, a hip-hop approach can make these learning experiences more meaningful and engaging, and therefore more effective. Instead, I argue that hip-hop should be threaded throughout the existing music education curriculum. This includes the music theory sequence. Theory courses have traditionally been concerned with harmony and form, and rap would seem to offer little opportunity for analysis. Rap does use harmony, sometimes in quite adventurous ways, but that is not its main expressive dimension. Instead, rap’s expression is mainly in the domains of rhythm, timbre and intertextuality. If music theory classes expanded to include these topics, it would broaden their scope considerably, and would offer new approaches to other forms of music as well.

Hip-hop is important subject matter for music history classes, but beyond that, it also offers tools for engaging other forms of music as well. Students can sample and remix any source material. These practices are also useful for understanding the methods of canonical composers, who routinely “sampled” from vernacular songs and hymns, from one another, and from themselves. Jazz is an art form built 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. Sampling and remixing, literally or figuratively, have rich potential for this purpose. A hip-hop approach to teaching classical music might use the canonical masterpieces as raw material for the creation of new music.

Since we cannot teach everyone and everything, we have to make choices about inclusion and exclusion, and those choices are inherently political. Martin Urbach pointedly asks, why is Julius Eastman not a canonical composer? Why did Eastman die homeless? Ignoring these questions is as much a political decision as confronting them is. Martin believes that as long as music education is going to be political, then the politics might as well be anti-racist and decolonized. It is not enough to include hip-hop in the curriculum for “diversity” or as a special topic during Black History Month. Nor should we add a class on antiracism to the music education curriculum. We need to build inclusion and antiracism through everything we do. This idea motivated my foregrounding of cultural appropriation issues in the NYU Popular Music Practicum.

Brandon Bennett wants white Americans to consider hip-hop to be an outgrowth of Black culture, not simply a consumer product to be enjoyed out of context. Specifically, he wants white listeners to recognize the struggle against systemic oppression and racism that gave rise to hip-hop. He urges white rap fans to stop seeing hip-hop as a “fashionable hat” that they can put on and take off at will, and instead to view it as an expression of real people facing tremendous adversity. White listeners will need to understand racial oppression in order to understand the cultural expressions of hip-hop.

I conclude by asking about the larger goals of hip-hop music education. We might take a narrow view and say that the goals are to advance hip-hop as a core subject matter, and to prepare educators to understand and appreciate hip-hop values. However, I believe that we can be more ambitious, and actively seek out opportunities to put hip-hop values into action wherever possible. The methods of hip-hop music education are learning through original expression and the repurposing of whatever cultural and technological materials are available. These methods can inform and deepen any form of musical learning. To approach hip-hop music education ethically, we must engage the music’s social and political contexts, particularly with regard to the history of American race relations. Here, again, we should not limit this engagement to hip-hop: music educators should consider these same issues in whatever we do.