Lately, the hip-hop pedagogy emerged in a spotlight of the most radical and effective alternative educational choices. “As teachers concerned with developing a critical learning search for new and innovative ways to introduce educational relevance, hip-hop should be located in the range of approaches. Developing relationships based on familiarity and importance, students have the greater propensity to grasp concepts originally considered foreign or “uninteresting.” (David Stovall. (2006). We can relate: hip-hop culture, critical pedagogy, and the secondary classroom. Urban education, Vol. 41, No: 6, November 1, 2006, pp. 585-586). Unlike the common school subjects, there’re quite specific difficulties which so far had prevented hip-hop pedagogy from spreading over the formal music education: “music education researchers have arguably done little to consider developments in hip-hop pedagogy, critical hip-hop pedagogy, and hip-hop based education” (Adam J. Kruze. (2016). Toward hip-hop pedagogies for music education. International Journal of Music Education, 2016, Vol. 34(2), p. 247). This paper discusses the particular ways in which hip-hop culture affects music classrooms and proposes several methods of integrating hip-hop pedagogy and/or hip-hop based education in music studios. My contextual standpoint in researching this topic is of a white third-world female who had been formally trained as a classical pianist worldwide including in the USA, and works as a formal music instructor. I understand the role of hip-hop culture in American society and in urban societies around the planet, and am first-hand acquainted with the ways in which the system of academic music education operates.
In music schools and studios, there’s something about music that students know and comprehend better and deeper than their instructors. “In confronting “truth, myth and controversy,” young people are eager to engage the various contradictions between content and reality” (Stovall, 2006, p. 589). The students know that the ideological essence of curricular subjects which derived from Enlightenment and Romantic era’s European thought has proven to be culturally irrelevant to the market demands of the digital epoch. Students listen and contribute to the vernacular culture of Hip-Hop, Rock, Funk, Electro-dance, R&B and Soul, Indie, and other styles born in the communities of color which are widely disseminated over the mass media; the urban youths wrap their lives around the globalized culture which is reflected in these styles. Some of the common fundamental features of the ‘popular’ songs which are not found in Eurocentric white music styles bind the popular music movements altogether: “lyrics were secondary to the music (referred to as the “beat”). Almost with consensus, students noted the centrality of the beat. For many, this was the defining element in whether a song was listened to.” (Stovall, 2006, p. 591) Sadly, it is not a part of music curriculum to make a beat, to write a song, or to rap about what’s important for the students. During my studies in three undergraduate music programs, I never got to compose music of my own, just as the absolute majority of my classmates. Whatever relates to formal music curriculum seems to remain the perpetual postcolonial curse in the field of education with its notorious “condescending presumption is that young people do not “really” enjoy pop, that they are being tricked into it by marketing and image, and that they are too lazy and ignorant to make critical choices” (Ethan Hein. (2017). Research Proposal: Hip-Hop Pedagogy. The Ethan Hein Blog, May 9, 2017).
Eurocentric music education
“In college I understood that 17c counterpoint does nothing to help me to face the issues of real life”.
(Martha Mockus)
Behind the growing ‘student-teacher’ tension there’s a whole complexity of philosophical approaches to the understanding the music curriculum and the mindset of working music educators and their students. “Teachers tend to use elaborated [musical] codes derived from Western European ‘elite’ culture, whereas students use vernacular codes… Students and teachers are therefore in danger of standing on opposite sides of a musical and linguistic chasm with few holding the key to unlock the other’s code.” (John Finney. (2007). Music Education as Identity Project in a World of Electronic Desires. In J. Finney & P. Burnard (Eds.), Music education with digital technology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, p. 18). Today, a mass body of literature shows that many of the music educators feel particularly threatened of losing students to the street culture which they regard to as ‘shallow’. Considering every dropout student to be a loss of the system of music education which only evolves in a snail pace if does so at all, it’s necessary to alter the ideology and the methodology of the formal music curriculum with an inclusive openness.
