Bringing It Down From the Ivory Tower: Teaching With Hip Hop

I was struck by a comment I once heard from a pre-service teacher woman, and I will not even describe her because I think she expressed an almost universal sentiment.

In her lesson demo she told a group of English teachers that she "used British hip hop artist M.I.A.'s song lyrics to draw her students in, that they be more willing to learn about 'real' poetry." I raised my eyebrows and said nothing--knowing full well how much I disagreed with her position. I imagined what she meant by “real” poetry.

I thought about poets I loved: Dickinson, Whitman, Frost. I figured those three among the poets she counted as producing “real” poetry, poetry worthy of study and canonization. In those few seconds it took to register her comment then become annoyed by it, I also began to wonder why she discounted MIA's work as not “real?” I wondered why she didn't know better. I concluded that she had separated hip hop from the poetic tradition either because she didn't know enough about poetry to make a comprehensive assessment or because she believed class, race, or nationality actually qualified one genre of poetry as “real” and another as a pretender. You see, MIA is a working-class female Bangladeshi Brit rapper. And I wanted to talk with this teacher to share that I have not ever read poetry from any author, any period, or any culture that did not match in complexity, creativity, technique and beauty with a number of old school and modern day hip hop artists, including MIA.

I wanted to say, like we often do after these opportune times, that if a teacher's goal is to connect, then build upon students' prior cultural knowledge and transfer that into meaningful new academic knowledge, then teachers could certainly use the poetry students already know. They already know how to analyze hip hop—without necessarily even reading the lyrics. If they can do that, why not take hip hop song lyrics, engage students with its musicality and content, then show students how similar what they already know at home is to what they need to know in school? This is culturally responsive pedagogy. Culturally responsive pedagogy is a valuable tool for any classroom:

The validation, information, and pride it generates are both psychologically and intellectually liberating" (35). This freedom results in improved achievement of many kinds, including increased concentration on academic learning tasks. Other improved achievements can include: clear and insightful thinking; more caring, concerned, and humane interpersonal skills; better understanding of interconnections among individual, local, national, ethnic, global, and human identities; and acceptance of knowledge as something to be continuously shared, critiqued, revised, and renewed. (Chapman, 1994; M. Foster, 1995; Hollins, 1996; Hollins, King, & Hayman, 1994; Ladson-Billings, 1992, 1994, 1995a and 1995b; Lee, 1993;  Lee & Slaughter- Defoe, 1995)

Now, I of course, have not read every bit of canonical poetry, nor I have heard every hip hop song, but hear me out. I have read and studied an enormous amount of literature, have taught critical reading and writing, have written several genres of literature, including poetry and have recognized for some time hip hop's poetic value. Hip hop is poetry--some good and some bad, some mediocre, and some phenomenal. I offer that when we understand that in academia, the "real" shall meld with the real and students will have access to what many of them find relevant and non-exclusionary. Students can find genuine validation within a classroom, rather than a condescending teacher trying to reeaachhh them through what they know in order to eventually denigrate it. Students, especially students coming from outside the dominant culture, appreciate correlative relationships; not hierarchies that have historically excluded what they value. And understanding some of the history and poetry of this music form might better equip teachers to use it in the classroom.

So let's get back to hip hop, and what it means to many of our students, and let's be honest, a whole generation of younger teachers who also grew up with the art form. So it means a great deal to us. From its inception in the late 70s we saw the music transform from simple, rhyme schemes of the eighties--predominately sounded off in a bubbly iambic pentameter--to more and more complex structures that fused word-sounded syncopation driven by the poets who created tone, mood, and the highs and lows and complications of narrative poetry through the use of a multiplicity of literary devices, devices many multiple subject and English teachers expect their students to recognize, analyze and use themselves.

