Pedagogical ideas on sonic,mediated,and virtual musical landscapes: Teaching hip hop in a university classroom

Introduction

In March 2007 I presented a series of lectures on hip hop culture and rap music in an ‘Introduction to Popular Music’ course that was taught in a large city in western Canada. I was a teaching assistant for this course, which consisted predominantly of undergraduate non-music majors. I began my lecture with the origins of the hip hop movement in the Bronx during the 1970s, continued onto the rise of West Coast ‘gangsta’ rap during the 1990s, and provided my own examples of modern, global hip hop. During the semester, the students had learned how to study popular music through three lenses established by the instructor: sound, social meaning, and historical context, so I believed that the students would be ready to study a diverse range of sounds and social meanings within hip hop culture. At the end of my lecture, I asked students for feedback through an anonymous system where I asked them to list one ‘good’ thing that had happened during the lecture and one ‘bad’ thing that had happened during the lecture. My methodology for feedback from my students was suggested by a colleague with degrees in education and psychology. From these responses, I hoped to gain insight on how this musical material, which was very different from what the students had previously studied, was being received and to gain insight into developing pedagogical tools for teaching less ‘conventional’ types of music.

While all of my students enjoyed the Cuban, Israeli, and Palestinian pieces that I played as examples of the political and social dialogues occurring in rap music today, a few of my students did not seem to appreciate portions of my discussion about North American hip hop. Based on the responses that I received from my students, I found that some of them did not understand the complexities of racial dynamics in the United States, while others were offended that I would assume that they did not have prior understanding of the hip hop culture that I was discussing since, according to an anonymous piece of student feedback, ‘it was all the same culture anyway . . .’

After receiving this feedback, I began to consider that the feedback might have been a result of my teaching music that originated in the urban areas of the United States in a Canadian classroom. I was lecturing on a type of music, originating from the Bronx, that is essentially a dialogue based on a society, culture, and location that I was relatively familiar with. I believe that the disjuncture between my students and myself was based on our different orientations within the landscape of hip hop culture. Although hip hop culture is prevalent within the large city in western Canada where I presented my lecture, it is enacted quite differently from the hip hop culture of the East Coast of the United States that I am more familiar with. I determined that evaluating the cultural landscape of hip hop from different perspectives would provide me with the ability to pull together different vantage points that would allow me to bridge the gap between my familiarity and their unfamiliarity with the American landscape from which hip hop originates.

Defining the objectives

Since the teaching experience that I described, I have considered the social meaning of place in a variety of situations, which has allowed me to further consider my question on how to approach the complex cultural landscape of hip hop music in the classroom. Through this article, my goal is to examine current scholarship in hip hop culture, as well as the virtual and mediated soundscapes, and to provide a synthetic, and somewhat syncretic, review of the works that I have encountered, concluding with my own thoughts on pedagogical tools for teaching hip hop in the classroom.

While this article is somewhat autoethnographic in nature in that the project is ‘characterized by a focus on “intimate involvement, engagement, and embodied participation” in the subject matter’ (Bartleet & Ellis, 2009, p. 7) that I am exploring, it is mostly a reflexive exploration, based on one particular teaching scenario, that draws on my desire to determine a way to gather more ideas on hip hop itself, as well as pedagogical processes to teach effectively. I will examine several pedagogical processes which are drawn from ethnomusicology and popular music literature that I believe are important to understanding musical cultures that might be unexpectedly unfamiliar to a student in the classroom: (1) the mediation of the different vantage points present in a musical performance; (2) the consideration of insider and outsider perspectives; (3) notions of cultural specificity and acoustemology that can de-mystify the unfamiliarity of a new music culture; (4) issues of origin and authenticity that could potentially cause misunderstanding for a student who is somewhat familiar with hip hop culture; and (5) a relationship between culture and place that might provide solutions for teaching students how to mediate their own understanding of hip hop culture.