In spite of the budget cuts which affect all the art subjects in public schools, only music classes suffer from the notable shortages in enrollment. There’re two main factors which contribute to the decline of the demand in the formal music education amongst adolescents and teenagers. The first factor is economic and political and addresses the community of music teachers itself who had ignored the popular culture for the past five decades. Music teachers pass to next generations whatever they learned themselves by the book, often using authoritarian teacher-centered and subject-centered pedagogical approaches to which they were exposed during their own studies.
The continuous segregation of American society has inevitably caused the lack of an access to the expensive music resources (such as the instruments and the scores) in the communities of color; the public schools in disadvantaged communities rarely offer music classes at all. This issue over the course of history has left the body of music educators “overwhelmingly white and privileged” (Ethan Hein, 2017). Furthermore, the music teachers had gathered into a quite closed category of the society functioning in a simulacrum (Adam J. Kruze. (2016). Featherless Dinosaurs and the Hip-Hop simulacrum: reconsidering Hip-Hop’s appropriateness for the music classroom. Music Educators Journal, June 2016, 14. Simulacrum: a philosophical simulated reality which helps to form our expectations; its own form of reality), or an axiomatic model thinking which highlights the patriarchic dominance of a preferably the ‘white-male-Christian’ composer in the canonic music tradition. With the steadily diminishing cultural and political objectives of the ‘classical’ music performance whose aesthetics propagate the ideology of power inequalities, (Hein, 2017) and with the following rising levels of the competition for jobs, American music societies allow less and less participants and create higher and higher standards for young students to get selected and admitted into the “legitimate” music circles. The demands for students are such that very often are thought unachievable by the students and their families. The competition “churns the cream to the top… And it just so happens that the overwhelming majority of those who benefit most from this sorting process are those who look, talk, think, and act most like those who already have power” (Jeffrey M. Duncan-Andrade, Ernest Morrell. (2008). The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from a theory to practice in urban schools. NY: Peter Lang Publishing, pp. 3-4). Even without the socio-political aspects, the tendencies to self-preservation in the academic music camp aggressively attack the very linguistic capital of the potential and the existing students, aka their “intellectual and social skills [which could be] attained through communication experiences in more than one language and/or style, … [and their] ability to communicate via visual art, music or poetry” (Tara J. Yosso. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 78-79). Ethan Hein expresses how “the stigma of “failure” is a heavy psychological burden to overcome” (Hein, 2017) for the masses of the ousted students who originally were appealing to formal music education for the purposes of emotional healing and liberation. Obviously, many of the burnt-out students would turn to the vernacular music genres which can be self or peer-taught, usually using the easily accessible internet resources and chat rooms.
The other factor which expedites the decrease in the popularity of the academic music education concentrates around the insignificance of the listener’s identity within European music aesthetics of a passive and reflective music appreciator. The sound, music and its beauty are the ultimate goals here. This ideological stronghold of the music art assigns music performers the appearance similar to the identity of a channeling Christian priest, while the depersonalized listeners’ only job “is to decipher the formal relationships that the composer has encoded into the score” (Hein, 2017). The concept of music ‘art for the sake of art’ was imported to the US from European conservatories of 19c and the beginning of 20c (and from Catholic church canon earlier), and are supported by European philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Szendy, and many others. On the other hand, the vernacular music genres, especially hip-hop, offer music appreciation in the emotionally charged context of listener’s socio-political experiences. The purpose of participatory music styles as in “building individual and group identity and a sense of belonging, … [really just] an alternative form of citizenship and an assessment of tribal identity” (Hein, 2017) appeals to students’ and wide audiences’ social capitals “reassuring the student emotionally that she/he is not alone in the process” (Yosso, 2005, pp. 78-79).