You had early artists, influenced by Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets, who took the art of the African American cultural elite to the streets of New York City. Eventually, and after a commercial surge, came artists like Grand Master Flash, whose "The Message" is now anthologized in Norton's African American Literature. Beside it you will find Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype." Following in the tradition of Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets, both songs represent a socially critical aspect of the music. That socially critical voice can be heard through a number of groups that emerged in the late eighties and early nineties: Eric B. and Rakim, Boogie Down Productions, Poor Righteous Teachers, The Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, DeLa Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Brand Nubians, Bahamadia and many, many more. These artists were very well known within the culture, but were not necessarily megastars. They emerged as respected poets who could deliver their cerebral poetry over an appropriately funky breakbeat and move a crowd all night long. They were like the cool jazz players of an earlier generation, who riffed off of and alluded to each other's work and character, according to the tradition of what Skip Gates calls "The Signifying Monkey." The Signifying Monkey, or allusion, is the key to the music's continuity.

How does this work in a classroom? Well, I always try to introduce to English 9 students that when Maya Angelou chose the title, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she wanted not only to credit Paul Laurence Dunbar, because that's a line from his poem, “Sympathy.” I then ask them to draw correlations between his experience and hers as an African American. What do they have in common? Why did she choose to make this connection?

Usually, my more advanced students get that right away. But when I say, "You know how E40 uses the looped metaphor, 'We be to rap/what key be to lock.'”

They say, "Yea!" And then I explain that that was not his line—that he's referring to a line by Q-Tip of Tribe Called Quest: and that that line was also later used by Diggable Planets in the song, “Cool Like That.” So now the concept, application and usefulness of allusions become more clear to students who often have difficulty in understanding and internalizing this complex idea.

They build on the conversation, "Oh you mean like when Jay-Z says, 'All I need in this life of sin/is me and my girlfriend,' he's paying tribute to Tupac and trying to compare himself to him.'

They take over as I smile widely and say, "Yes! And why do you think he did that?” The allusions link together like the greased gears of a pressed lock. My work and theirs becomes so much more relevant and lively. They connect with a genre they once held at a distance as overly technical or foreign (the academic).

“Look at what I found Ms. Keeble!” One student shows me some writing technique Jay-Z uses in his song, “Minority Report” as we read and write creatively and critically about Hurricane Katrina. “I hadn't even noticed that, Omar Beautiful.” My students begin to integrate home and school. One they own; one they begin to own—quickly. Their sense of agency capitalizes.

And what does this have to do with that young teacher lady who said that she uses the hip hop lyrics to get to the "real" poetry?

Well, I think it's pretty clear. Our students have a wealth of knowledge that is genuinely creative, rooted in the majestic, and culturally relevant. They know the quality of poetic composition of artists like, Wale, Common, Talib Kwali, the Roots, J Cole, Lupe Fiacso, and I could go on. That composition consists of all the elements of what we call classical poetry, accepting that it is not written in sonnet form (alas)--but quite commonly a 32 bar pop song--that originated in the African American church. When will we give credit to an American classic creation and qualify it as a real and valuable tool in the teaching of our young people who are so completely able to immediately comprehend all its complex meanings? The failure to do so leaves our nation's students disconnected from the relevance of their own educations and power of their own art forms. Hip Hop, like jazz and rock and roll, is a genuine, although often disrespected true American art form that our students have known their entire lives. Educators and students might be better off learning something of it, and using it to connect our students to our goals.