Finding pedagogical tools in ethnomusicology and popular music studies

Hip hop is a dialogic music in which the performer and the listener are involved in a relationship through musical interaction. From shout-outs to location (such as the reference to an area code, neighborhood, or actual city) and discipleship (mention of a mentor) to the gendered conversations that have occurred in rap music during the 1990s, the presence of a dialogue has been crucial to the genre.

In American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP 3, Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman (2007) discuss the evolution of rap music and hip hop culture through musicians such as Public Enemy, who were college students whose music presented a dialogue based on their interest in political activism; the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that brought hip hop culture into suburban, white homes; and the hip hop group Run-DMC who signed the first commercial contract between a rap music group and an athletic clothing company. Events such as these changed the context of hip hop culture, which originated:

As mass media has begun to allow a wider audience to consume hip hop, has it retained the same meaning?

A solution to deconstructing the meaning of hip hop culture, from its origins through its changes, is to look at the work of Regula Qureshi and her examination of qawwali music. In her book, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context and Meaning in Qawwali, Qureshi (1995) examines the procedure of a qawwali event from the vantage points of the listener, mediator, and performers. By doing this, she allows an outsider to understand the event from three different perspectives, thereby not only thoroughly understanding the procedure of the event but also understanding the relationship between the human actors involved during the event. Although the meaning of the event may be different for each of the actors involved, depending on the context through which they are involved in the event, it is through these relationships that meaning is created. Studying a music culture through these vantage points and the interaction between them would allow a student, who might not be familiar with a musician or a type of music, to find a perspective that is familiar to them, or to find familiarity and understanding by deducing the meaning that is created by the relationship between the different vantage points.

To relate this idea back to hip hop, the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air would have a different meaning for the lead actor whose background is in rap music, the actors in the show that are not related to the music industry, and the audience(s), depending on where they are located. The mediators, who are individuals involved in dialogue on the show but who are not direct producers of hip hop or audience members, would have differing vantage points based on their relationship to the production of the show. Human actors within the hip hop industry would also be affected by how the show is perceived by audience(s). Therefore, the human actors involved in an event and their relationships to each other are crucial to understanding the event itself.

Qureshi also identifies herself and her task as the ethnographer, allowing the reader to clearly understand a human actor, whose agency and motives can often be somewhat elusive: the scholar. To further consider these ideas, I have considered readings by Kiri Miller and Deborah Wong. Miller’s (2007) article ‘Jacking the Dial: Radio, Race, and Place in Grand Theft Auto,’ examines the role of the virtual car radio stations that serve as the soundtrack of the videogame Grand Theft Auto – a game in which the player is transported to crime-ridden versions of veiled but relatively identifiable American cities. Miller expertly demonstrates how the radio provides a sense of cultural tourism for the player as they travel through different cities and an alternative lifestyle that is presumably quite different from their own, and she considers the portrayal of American cities in the game, which is largely developed and produced in Scotland. While Miller (2007) identifies the vantage point of the game’s cityscapes, the videogame players, and the developers of the game to provide her analysis of the use of place, she does not identify her own vantage point, which very obviously fuels her analysis of the game. Miller is American, largely from the East Coast of the United States. With this knowledge, the significance of Miller’s insights such as ‘Britishness occasionally bleeds through the games’ American façade . . . These hints of the foreign are all the more striking because in many respects these games are about creating a sense of the local’ (p. 409) are more poignant because one has the knowledge that they are coming from a cultural insider.

Insider status can affect one’s judgment of place, as is seen in Wong’s (1997) article ‘Just Being There: Making Asian American Space in the Recording Industry.’ Wong (1997) states clearly at the beginning of her article, ‘. . . I speak as an Asian American scholar writing on Asian American musics, with a vested interest in seeing more Asian American performers “make it” in a system that’s often stacked against their presence’ (p.291), and her voice dominates the article. She makes statements about the recording industry such as, ‘Whites, African Americans and Latino/as have long been targeted by recording companies as markets for particular kinds of music; Asian Americans, however, have been nearly absent from these socioeconomic geographies’ (p. 296), without direct references to performers or the listeners that purchase music in these genres. Wong, however, provides excellent interviews with Asian American artists and producers, and her work was one of the first in ethnomusicology to present the notion of being an ‘outsider’ in hip hop.

