![]() What if people had said, ‘we shouldn’t study Toni Morrison or Hemingway or Emily Dickinson because they’re too new?" he continued to USA Today. ĭiehl introduced a course on Lamar in 2014, and today lectures on hip-hop at Augusta University. Good kid, m.A.A.d city has themes of "gang violence, you’ve got child-family development in the inner city, you’ve got drug use and the war on drugs, you’ve got sex slavery, human trafficking - a lot of the things that are hot-button issues for today are just inherent in the world of Compton, California," Georgia Regents University instructor Adam Diehl told * USA Today. Lamar is among the artists who exemplify the way hip-hop culture transcends genre and form, whose work is a living document of society. Decades after Howard University began talking about hip-hop studies in 1991 and the University of California, Berkeley created a course to study the late rapper Tupac Shakur in 1997, 17-time GRAMMY winner Kendrick Lamar is now the subject of dedicated college courses around the country. The study of hip-hop has also experienced significant development - from history-focused socio-cultural studies, to deep dives on specific artists. He cites Brown University professor Tricia Rose’s 1994 book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America as a key breakthrough to pave the way for hip-hop scholarship. He comes from a generation that had no context for it being somewhat academic."Ĭharnas certainly isn't the first academic to study hip-hop. ![]() "When I was on last year, he’s like, ‘So you teach hip-hop, what’s that like?’ It was such a weird question! He says when he was a student at Tisch, where I teach, hip-hop was the thing you did instead of school. "It’s funny," he continues, citing an episode of podcast. So teaching hip-hop is just teaching history," Charnas tells, adding that not incorporating hip-hop into his curriculum would "be an incomplete education of our world. "Hip-hop is just part of a longer popular music tradition which sits very squarely in any history - cultural, music or otherwise. Dilla - who produced for artists including A Tribe Called Quest, Common and Janet Jackson - inspired Charnas to write the New York Times bestseller Dilla Time. ![]() His popular course on the late producer and composer J. ![]() Dan Charnas, Associate Arts Professor at New York University, suggests that hip-hop is crucial in overall education. What hip-hop artists have been expressing about race, violence, economic class and beyond for the past 50 years is used as a powerful education tool in the present. From dancing and rhyming in K-12 classrooms to university-level classes and archives, artist-centric studies and fellowships, the use of hip-hop in education has evolved significantly over the decades. Despite the mainstream forces that long sidelined hip-hop its rightful impact for decades, what began as a cultural expression now has significantly impacted business, music and culture on a global scale.īeginning in the 1990s, hip-hop music and culture emerged as a key pedagogical tool in education at all levels. In its 50th year, hip-hop is in a remarkable place of leadership.
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