Place and Space: Engaging with Local Hip-Hop/Rap Practice and Pedagogy

Michael Berry

Here is the text of a lightning talk that I’m giving to the Society for Music Theory’s rap and hip hop interest group.

Rap music and hip hop culture have long been concerned with ideas of place and space: recall Murray Forman’s groundbreaking work; Loren Kajikawa’s analysis of “Straight Outta’ Compton”; and Justin Williams’ work on automobility, to say nothing of the scholarship that focuses on specific cities or regions. As scholars of rap music–particularly those of us who benefit from white privilege–I contend that it is imperative that our teaching and scholarship about rap music be rooted in antiracism. An antiracist approach to rap scholarship and pedagogy must be concerned with place and space. This evening, I’d like to talk about how our studies of rap should engage with our local hip hop scenes in order to advance racial equity and justice in our own communities because as scholars, teachers, and fans of rap music, we profit from the damaging outcomes of the policies that gave rise to hip hop culture in the first place. I will offer a brief overview of three lesson plans that I have used in my teaching to highlight the intersection of music and local politics.

M. K. Asante defines the ghetto as “a place people are forced to live.” Racist policies like redlining and racial restrictive covenants define where certain groups of people can and cannot live. People of color are more likely to be stopped and frisked while walking, or to be pulled over while driving: these enforcement actions represent efforts to limit their mobility. In order to effect change through our pedagogy, we need to be studying music by local artists, engaging with local media outlets, and examining the policies—both current and historical—that marginalize groups of people in our regions. Many local artists call out these practices in their music: it is our job as scholars and teachers to contextualize and amplify the message that they are relaying to us.

Writing in 1991, Richard Shusterman argued that rap music’s aesthetic criteria are often the opposite of what we tend to value in Western art and encourages us to view rap in the context of a postmodern aesthetic, one that embraces “recycling appropriation rather than unique originative creation, the eclectic mixing of styles, the enthusiastic embracing of the new technology and mass culture, the challenging of modernist notions of aesthetic autonomy and artistic purity and an emphasis on the localized and temporal rather than the putatively universal and eternal” (614; emphasis mine). While I may not agree with him that rap music is fundamentally postmodern, I do agree that we need a different aesthetic lens through which to understand rap music. Mass media is successful largely because it surreptitiously abstracts songs from the time and place in which they were created, and too often in our musicological ventures, we end up reifying their status as timeless and universal through our analyses. The move away from physical media like records and compact discs and toward a digital streaming model complicates the idea of rap as some kind of object: as songs come and go from streaming services, or their versions are “tweaked” after they’ve been released (as we’ve seen happen to De La Soul’s catalog, for example), music is becoming ephemeral again albeit in a very different way. Liz Pelly, for instance, talks about how Spotify and services like it are contributing to the rise of “disposable” music, music that “streams well” but vanishes quickly from our minds in the attention-driven economy (Pelly 2018).

The first lesson plan asks students to read at least the introduction to Tricia Rose’s book The Hip Hop Wars. The introduction outlines the changes that the telecommunications industry faced in the 1990s that led to the rapid consolidation of radio stations, record labels, and other media outlets. The assignment also works with Byron Hurt’s documentary Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (which clearly influenced Rose’s book) or chapter 6 of my own Listening to Rap. Next, I ask students to research rap radio stations in the area. What are they called and how are they described? Who owns them? I asked the students to listen to two hours of that station, taking note of the artists and songs that they heard as well as anything else noteworthy about the broadcast, such as what kinds of businesses were advertising on the station, were any local artists represented, and so on. At the time, KUBE 93 was the “Seattle’s Home for Hip Hop,” and it was owned by ClearChannel (now IHeartMedia). The students noted that by and large, there was only a very small number of artists in heavy rotation: most observed roughly 20 different songs by about a dozen artists in their two hours of listening. Almost none were local artists, save for those that were played during a program dedicated to local music that aired at 11:00 p.m. on Sunday nights.

