"This album is dedicated/To all the teachers that told me I'd never amount to nothing/To all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustling in front of/That called the police on me when I was just trying to make some money to feed my daughter" –“Juicy,” Notorious B.I.G.
“I try to sit down so I can take some notes/but I can't read what the kid next to me wrote” –“Principal’s Office,” Young MC
I haven’t posted in a good long while because teaching and working on my certification program have kept me plenty busy. Here’s a final project that I worked on for a secondary literacy class that I’m taking. There are lots of kernels of ideas here that I hope to grow into some more fleshed-out lesson plans at some point. The book we used was Kylene Beers’ When Kids Can’t Read. I actually found it to be among the most useful things I read in this program. In what follows, I’ve selected some of Beers’ reading support strategies and will detail how they can be paired with hip hop studies to improve student literacy skills.
Ice-T’s song “Midnight” is a detailed narrative of a late-night car chase through the streets of South Central Los Angeles. Ice-T’s gift for cinematic storytelling is in peak form in this song and relies on cliffhangers at the end of each verse to propel the narrative forward. An obvious chorus is replaced with dialogue and sound effects that heighten the drama. These breaks in the song/story create an opportunity to use Beers’ probable passage strategy. Probable passage is “a brief summary of a text from which key words have been omitted” (p. 87). I might choose the following words from the first verse:
AM/PM midnight Evil E jack gat L.A. two brothers
Bleedin(g) BM(W) Donald D blazed strapped
Students select the words and add them to boxes that correspond to elements of the story: characters, setting, problem, and so on. Once the words have been grouped, students can use what they know about how stories tend to work to predict might happen in the story. We could then compare what the students developed with what actually happened and use that information in conjunction with the material in the “chorus” to predict what might happen in the second verse.
Rereading (or re-listening; p. 110) is crucial to understanding rap music. Signifyin(g) characterizes a substantial swath of Black artwork and engaging with the text several times is essential to uncovering these multiple meanings. For this activity, I chose Common’s song “I Used to Love H.E.R.” I might play the first two verses of the song for the students and ask them to summarize what the song’s about, providing evidence from the lyrics to support their synopses. I’d then play the third verse for them, in which Common reveals the woman’s identity in the last line of the song. I’d then ask the students to reconsider their synopses in light of this new information. How accurate were their predictions? How does their view of the “evidence” change? What does “H.E.R.” stand for? Some people suggest “Hearing Every Rhyme”; Common apparently has said “Hip hop in its Essence is Real.” How do we reinterpret the song in light of this new evidence? Finally, why do they think Common chose to tell the story this way—using this particular metaphor?
In this video, Gloria Ladson-Billings describes the process of code-switching from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) to what she calls American "edited" English (“standard” or “formal” English) as "translating" from one to the other: this resonates with Beers’ strategies of retelling (p. 152) and text reformulation (p. 159).[1] I'd love to do a project that considers rap lyrics in this light, asking students to consider the varieties of meanings that words have in different linguistic registers. Using rap music adds a layer of complexity to this because not only will students have to compare AAVE to edited English, but they will also have to consider use of figurative language. In The Art of Rap, Dana Dane talks about writing short stories which he then converts to rhyming lyrics. I can imagine a similar exercise here, either with a preexisting short story or one that the students write. Or the teacher could ask students to do the opposite: rewrite a rap verse in prose, or a more formal narrative of some sort: this is how we say this in rap music (“Broken glass everywhere, people pissin’ on the stairs you know they just don’t care”); this is how we might say the same thing in a letter to a city council member. They could work on translating the lyrics into their home language and discuss what difficulties they faced in doing so (i.e., “we don’t have this concept or these sounds where I’m from”).
Rap music and hip hop culture more generally provide a great environment for word collection. Beers invites dependent readers to “collect words they don’t like, don’t understand, think sound funny, think look funny […] or that invoke a particular memory or image” (p. 191). Rap is full of idiosyncratic words, or more common words used in idiosyncratic ways. In Listening to Rap, I talk a bit about language choices: how rappers invest old words with new meanings, or sometimes even create new words (“I shoot an arrow like Cupid/I use a word that don’t mean nothing, like looptid” in “The Humpty Dance”; pp. 52-53). We could easily talk about what words like “Illmatic” or “wanksta” mean by examining the context. “Stan” is a great example here: the narrator of Eminem’s song about an obsessed fan has evolved to a word that has recently been validated by its inclusion in the dictionary.
