Jazz music is universal and so is hiphop. The striking difference is that hiphop’s universality is strictly commercial whereas jazz music’s is academic and commercial at the same time.  My short paper here cannot answer why this is, but there are more than a few ideas about how it happened and what we can do in response.

The first thing to notice is that in hiphop there are no academic-commercial or industry collaborations. On the other hand, in jazz music you can easily find a collector’s edition of a rare Pharaoh Sanders recording from 1969 that’s richly documented by some academic musicologist. In these liner notes can be discovered important historical and biographical information, an aesthetic appreciation in terms of that specific moment in jazz, photographs of live performances, and so on and so forth.

This does not happen in hiphop music. There is no special collector’s edition of KRS-One classics, or of the rap produced on the West Coast before and after the L.A. rebellion of 1992, for instance. There are no best albums of all time series, with expert commentary to substantiate the claims. No best deejay compilations, no music from Brooklyn, no music from Queensbridge, no music from the Bronx, from Houston, from Atlanta. 

The non-collaboration and non-cooperation factor in hiphop culture can be blamed completely on the U.S. academy. Nobody has ever prevented an academic from getting a grant to buy a thousand hiphop recordings and then taking the next six months to just listen and take copious notes, studying closely the commercial hiphop market.

Instead, the academic writing on hiphop has been mainly about social issues, such as the content of rap, the sociology of it, or censorship issues. And then there are all the books that are industry insider type stuff. An academic would have to study all this material, but in all events the fact is that the industry stuff heavily outweighs the academic writing. This cannot be said about jazz.

It’s a very short step from here to the conclusion that it’s because the makers of hiphop music are neither from Julliard nor the projects, but, rather, from African American working-class communities of the U.S., from KRS and the South Bronx, Pete Rock from Mount Vernon, Sadat X from New Rochelle, to Queen Latifah from South Orange, Chuck D from Brentwood, so on. The academics are not afraid of the ghetto—in fact, they have a long history of systematically investigating the ghetto and its so-called “sociopathologies.” The academics are afraid of the working-class, not the ghetto.

It was not until the arrival of Eminem that this finally became clear to everyone. The academics flocked to Eminem because he is white, but what they found is a different story. Eminem is from the white working-class of Detroit, and when an academic stops to study the white working-class of Detroit, as they then did, they find poverty and despair, and when they wonder why this is they figure out it’s because Detroit is being racially resegregated. “8 Mile” is Eminem’s originary political symbol: it represents the root cause of American working-class political weakness and suffering: the endurance of white supremacy. There are already more interesting books on Eminem, Detroit, and rap music than on all the great artists of New York combined.

So if the academics went to the African American working class, like they’ve gone to Eminem’s white working-class of Detroit, what would they discover?

One thing is that African Americans of the post-civil rights movement generation are treated socially no differently than the black folk still trapped up in the projects: this is the re-imposition of white racial oppression, or resegregation. And then the academic would be struck by the enormous record collections, all the books and ideologies, and the fact that many famous rappers have PhDs for parents, social workers and teachers and librarians, skilled mechanics and trades people. And they would find the specific methods of making hiphop music, and this is the most important thing, in my view.

This is the kind of writing we’re building on now, but, lacking a solid academic position from which to do it, the progress is slow going, arduous and completely unfunded. In this spirit, I propose several “wars of position” in hiphop musicology that we could make, and reject a few others.

The first to reject is the critical theory essay anthology. Enough already. Nobody reads them anyway.

The second to reject is the bio-pic, the focus on the industry and its social scenes. We have plenty of good ones already.

The third to reject is the social issue book or academic sociology article, showing that hiphop comes from poverty and oppression, that it is a real music and culture, and so on. We know that already, too.

The fourth to reject is the whole way of life argument, in which graffiti writing, deejaying, lyricism, beat-making, and breakdancing are treated like a holy trinity—breakin, bombin, beat-making/mcing. This culturalist musicology is by far the best of the four standard approaches but it should be attempted only after first establishing the hiphop episteme.

The first work that advances the episteme is the study of a specific period or genre of hiphop music. When Amiri Baraka started his work on blues and jazz in the early 1960s, which produced the classics Blues People and Black Music, this is exactly what he did. He focused on a distinct style of jazz, in the case of Black Music the explosion of hard bop in the mid-1960s, and in the case of Blues People the complex transition from country blues to city blues.

Following Baraka’s approach, the musicologist of hiphop might focus on the period of the early 1990s when there was an explosion of college radio programming devoted exclusively to underground hiphop music. This produced epic freestyle battles that then produced an outpouring of successful tapes, albums and CDs. For instance, Columbia University’s college radio station featured during the 1990s the monumentally important Stretch Armstrong Show hosted by Bobbito Garcia, which directly enabled the success of groups and soloists like the Artifacts, Showbiz & AG, Black Moon, Craig Mack, Jeru, and Mobb Deep.

Their albums are not the greatest ever but the music is highly advanced aesthetically. The individual album tracks re-engineer aesthetically an authentic freestyle studio environment. For example, on Jeru the Damaja’s 1993 album The Sun Also Rises in the East, the beats are strictly for live freestyle rhyming; thus there are no choruses and no catchy loops and hooks. Listening to that album today is probably close to what Baraka and other critics felt listening to Art Blakey’s "Blues March" or Pharaoh Sanders’ "Astral Traveling" back in the 60s: a new style was being born and an older one ruthlessly attacked. Baraka called the hard bop artists jazz music’s "private assassins," and the same kind of argument could be made about the underground rappers of the early 90s, who coined the term "hardcore hiphop." 