The authority of Western traditional music education gained its grounds in the imperialistic assumption that European music science of harmony and counterpoint, twelve-tone serialism, etc., are superior to all of the non-Western musical genres which were thought of as ‘barbarian’ before 20c. Formal music educators routinely disregard the fact books which do not fit into the simulacrum of the Eurocentric ideology of arts. For example, the twelve disproportionally untuned by-purpose European semitones and their modes and scales stand no comparison with the thousands of mathematically calculated Indian ragas; the rhythmic complexities of steel orchestras or gamelan repertoires exceed the most daring canvases of the symphonic literature. None of the abovementioned music styles just as well as the vernacular songs find their way into the formal music curriculum. Unsurprisingly, hip-hop and its beat, even though it was born in the US, is considered a non-Western music style and, therefore, appeared undesirable within the existing system of music education. However, the very latest music scholarship shares some thoughts and ideas about the modernization and the adjustment of the outdated curriculum through the integration of hip-hop culture into the music classroom.
The idea board for hip-hop pedagogy in music classroom
“The truth need not be veiled, for it veils itself from the eyes of the ignorant”.
(Hazrat Inayat Khan)
Hip-hop could enter the formal music education not only as one of participatory music genres in vernacular culture, but “as a generational identity and a larger, empowering cultural movement that has sparked the social and political imaginations of some young adults in the United States and around the world” (Emery Petchauer. (2010). Sampling Practices and Social Spaces: Exploring a Hip-Hop Approach to Higher Education. Journal of College Student Development, Vol. 51, No. 4, July/August 2010, p. 359). The enthusiasm about the hip-hop music and culture which young urban students induce in a school holds an incredible positive potential for the metamorphosis of a music classroom into a critically engaging workspace. “As teachers concerned with developing a critical learning search for new and innovative ways to introduce educational relevance, hip-hop should be located in the range of approaches. Developing relationships based on familiarity and importance, students have the greater propensity to grasp concepts originally considered foreign or “uninteresting”.” (Stovall, 2006, p. 585-586). However, the references to hip-hop culture in music classroom should not be used to only lure students into learning the white-bearded ‘appropriate’ and ‘legitimate’ ways in which music educators have studied themselves: “hip-hop music can be taught for its own inherent and should not be seen as merely an add-on or enhancement to canonical school music” (Kruze, 2016, Toward hip-hop pedagogies, p. 255). The whole conceptualization of what type of musical expression is ‘appropriate’ and ‘legitimate’ must aim to foster the generation of independent, analytically thinking musicians who’d be able to map their music journey in navigating between playing the acoustic instruments and reading European notation systems and using the digital hardware and software which does not require from students to possess any mandatory musical literacy.
There’s a spectrum of common fears around the inclusion of hip-hop based education and hip-hop pedagogy in the school music. Classical music teachers often appeal to the visual controversy of hip-hop music features, especially the fact that sampling does not necessitate learning acoustic instruments, and consider it as an easy-way-out from creating something new, and/or working hard. Hein argues that the art of sampling has nothing to do with the laziness; on the opposite, it enriches songs with “specific timbral qualities that evoke specific memories and associations, situating the music in webs of intertextual reference” (Hein, 2017). Adam J. Kruze addresses the concerns for the appropriateness of hip-hop’s harsh language and negative social models in a formal music classroom (Kruze, 2016, Featherless dinosaurs, pp. 15-17) and suggests ways of working with the steep reef of ‘inappropriate’ linguistics:
“If music educators ask students to express themselves through music, is it wise to remove some of our most powerful and expressive words—especially if they carry particularly strong meanings in some cultures? I don’t suggest that profanity be included haphazardly in any or every school setting, but some students may connect and engage with this language in mature, responsible, and meaningful ways.”
The feared negative social themes in hip-hop such as violence, substance abuse and alcoholism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. should get clarified to students by their teachers as actually the extended metaphors in a multilayered approach to coping with social issues and mixed emotions. Rappers wrap a completely dissociated content in the rough expressions which are “shifting between various characters and creating intricate and occasionally contradictory messages” (Kruze, 2016, Featherless dinosaurs, p. 17). In addition to understanding the often- misinterpreted hip-hop lyrics, it is necessary to acknowledge that not all the hip-hop themes are rough or negative; that the large category of less-exposed by media (due to the non-profitability) conscious rappers propagate the family, health and spiritual values in their songs.
