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College Raps about Hip-Hop with Prof. Tricia Rose
by Porsha Lackey
"You're never going to get a job. What department are you going to teach in, the Hip-Hop Department?"
"You'll be an expert in hip-hop, and that's all you'll be able to do. They won't hire you. It won't even be around"
"By the time you finish your dissertation, hip-hop will be gone. No one will know what you wrote about. You'd better attach a cassette, so people know which songs you were referring to, because no one will ever hear them again."
"I understand why you say this has political merit, but it's not music. There's nothing in it that qualifies as music."
It was the 1980s, and those were the arguments that people gave Tricia Rose when she said she wanted to study hip-hop.
"I decided to write my senior paper on hip-hop --how this music and culture became so mainstream," said Rose. She wanted to go on and study it in graduate school.
"My entire graduate career was the process of convincing people that it was a subject worthy of study."
It did become a worthy subject for author and Professor Tricia Rose, who graduated from Yale University, received her PhD at Brown University, and created and assumed her own professional major. She went on to write a book about hip-hop: Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
Rose told her story on April 18 at the plenary session of the first annual SLAM (Student Liberal Arts Mosaic).
Rose was born and raised in New York City and spent her childhood in the Bronx and Harlem. She has taught at New York University, the University of California at Santa Cruz and is now a Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. She gives speeches often to general audiences on a wide range of topics, from American culture to black culture. So there was a great deal of excitement when she agreed to be the keynote speaker at SLAM.
After more than 20 years, hip-hop culture has evolved from street and backyard random fun, to a trend 'for the time being,' to a recognized art form.
But hip-hop is not praised by everyone. "Hip-hop is highly criticized for being hyper-vulgar, hyper-violent, hyper-misogynistic, hyper-materialistic, hyper-homophobic," said Rose.
"There's an element of truth to those things. But there's also a history of how that happened," she said.
"Popular culture always explores the taboo. It always pushes the boundaries of every-day life. It's a form designed to revel in those things that no one wants to talk about."
"It's also a form that frequently attaches to a youth consciousness of rebellion. That historically has existed cross-culturally for a very long time."
On the other hand, she said, there are those who have had an economic interest in selling the negative aspects of hip-hop rather than the positive aspects of the art.
"Those (negative) elements of the music are rewarded and commercially supported by the dominant society," she said. "Those projections are what have been profitable." Young people have been convinced to use these things in order to become successful.
The commercial mainstream has had a "tremendous deadening impact on the genius and creativity of hip-hop," she said.
Although Rose believes that hip-hop can not be solely blamed for its negativities, she also believes that hip-hop has some things to answer for -- for example the degrading insults placed upon women. The words "ho" and "bitch" have been communicated in several hip-hop songs.
When radio personality Don Imus made his derogatory comments about the majority black Rutgers women's basketball team, calling them "some nappy-headed hos," he said that the word "ho" was a word rooted in hip-hop, and that black people should not be upset about it.
"Imus was lying when he said that. He was just looking for an excuse to get out of saying how he really felt," said Rose.
Rose said that while "ho" is not a word that comes originally from the hip-hop community, some people in the hip-hop community do use the word and it is something we should work on.
Rose later explained why music can sometimes influence us to say and feel things that we usually would not say and feel. "The song "Gin and Juice" is one of those songs that you recite and get into because the rhythm and beat is so powerful, said Rose.
She played a sample of the song for the highly energized audience. Heads began to bob and hands began to wave. A portion of the audience even began to recite the words along with Rose as the song was playing. The rhythm of the funk in the song had such a powerful effect that it was hard to deny the words that Snoop Dogg was delivering. Some of those were words degrading women and proclaiming that men are superior to women.
"Gs up; Hos Down," was the line where the D.J. would turn down the music and everybody in the club would say it…"What are you going to do?...Are you going to stand there and stop dancing because you don't like that line?" asked Rose. Usually most people continue to dance, therefore supporting the lyrics that are degrading a group of people.
"Can you kind of listen to Candy Shop? How do you enjoy the power of the music, and still resist the destruction it celebrates?"
As a population it is our job to refuse those negative energies that the mainstream has placed upon the culture of hip-hop by being "passionate, invested and critical," said Rose.
She closed her speech by saying that "the future creativity of hip-hop lies within the distinctions of positive and negative.
"We can not allow popularity and what is 'hot' to justify our statements made in music or drawn from music and allow them to place us in a box. We need to have the courage to be different…we just have to be willing to take a little heat, and that is better than the box."
For more on Professor Tricia Rose, tune into Mars Hill College local Channel 23. Reporter Porsha Lackey has interviewed her for The Growl, beginning on Friday April 27.
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