The ethnographer serves as the mediator between the performers, listeners, and other participants involved in the ethnographic situation that he/she is studying. In this sense, the ethnographer serves as another sort of mediator. In his article ‘Landscape: Between Place and Space,’ Eric Hirsch (Hirsch & O’Hanlon, 1995) states that there is ‘the landscape that we initially see and a second landscape which is produced through local practice and which we come to recognize and understand through fieldwork and through ethnographic description and interpretation’ (p. 2). I am interested in seeing how this process unfolds for the ethnographer, as well as for a student as he or she becomes acquainted with a cultural landscape and/or musical system. Therefore, if one is looking at the structure of a musical system, as Qureshi, Miller, and Wong do, Qureshi (1995) suggests that they must look at dynamic links between the different vantage points, as well as the mechanics of the interaction process, which means that the human actors must be brought to the forefront of the scene. I agree with Qureshi’s methodology; however, in order to present a balanced ethnography, or a coherent lecture, on a cultural landscape, one must first identify the scene.

To identify the scene, I turn to Edward Casey (1996) and his ideas on cultural specificity. He states that:

I believe that cultural specificity is essential when studying a musical culture, whether it is virtual, recorded, or live, due to differences in how individuals perform, produce, and consume music. Although a piece of music might be strongly tied to a local place, its relevance to a larger population, particularly through time-specific contexts, is what allows for mass media dissemination. This kind of dissemination is no longer dependent on recording companies. In the age of social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube, listeners are disseminating music amongst themselves across vast geographical ranges but within the relatively enclosed place of the social networking sites. It is these changing definitions of place that make time and social meaning, historical and present, particularly relevant for a student. How does an instructor utilize cultural specificity when studying or teaching about a musical system?

I propose Steven Feld’s (1996) concept of acoustemology as a method through which the actual music that is being studied can serve as a tool for studying place. According to Feld:

Therefore, the sense-making that occurs through the experience of sound, which results in the making of place, has the potential to create an interplay within time – between the resounding and the reflective. By proposing acoustemology, Feld brings together the dynamic links that Qureshi stresses and the cultural specificity that Casey believes to be crucial.

In a classroom setting, studying a piece of rap music through historical meaning builds a sense of background through which one can establish a sense of place of the human actors involved in the song. This understanding of the musical background bridges relevance between the place (and/or time) when the music was created and the current sense of time and place in the classroom. An actual experience of the sound should allow for the student to develop an interplay, or understanding, between the resounding experience of the actual music and a reflection on the dynamics between the individuals and place(s) involved within the song.

Issues of origin and authenticity in musical cultures

By drawing upon historical meaning, interactions between human actors, and the sound that is produced, one is studying what Daniel Neuman (1980) has called ‘the ecology of music culture.’ Neuman examined ‘the ethnomusicology of cultural change’ in Hindustani classical music during the 1970s through a study of the producers, performers, context, and technology. Neuman studied Hindustani music culture during a unique time when the practice of Hindustani music was becoming popular among middle- and upper-class individuals through post-colonial interest in Indian art forms and the popularity of music colleges, where non-hereditary musicians could advance musicianship skills, while technology was allowing widespread dissemination of a music that could only be heard through the performances of hereditary musicians less than one generation before. Neuman states:

I believe that mass media has allowed for the same change to happen with hip hop culture and rap music, whereby rap music has begun to mean something different to mainstream hip hop audiences because they experience rap music outside of the contexts from which it originated.

Therefore, to answer the question that I posed earlier, I do believe that the meaning of hip hop culture has changed. Issues of authenticity have arisen as the places where hip hop culture is created and the spaces in which it is experienced continue to expand. Murray Forman (2002) writes:

In asking how diasporic blackness plays a role in the situation, Foreman quotes Paul Gilroy, who states, ‘black global culture as a world culture is American’ (p. 104). The association of hip hop cultural space as being predominantly black and American has been problematic to outsiders, whether they are undergraduate students studying hip hop culture in a classroom setting or Asian Americans entering the hip hop genre of the recording industry.

