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Some General Comments...

Thought to join this, but I may forget from time to time to check back in. The genre name "hip hop" over the past 10 years has, for me, become pretty fuzzy. In a sense, what I think encompasses hip hop may be slivers of what, say, my 36-year-old brother remembers as hip hop, when he was used to spin records in the same neighborhoods as scratch guru QBert in the mid-to-late 80s here in the Bay Area.

 

For me, hip hop isn't rap, because when I think of rap, I immediately think of mainstream R&B and commercialized bling and hip hop culture of MTV, but that automatic labeling, of course, is due to my own influence from our culture, which is label and compartmentalized-happy. When I think of hip hop today, I'm moving away from an actual genre of music and move toward an essence -- a feeling -- which makes me feel a bit more comfortable. When I think of hip hop, I think of contemporary and urban forms of poetry, spoken word, a crowd dancing in unison to beats at midnight, head bopping, and the ability for someone to MC and flow on a mic in front of a crowd and spit wisdom that's both hip, underground, yet socially conscious. I think of my early days in college in Los Angeles, in neighborhoods where my friends and I went to MC and DJ battles and were immersed, and a part of, this culture. If I HAD to connect hip hop to music, I usually think of groups like Hieroglyphics, Company Flow, People Under the Stairs, GangStarr, and A Tribe Called Quest, and then, perhaps, the increasingly mainstream Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Hi Tek, and others.

 

When I worked at Edutopia magazine, we published a story about a teacher infusing hip hop into his high school curriculum. He talked a lot about Tupac Shakur, who I personally never listened to and hence don't innately connect with hip hop (but that's just me), and the power of poetry. The piece was called "Hip Hop High," and the link is here:

 

http://www.edutopia.org/hip-hop-high

 

I also wrote some short related articles, and here's one about the positive influence of graffiti on some students:

 

http://www.edutopia.org/writestuff

 

Still, though, I generally feel strange about discussing hip hop on paper, or on an online community forum like this one, or using research from books, as the discussion overview does, to talk about it. It feels static, sterile, stagnant, and odd. Hip hop is not to be talked about or analyzed, although some professors and thinkers in colleges have become "experts" in this "field." I think that's great, though I also think hip hop is experiential and can only be felt.

 

Cheers,

Cheri Lucas

cheri@cherilucas.com