After researching the station, I encouraged students to write letters to the program managers, on-air personalities, and anyone else that they could reasonably contact. In their letters, students synthesized what they learned from The Hip Hop Wars about mainstream rap music and its damaging stereotypes, what they observed in their study of the local rap station, and some concrete ideas for making the station more progressive and relevant to the local area. Quite a few students were surprised to receive letters back from the station–often, little more than a boilerplate “thank you for your concern; we’ll take this under advisement”--but by receiving the letter, students got confirmation that their voice can make a difference. Now did anything change at the powerhouse corporate station we were writing to? No. But now, if students wish to write to their senators, or city council representatives, or anyone like that, they can feel empowered to do so.

The second lesson plan asks students to research and listen to songs about the city by local “underground” artists (i.e,. not Jay-Z rapping about New York or Migos rapping about Atlanta). Before embarking on our listening journey, I ask students to brainstorm some things that are quintessentially Seattle. The list typically includes coffee, rain, the Seahawks, the Pike Place fish toss, outdoors, Subarus, Microsoft, and Amazon–things tourists or outsiders think of when they imagine Seattle. We then work our way through about half a dozen songs and talk about how the artists “construct” the city. Among the songs I’ve used:

Typically, when I’ve given this assignment, I’ve paired it with reading from local publications. Teaching this class in Seattle has provided considerable material for discussion: during one quarter, several local publications had written articles about how the city’s rapid gentrification and skyrocketing housing costs were forcing musicians and other creative workers out of the city. Sam Chapman wrote in Seattle Weekly how rising housing costs were pushing house shows and other do-it-yourself venues north and south of Seattle proper. In a pair of articles for City Arts, Jonathan Zwickel wrote about how the rising cost of living was impacting both aspiring and established musicians. Central to our class discussion was the notion that such changes deprive the city of the very thing that made it an attractive location to move to in the first place. Zwickel puts it far more elegantly than I: he writes “when the songwriters leave, the soul of the city leaves with them.” In a sad twist of irony, City Arts ceased publication in 2018, and Seattle Weekly (which I used to write for) is now online-only and owned by a large corporation, a shell of its former indie newsweekly self.

The Seattle Times just last week published an article by a local theater leader titled “We must invest in affordable, accessible arts spaces” that would be a good article for this purpose. The Seattle Department of Transportation is seeking input from musicians, and the Office of Labor Standards is hosting an event to educate and support gig workers.

The final lesson plan works in conjunction with the previous one, and it involves looking at local laws that govern where people can live, work, and relax. The University of Washington hosts a Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History project that includes links to samples of racial restrictive covenants, zoning ordinances, and other laws that specify who can live where. I know that similar sites exist for other cities as well. I ask students to look up their neighborhood (or one close to them), peruse the maps, and to read the language in the property deeds. For example, one that I found close to where I live reads as follows: “No person of any race other than the White or Caucasian race shall use or occupy any building or any lot, except that this Covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant” (and this was in force during at least the 1940s). Furthermore, laws like Seattle’s 1985 Teen Dance Ordinance made it difficult for young people to go to local music venues. The laws required younger patrons to be chaperoned, for clubs to carry $1 million-dollar insurance premiums and to have two off-duty police officers on the premises. The rationale of course was that rap concerts were more likely to be accompanied by violence, drugs, and other crime. These laws made it cost-prohibitive for many venues to host rap acts, which shifted the dynamics of the city’s music scene. These laws are inextricably linked with how we define race and their study reveals a good deal about racial dynamics in the community.

To recap: if we intend to be antiracist in our study and pedagogy of rap music, it’s imperative for us to engage with the local music community. Assignments like this provide students the opportunity to connect with artists and potentially create their own chronicle of the local music scene. In my experience, many local artists are very willing to engage on social media and I’ve invited a few of them to come and speak to my class. By its very nature, rap music is local and current which makes it an ideal medium for understanding race in our community: as Chuck D famously claimed, rap music is the Black community’s CNN. Paying attention to the local rap scene is mutually beneficial: it helps to sustain the art scene and increases student understanding of how race shapes the history of their local area.

Visualizing rap, part II

Visualizing rap, part I