Hip-hop can be applied as a ‘bridge’ (Hein, 2017) to explaining the existing perennial music curriculum to students; hip-hop can function as a practice of creating beat, electronic music, and of rapping; or it can be seen as a cultural lens through which teachers would appeal to students to enhance their social standpoints. A ‘bridge’ approach to hip-hop in music classroom would disregard the difference between the value systems of the Eurocentric and vernacular culture. However, there’re common features shared by both musical directions, the ones concerning the rhythmical values and patterns, musical form (4 measures sentences, 8 measures phrases), harmony (‘tonic’ and ‘dominant’) and voice-leading (the multiple intertextual layers of prerecorded rapper’s voice can be easily linked to the polyphonic dogmas of counterpoint). Those concepts and many more would be easy to explain using the popular songs which are familiar and valuable to students. As an example of practical application of hip-hop, music students enjoy practicing mandatory scales and arpeggios on acoustic instruments much better with the background beat (even if it’s played from a phone app) than practicing the boring material without a beat or, even worse, with a metronome. Like the metronome, a beat keeps the rhythm steady, but a student is entertained and personally connected with the dreadfully unlikable activity.
Hip-hop as a cultural lens in music classroom examines hip-hop songs and their emotional and socio-political content (Kruze, 2016, Toward hip-hop pedagogies, p. 255) related to the daily lives of students. Here the curriculum itself is about hip-hop, its musical composition with all its aspects, and the critical perspective to its lyrics, redefining race, gender, superiority and selectivity with hip-hop based music education. David Stovall explains that if used “as an alternative to situations that are dehumanizing and depersonalized, the infusion of hip-hop culture can provide the context for students to develop a critical lens in approaching subject matter and its relevance to their daily lives. Hip-hop culture, as relevant to the lives of many high school students, can provide a bridge to ideas and tasks that promote critical understanding” (Stovall, 2006, p. 589). Complicating the ways in which students listen to the familiar popular songs allows them to gain a deeper understanding of the relevant to them culture and of their personal spot in it.
In all the diversity of the possible applications, hip-hop holds the ability to modify and revitalize the formal music education in the meaningful, inclusive, democratic and culturally relevant way. Hip-hop pedagogy suggests the student-centered approach to music education: “placing the student in the center requires the facilitator to slowly remove herself or himself from a banking model of education” (Stovall, 2006, p. 588). Also, engaging in hip-hop pedagogy and hip-hop based education would require from working music teachers to learn themselves a completely new material about the hip-hop literature and the range of digital musical instruments and software. It’s nearly impossible to imagine that the large group of experienced teachers would shift their own system of values on a spot; most likely in school music the switch from an old pedagogical philosophy to a new may take place within a generation of educators.
Bibliography
- Duncan-Andrade, Jeffrey M., Morrell, Ernest. (2008). The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from a theory to practice in urban schools. NY: Peter Lang publishing.
- Finney, John. (2007). Music Education as Identity Project in a World of Electronic Desires. In J. Finney & P. Burnard (Eds.), Music education with digital technology. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Hein, Ethan. (2017). Research proposal: Hip-Hop Pedagogy. The Ethan Hein Blog, May 9, 2017. Available at: http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2017/research-proposal-hip-hop-pedagogy/
- Kruse, Adam J. (2016). Featherless Dinosaurs and the Hip-Hop Simulacrum: reconsidering Hip-Hop’s appropriateness for the music classroom. Music Educators Journal, June 2016, pp. 13-21.
- Kruse, Adam J. (2016). Toward hip-hop pedagogies for music education. International Journal of Music Education 2016, Vol. 34(2), pp. 247 –260.
- Petchauer, Emery. (2010). Sampling Practices and Social Spaces: Exploring a Hip-Hop Approach to Higher Education. Journal of College Student Development, Vol. 51, No. 4, July/August 2010, pp. 359-372.
- Stovall, David. (2006). We can relate: hip-hop culture, critical pedagogy, and the secondary classroom. Urban education, 41, No: 6, November 1, 2006, pp. 585-602.
- Yosso, Tara J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 69–91.
Stasie Fomalgaut
Written for Mills College, April 2018
Stasie Gonikberg Blog 