The second work of the hiphop episteme is to treat the music through the tools of formalism. How does KRS or Rakim or Nas conceive their arrangements? What is the process of rhyming over beats, metrically, and syntactically? Included in this research project would be also a study of deejaying. Here there are many areas of study: live deejaying and deejay battling; the transition from radio deejaying to studio deejaying to advanced mixing and producing—and all the variations.

The third work is canon formation. What are the best albums? Who are the most important lyricists? Who are the major beat-makers and producers? Why are we studying Nas, KRS, MC Lyte, Kool G Rap, the Large Professor and not these other artists? What are the criteria for teaching a seminar on the poetics of hiphop? How would an artist such as Wise Intelligent be taught alongside 50 Cent or Lil Kim?

As a teacher of art and literature, when I ask myself these questions I realize what an atrocious shape we’re in. It’s like Baraka is always saying about our struggle: it’s Cisiphysian, pushing the rock up the mountain, it falls down, and then doing it all over again.

I’ll conclude with a description of one course I recently designed and taught. As I alluded to in one of the examples I’ve given, the college radio rap upsurge in the early 1990s produced a distinctive hiphop aesthetic, termed the hardcore aesthetic by its practioners and fans.

The first phase is listening to the product that was eventually mass consumed. I like Jeru’s “Come Clean” track, or Biggie Smalls’s “Unbelievable.” These tracks came straight from the live freestyle environment of the early 90s. Eminem’s 8 Mile, which he had a large part in writing, visually animates this environment to great success, and most students have already seen it. So students can easily make the connection between the real freestyle context and the commercial tracks they eventually heard on the radio and then purchased, black-market or otherwise.

This leads to the college radio environment. Who are the major players of this movement? Then to a presentation of a live freestyle session. To me, it doesn’t matter if you play Supernatural vs. Craig Mack or MC Serch of Third Base vs. El the Sensai of the Artifacts. Then there is the reading. There are interviews with Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito, for example—there is Bobbito’s own column in Vibe, excellent fanzines like Ego Trip, etc. This helps bring to life the essence of the real musical environment.

Students can then write on their own preferences. No social history, just students writing about why they think Sadat X is the greatest freestyle rhymer, and so on. They have to describe his lyrical technique, analyze the beats he picks out, etc. In school, this is called music appreciation.

In terms of classroom management, if the course meets two days a week for an hour and fifteen minutes, the first fifteen minutes can be used to introduce the topic, for example, the Stretch Armstrong show at Columbia and freestyle rhyming. Play a track, and then ask students to write down the distinctive elements of the rhyme style. I transcribe the lyrics so they have them in front of them.

Other class sessions follow up on this first level of discovery by having students go out and find old CDs. In NYC, this is simple. The textbook costs for the course are about $60 dollars worth of classic hiphop CDs.

Students have a list of 40 albums, from the late 1980s and early 90s, to choose from. They range from PE’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back to Biggie’s Ready to Die, De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers Show, Queen Latifah’s All Hail the Queen and MC Lyte’s Light as a Rock. The list is organized alphabetically.

The second part of the course is looking closely at the whole album concept. How do we read a hiphop album? Like a novel? Like a painting? Like an opera? Like a jazz concert? Because it is very different than any conventional studio album, where the hits come before the live performances. With hiphop from the late 80s and early 90s, the live performances on college radio or at a rap show come far before the albums.

There is a vocabulary that goes along with this unique moment in hiphop: terms like “show and prove,” “street credibility,” “staying on point,” ‘frontin’”  “add on to the cipher,” and so on that come directly from the live freestyle environment. For example, “show and prove” has many meanings but in the live freestyle environment it refers to a person who claimed to be a rapper but in live competition stammered, stuttered and couldn’t stay on the beat, or who ran out of ideas within 30 seconds. The freestyle environment is the testing ground, which assures an advanced aesthetic, because of the intensity of the competition.

But then there are the whole albums such as Gangstarr’s Step in the Arena, Tribe’s The Low End Theory, KRS’s By Any Means Necessary, Brand Nubian’s One For All, the Main Source’s Breakin Atoms, and MC Lyte’s Lyte as a Rock, that were composed without direct reference to the live freestyle environment, but were made during the rise of freestyle rhyming. Here arises an important relation between lyrical competition and musical cooperation. 

The final paper is a treatment of one facet of hiphop music and culture produced during the late 80s and early 90s—roughly a five-year period. Students have special topics, such the relationship between college radio and the whole album concept. What are the differences between freestyle music and concept albums? What is the relationship between the two? Explain, using specific examples.

To carry out some of these basic tasks, the academic needs to locate the fanzines and the tapes of the great live radio freestyle battles. This requires grants.

Once the project is started, it’s easy to arrange a writing and musicology course on hiphop, because, like jazz, the artifacts of the culture are some of the most advanced forms of artistic consciousness and social history that we have available in our society.

Jonathan Scott is Assistant Professor of English at Al-Quds University in Abu Dees, the West Bank, and the author of Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes . jonascott15@aol.com

posted by 16 November 2005