Why Black Girls Must Leave Home: an Argument for My Daughters

Ever read Gwendolyn Brooks' "Sadie and Maud?"  In the poem, published in 1963, Brooks presents Maud as a mouse of a woman who chooses to leave home to attend college.  Sadie, on the other hand, as full of vigor as her name suggests, stays home and pulls out some dichotomous mea culpa of adventure and pleasure, scraping life "with a fine toothed comb."  In the end, Sadie dies early willing her "fine-toothed" aesthetic to her children, while her sister Maud lives on, alone in her house, presumably with her dry old books and degree placards to keep her company.  (line 4)  Sadie and Maud both come to mind as I watch my daughters pack and plan out which way to go as the sun sets on their respite in childhood.  I watch them pack and plan and look back on my own leaving, and I think of that poem.        As I recall, the poem's absolute irony was lost, reading it the first time in 1988, in a Literary Forms course, on the second floor of Giles Hall.      There we sat, within a seminar construct, no more than twenty of us.  All women.  All African American; or some derivative thereof, reading an African American female author, being taught by an African-American female professor. And although this seminar never produced any predictable rhythm, no marked warmth or exploratory space, as some professors do not connect with students well,  it did somehow provide relevant fodder for future reflection (as is the case here).  Moreover, our analysis of "Sadie and Maud" warrants some discussion primarily because we stayed within the pages of our text, not actually appreciating the poem's applicability to our own reality.        The realization that arises now, that did not then, comes out of my experience as an African-American woman who, over twenty years later, understands clearly that she may never have read Gwendolyn Brooks had she not left home.      Amazingly, without even thinking I needed to protest in the least, I went through school, K through twelve, without being directed to read any authors of color.  Period.  My post-adolescent view of the world had been shaped by this actuality.   Today, as I explain their good fortune, my students find it unbelievable that in California schools through the seventies and eighties, I had rarely, if ever ( I can almost say never) been directed to read an African-American author.  And in retrospect, the one time I was,  in English 12H,  reading Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" (which at the time would have been great to know) our teacher never revealed the author as a black man.  Mr. ___ did not tell us this.  I now imagine my instructor, as talented an English teacher as I've seen,  believed sincerely in the universalization of textual meaning.   This strict, unwavering method of looking at texts makes sense when considering from whence the practice came:  my high school English professor came out of a traditional graduate program that taught him prior to the flourishing post-colonial criticism that blossomed in the final decades of the twentieth century.       He came from the school which, prompted by critics like Robert Penn Warren, A. I. Richards, and t.s. eliot,  began to wring analysis very strictly out of the words on the page;  sans biography, sans history, sans overall context.   They felt one could locate meaning on the page, not in the world:  the grand universalization of signs.      That self-same universalization,  Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison,  describes as a lobotomizing of texts.  She says that identifying matters of race in a text tends to inspire moves (on the part of the academy) toward universalization--ignoring and thereby minimizing the complications that arise when contemplating the West's racial history.   It is too much to handle.       For a student like myself, in desperate need of identifying myself outside the strictures of a what I experienced as a brutally racist education, universalization served to douse water onto the flickering little flame within me.  Lobotomize indeed.      Did my instructor realize that I assumed Hayden was just as white as everyone else we read, including Joseph Conrad, who in The Heart of Darkness, used Black, Negro, and "Nigger" with an interchangeable deftness which I to this day find offensively amazing?  In my English 12H class, we never discussed this glaring offense as we toyed with analysis of the imperialistic mind and African partition.      And because the education that I trudged through outside my home focused so consistently upon a culture that minimized my group's historical contribution to it, I found myself unaffixed and unintrigued within it.  I am certain now, that were I to follow Sadie's path, staying home and continuing in California as a post secondary choice, I may have never returned to the South to meet either Sadie or Maud, let alone that Grande Dame of African American poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks.   And oh!  How I did need to meet them all.        In her essay, "Saving the Life That is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist's Life,"  Alice Walker argues that a lack of relevant, concrete, visible models is deadly to an artist's life.  She cites Van Gough's struggles with models just before his suicide as evidence of a rudderless, untethered identity; then extends the analogy to herself as a black female artist.  Walker sought out her models feverishly, and found them through dogged, relentless searching.      Throughout In Search of Our Mother's Gardens Walker explores the relationship of the artist to the world in which he/she lives.  She names among her models Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer--all profoundly important American authors whom I had not read until I packed my trunk for college and headed out into a world I was not expecting to find.  And I knew I had to find something that reflected my cultural relevance to the world and its history, and that something had to reflect so brightly and so effectively as to quell and defeat a rising tide of cultural shame and ignorance warring inside me; warring against my innate desire for self-actualization.        