As seen in Wong’s (1997) article, a perceived notion that the recording industry has been a space that is racially dominated by African Americans caused her and the musicians whom she studies to feel isolated from the hip hop genre. Meanwhile, pedagogical issues arise when trying to describe this landscape to cultural outsiders, as I experienced when teaching my class. Stereotypes are perpetuated through mass media, such as the popular Grand Theft Auto videogames, resulting in a cultural place that is trapped within stereotypes.

A solution to transcending these place-based stereotypes is suggested by Adam Krims. He looks at the example of Dutch rap, in a nation where ghettos are practically non-existent as a result of government-based subsidies. Since poverty is extremely rare, Krims (2002) states that it is the dialogue on localities that becomes the dominant point of focus in rap music:

Once again vantage points become lenses through which one can analyze the dynamic links between actors who, in this case, are the places themselves. Therefore hip hop culture maintains its relevance whether it is being discussed in New York, Amsterdam, or Edmonton, because it is the relationship between places that creates significance within the modern ecology of hip hop culture. Thus as Casey (1996) states, culture pervades and place is secondary.

I believe that this sentiment is shared by the musicians themselves. Idan Raichel, a prominent Israeli musician who has bridged the gap between Ethiopian Jewish immigrants and Jews living within Israel, stated in an interview with Howard Felson (2005):

Therefore through its primacy, culture possibly provides spaces through which individuals may navigate ‘defined’ places, by listening to each other, and create from what already exists to find their own voice.

Conclusion

By analyzing the work that I have reviewed in this article, I have come to the conclusion that the vantage point of performers tends to be overstated. Whether the actor be a performer, listener, or mediator within the musical system, most scholars tend to view all of these actors as ‘performing’ their roles. As a result, the vantage point of the listeners has become hugely understated, yet I believe that it is the listeners that shape the industry through the music that they listen to and how they listen to it. Through websites such as MySpace and YouTube, listeners no longer have a geographical location. To some degree, the listeners themselves have become the new landscape, mediated by the Internet and the audio and visual technology that they use.

Media studies research has approached the study of music consumption from this angle of studying the listeners and the mediators, and I believe that ethnomusicologists, as well as instructors in a classroom setting, should adopt some of these tools. Bob Lochte (2004) states in his article ‘US Public Radio: What Is It – And For Whom?’, ‘American radio stations do not produce programming. They produce audiences’ (p. 39). He identifies programming as the primary goal of radio stations. Similarly, I believe that dissemination and sales are the primary goal of the mediators of popular music, who are the record companies, to satisfy the needs of the listeners. The purpose of media produced is to create a soundscape for an audience that might be relatively geographically diverse, yet that is intimate enough for individuals to find their own space within. It is this familiarity between individuals that creates a sense of place within a ‘placeless’ soundscape where listeners might feel a sense of connection with each other. A sense of connections between listeners has been observed in virtual gaming by Nic Crowe and Simon Braford (2007):

For future lectures on hip hop culture, I will plan to utilize the connections that my students have already established in their virtual and mediated worlds as a pedagogical tool to produce a more effective space through which they can navigate the landscape of hip hop culture. Current students, who have a hyper-awareness of themselves as listeners, can take an ontological approach to the music by exploring their own relationship to music and the relationships within the music culture being studied, many of which I have outlined in this article.

My next hip hop lesson will involve playing a piece of rap music for my students that permeates their soundscape, after which I will begin their study of the genre by identifying the vantage points involved and dynamic links between them. After thoroughly understanding the culture of the musical example, we will begin to deconstruct the ecology of hip hop music through place-based dialogue that describes the history of the music culture in North America and throughout the world. Finally, I believe that acoustemology will allow the students to bridge gaps between their cultural landscape and the origins of hip hop in New York City to find their own vantage point through which to understand hip hop culture.