This exercise is similar to and could be used in tandem with ask the right question (p. 201): “Have you ever heard this word?” or “Can you figure out what the word might mean if I tell you it is related to ____?” are questions that could help students uncover the meaning of unique words, or more common words used in unique ways (I’m thinking of the word “trap” in this context). (Actually, made-up words are probably ideal for this exercise…). Toni Blackman’s videos on freestyling use some very similar strategies as far as word (and phrase) collecting. She even advocates spending time reading the dictionary (lots of rappers do this): pick a letter a day, read through it and choose words that stick out to you.
Regarding fluency and automaticity, rap music is ideal for this kind of practice as well. It’s easy to provide students with varied opportunities to hear texts (p. 215). We could read lyrics on paper, read them aloud (perhaps taking turns verse by verse, line by line, or via “echo reading”). We could then listen to the song and talk about how the rapper’s delivery influences our interpretation of the text. Digging into sampling could be interesting here, listening to passages in different contexts. Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” provides a few opportunities to do this. The opening sample “Too black, too strong” comes from a Malcolm X speech. The words don’t appear next to each other in the original speech: “It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong” (Listening to Rap 17). We could examine the speech and talk about what it means, and then consider what effect Public Enemy’s reinterpretation has. The heavy metal band Anthrax covered the song in conjunction with Public Enemy, and we could listen to that as well. Musically speaking, we could discuss how the “Funky Drummer” break appears in this song as well as any of the hundreds of other songs that sample it. By trying to learn some of the songs by rote as the artists present them, we could practice learning phrasing and intonation directly (p. 216).
Spelling could be tricky in this context, since rap is such an oral culture and relies on double-meanings, homonyms, etc. for its effects and often openly challenges “proper” spelling (Ludacris’ Word of Mouf album, for instance; see p. 53 in Listening to Rap). There are some songs that lend themselves well to this kind of study—Blackalicious comes to mind (“Alphabet Aerobics”; “Paragraph President”; “Chemical Calisthenics”). I nominate Eric B. and Rakim’s “Follow the Leader” for use in teaching rime patterns (p. 233).[2] The challenge here is distinguishing between “rime” and “rhyme.” Rakim often pronounces words in such a way that they sound like they rhyme, a technique called “transformative rhyme” (i.e., “Nam,” “bomb,” “alarm,” “calm”). Then there are words that actually rhyme, some of which have the same rime (i.e., “grave” and “slave”) and some of which have different rimes (i.e., “wait” and “motivate”).
Finally, in terms of interesting and engaging reading material, I’d like to think I automatically have a leg up here with a course on rap music. However, I’ve been thinking about how I can diversify reading materials within the scope of this class. Reading from a variety of sources will be important: there are lots of blogs, popular music magazines (i.e., The Source, XXL, Rolling Stone), biographies of artists and other players in the hip hop world, and even podcasts (which I realize aren’t print media, but could none the less be useful in some regard). In addition to looking at songs, there are a lot of speeches, literary works, and poems by people who I would call “hip hop adjacent,” perhaps: Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Gil Scott Heron, to name a few. And it’s also important to consider a variety of voices in the songs that I choose. Rap is often seen as dominated by black male voices, but (especially lately) there are many great women rappers who are well known, and we need to consider Latino rap artists, rappers who are part of the LGBTQ+ community, and rappers from around the world and from our own backyard. My students will no doubt be more well-versed in contemporary rap than I am, but it’s important to include rappers from all eras.
[1] This paragraph is adapted from something I wrote on my blog in response to one of my STAR classes this summer.
[2] Genius.com (formerly Rap Genius) has tools that allow people to annotate texts. I used to create private pages for my students to annotate songs as a group, but the site has changed a lot in the last few years and I haven’t really explored its capabilities recently. Regardless: such online annotation tools—even something like Google Docs—could be a valuable technological intervention with respect to teaching reading.