The need to fight against shame and ignorance came out of my experiences in California public schools, which only now do I realize paper-cut my psyche in support of untruths and stereotypes which undermined my love for myself and my community.  So thorough and insidious a job had been done, that by the time I graduated high school, I, unlike Sadie, had to leave.  Had I not,  I believe I would have perished.        Like many of my age and circumstance, in direct opposition to its  true purpose, my public school education worked to alienate me racially, psychologically, and spiritually from  my Self.  I lost myself in school.  From the moment I stepped into my first class in kindergarten, Ms. Hoffmeister's, in a small Southern California city, I learned to practice the art of defense against psychic attack.  I was told by my classmates to believe that I was defective.  "What if you were Black?" they actually said to each other, in front of me, in an elementary school in third grade, in Monterey County.       I recall in first grade, proudly sharing with my classmates that my uncle was a police officer.  A boy in the group interrupted, "Oh, I know him."  My teacher cut him off, "You don't know her uncle."  He smiled, "I know he's a nigger."  My African-American teacher told him not to talk so filthily.  We were six.       I learned then, in spite of what may have been true or not about my assessment,  that no one in that class could be impressed by my family.  I learned that the decidedly impressive folks were Janet and Mark and their dog Spot, who lived around the corner.         What to make of school as I would then go home and hear my mother's adventures of working to change the South, in SNCC with Julian Bond, Ruby Doris, and a man I later came to know as Mukasa.  She told us about Reagan hunting for Angela Davis and pointed to pictures of the Soledad Brothers on the wall.  My dad's degrees and research on DuBois could not have impressed my classmates.  He was my black uncle's nephew.  I became confused.  I became angry.  Was this not what our folks wanted for us?  They told us that people worked hard, bravely, and many died so we could go where we pleased--so go.  I questioned why they would want this for us.  I could not tell them that this hurt us.      I resisted, fighting back, sometimes with my hands and sometimes with my words, but mostly with my hands.  And unfortunately, beside just a few years miraculously protected in Arkansas schools,  I matriculated all the way through to graduation in California.  With a keen immediacy, I feel Chris Rock's experience when he says he was attacked daily, and had to fight often, when he was bused out of his predominately black Brooklyn neighborhood.   .                     .                      .      Duplicity arose within us as we were told in public that we were one awful thing, then returned home listening to our parents who taught us of the beauty of our black selves: hair, skin, noses, and souls.  Often, I recall hearing people of my race (and other races of color) condemn themselves for being "too dark," or having "kinky" hair, or broad "big" noses.  I heard it, yet I did not understand how anyone would reject what we were taught was beautiful, even majestic.  Pretty and black did not fit together in my school experience.  One was more likely to hear pretty, even though dark.  And I knew something had to be wrong with this.  Yet the voices of those who believed in their own implicit ugliness prevailed, the voices of those who treated African Americans as monolithically defective was so overwhelming as to cause constant conflict for many of us, within and without.     My trouble could not resolve itself until I left California.  When I returned to Arkansas, my birth home, I found relief because I knew my cousin Yolanda, was the prettiest girl ever, black, black, and pretty pretty.  Benny W. was known as just pretty, Black Benny.  But maybe that was because I am from the South, and the proud South where we grew our own ideas about ourselves, wrought out of genuine, self-affirming, communal living.  Segregation crystallized the affirmations.        In the South we grew, we flourished, protected by that racial unself-consciousness Zora Neale Hurtson experienced while growing up in Eatonville, Florida.  We could be ourselves.  We colud breathe.  We could explore.  We could find who we were through ourselves, without interference from the outside world that insisted on racializing everything in order to dominate everything.      Because we lived communally and depended upon ourselves, we knew we could be what we wanted to be.  Young men could build houses like my grandfather and uncles.  They could own grocery stores like Alexander and Mr. White and the Lowdens.  They could own a car wash and sell bar-b-que like my cousin Marcus.  They could start a baseball league like my grandfather and his friends.  They could profess at the college like Mr. Haley.  Earn a "terminal" degree.  Found or pledge a sorority.  They could open their own nursery school like my aunt.  They could be a Fulbright Scholar or a librarian like my aunt Billie.  They could even paint the Black Belt and show in New York, like my grandma's cousin Archibald.        Mostly however, they could be in love and raise a family and find affirmation in the folks around them who expected them to be and do whatever they wanted because they were glad about their heritage, rooted in their culture, and certain of their own beauty.  They could laugh and cry.  They could be ugly if they so chose.  They could just be.       So I say to my daughters, who both have now finished high school: go.  Go far and look for yourself.  Go South.  Go anywhere.  Travel dusty roads.  Look for yourself in the dogwoods and magnolias of Arkansas or the deep red clay of Georgia, Mississippi, or Alabama.  Be like Sadie.  Be like Maude.  Be whomever you choose.  But be sure to bring with you-- my girls, my Loves--your fine-toothed combs.

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