I got my first full-time teaching job at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX before I had finished my Ph.D. I taught music theory in the School of Music to aspiring music majors—mostly marching band students, given the importance of football to the culture of (West) Texas. I moved to Texas just as Chamillionaire, Paul Wall, and Mike Jones were nearing the height of their popularity. I began to observe how my mostly white, upper middle-class, conservative students were engaging with this music and I was concerned (perhaps I saw my younger self in many of them?). I proposed a class for the Honors College that would consider rap through an interdisciplinary lens. We discussed music and poetry, gender, religion, politics, and several other issues. My intent was to get the students to think critically about the music and images that they were consuming. Although I didn’t have the language for it then, I realize now that these were my first steps toward using rap music as a tool for anti-racism.
In the last fifteen years, I’ve taught dozens of classes that focus on rap music in some way. I’ve given conference presentations, and written articles and a book on the subject. I wrote for Seattle Weekly, listened to and met local rappers, and gained an appreciation for how important the local music scene is. When I moved to Washington state in 2011, the University of Washington Tacoma, an “urban-serving” campus, eagerly added my rap class to the books. I team-taught a rap class at UW’s Bothell campus with Georgia Roberts, who had been teaching rap classes there for a few years already. Somewhat to my surprise, it took a lot of convincing and a bit of sleight of hand to get a rap course on the books at the School of Music on the main campus.
As someone who regularly makes music, and has often explored the relationship between musical analysis and performance, I realized that my rap scholarship would benefit from an understanding of how rap music was made. Inspired by Mark Katz’s experiences (which he details in his book Groove Music), I bought some turntables and a mixer and set out learning how to scratch. I learned some basic techniques—just enough that I could demonstrate them and teach them to my students—and started hunting for records. But I came to making rap as an explorer, with a colonizing mindset. Had I been making beats and DJing since high school, packing clubs, selling records, and the like, I think I would feel differently. But it’s not my place to talk about making beats or DJing: I’m not a culture-bearer in any respect.
In November 2019, my work on rap music took me to an unexpected place. I was contacted by a former student who now works in a law office in Lubbock, TX. They were defending a young black man who was being charged with possession with intent to deliver, and the prosecution was going to introduce the defendant’s rap lyrics and videos as evidence. Would I be willing to serve as an expert witness? This was an opportunity to put my knowledge to work in a very tangible way. I immediately accepted the opportunity and started preparing. My job was to convince a predominantly white, middle-aged, conservative jury that rap lyrics were just a story: just because Parkway Tee rapped about dealing drugs didn’t mean that he actually dealt drugs. Given the stakes of the situation, it was unquestionably one of the most challenging things I have ever had to do. As a kid, I looked forward to Officer Friendly’s visits to our school: police officers were your friends, we were told. And now my job was to convince the jurors that the police and the DEA were wrong. A few people involved in the case told me that I made a credible witness not only because I knew Lubbock, but because I was a white man.