Lacy says Mac Miller\u2019s mixtape, Faces<\/i>, kept him going when things went dark. \u201cI can\u2019t even explain how important it was to me. He helped me stay alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lacy\u2019s desire to make a career of rap and hip-hop led him to study psychology and creative writing; poetry, in particular. \u201cMy lane is the prettiest words I can find and the grittiest emotion I can bring,\u201d says Lacy.<\/p>\n
News of Mac Miller’s death in September of an apparent drug overdose at the age of 26 left Lacy shocked, but determined as ever to pursue his dream of becoming a rap artist. Miller will be remembered as an artist who had the respect of everyone in the business, Lacy says. “He contributed to the hip-hop culture without stealing from it. I still listen to him every day and what I’ve learned from him is that you’ve got to start early and you don’t need all these connects [sic] to get started,” he says. “He taught me I can do this myself.”<\/p>\n
The hip-hop industry generates $10 billion a year, and its reach extends far beyond music. Hip-hop is a culture with a language and symbols (think graffiti art) and an aesthetic. There are norms and values. There is a mythology and a reality\u2014with the requisite heroes and villains. And increasingly there is recognition of its contributions by the cultural elite. This year, the Smithsonian will release the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap<\/i>, comprising nine CDs with 120 tracks and a 300-page book of essays and photographs. In July, the Kennedy Center announced that it would award a special prize to the Tony, Pulitzer, and Grammy award-winning hip-hop musical, Hamilton<\/i>. Last April, hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for music, the first nonclassical or jazz musician to receive the award. Also in 2017, a single painting by graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for $110.5 million at auction.<\/p>\n
Need more convincing?<\/p>\n
The PBS series Poetry inAmerica<\/i> dubbed rap the most popular form of contemporary poetry in the world today. Scholars such as Adam Bradley, author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop,<\/i> take it further, asserting that rap is the \u201cmost widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n In the history of the world.<\/p>\n At 溏心vlog免费B站, faculty are introducing critical study of hip-hop to their students through the lenses of philosophy and art. Alumni are making careers in the field, and students like Lacy are finding ways to integrate their love of hip-hop culture into their educations. <\/span><\/p>\n Because hip-hop matters, says MC and entrepreneur Theo Martins Jr. \u201909. \u201cIt\u2019s the driving force of innovation and ideas in popular culture. Hip-hop is solely based on being the first and the freshest, the \u2018here\u2019s what\u2019s hot,\u2019 and when you have that as the driving force for your ideology, you are in a constant state of discovery, looking and looking.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like poetic space exploration,\u201d James Haile III, assistant <\/b>professor of philosophy, has a lot of research interests: continental philosophy (especially aesthetics), philosophy of literature, philosophy of place, Africana philosophy and philosophy of race, the intersection of 20th century American and African-American literature and existentialism, writers Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Jean-Paul Sartre, black aesthetics, and especially the contemporary genre aesthetics of hip-hop. Oh, and Kendrick Lamar.<\/p>\n Haile recently wrote an article on Lamar\u2019s album, good kid, m.A.A.d city,<\/i> for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy<\/i> titled, \u201cgood kid, m.A.A.d city: Kendrick Lamar\u2019s Auto-ethnographic Method,\u201d in which he argues that the artist \u201coffers a new way of thinking about hip-hop as a whole, not simply as a capitalistic enterprise or as a \u2018black news\u2019 channel, but as a distinct method for collecting data and understanding the experiences and existence of black people.\u201d<\/p>\n What artists like Lamar and graffiti artist Basquiat are doing, Haile says, is blowing up an idea and creating from the fragments. Kendrick Lamar takes the West Coast narrative and gives you those elements in different pieces. It sounds chaotic,\u201d Haile says, likening Lamar to Miles Davis. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe more you listen, the more you understand that Lamar plays around with voice as a way of shifting perspectives. He plays around with cadence like Wright\u2019s Black Boy<\/i>,\u201d Haile says. \u201cRichard Wright\u2019s Black Boy<\/i> is a collection of ideas. Lamar is a collection of ideas.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n In the shattering of ideas, Wright and Lamar are doing the work of philosophers. It is work Haile knows intimately. He is writing a book on Black art to be published by Northwestern University Press. \u201cThe history of philosophy is one of blowing stuff up,\u201d Haile says. \u201cBut we don\u2019t do that anymore. We don\u2019t say, \u2018Let\u2019s blow up the conceptual framework, the idea.\u2019 We fear being out on the ledge alone.\u201d Haile\u2019s book is about the destruction of thought. \u201cIt\u2019s a book about Black art, which is, in itself, Black art. It doesn\u2019t read like a straightforward narrative. It\u2019s constantly moving\u2014a moving target.\u201d<\/p>\n So, how does a philosophy professor use popular music to convey such weighty ideas as the destruction of thought or the nature of being to 18-year-olds? He meets them where they live. He talks about the title track of good kid, m.A.A.d city<\/i>: \u201cSing about me.\u201d He notes that Lamar alters his voice to tell others\u2019 stories in their voices, creating a conversation in which he channels all parts. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cKendrick Lamar is switching pronouns in a single sentence! Shifting perspective,\u201d Haile says. \u201cRather than speaking for those who do not have a voice, Lamar blends their voices as his own without subsuming their voice,\u201d Haile writes in \u201cgood kid, m.A.A.d city: Kendrick Lamar\u2019s Auto-ethnographic Method.\u201d \u201cWhen one is listening and hears Lamar, one is also hearing all the other voices that are not his.\u201d<\/p>\n So to study Lamar is to contemplate the very nature of identity?<\/p>\n Haile grins. \u201cLamar gets us out of the politics of our identities and more to something significantly true.\u201d<\/p>\n Hip-hop artists so revere <\/b>words that they profane them. They add and subtract letters from them at will. They stretch and pull them like gum wound round the finger. They take two words and mash them together. They take one word and split it like an atom. And the fallout is music\u2014and more: insight into the human condition, the outpouring of a soul expressing love, lust, anger, frustration, hatred, unity, pride, virtue, and vice: it\u2019s all there. Hip-hop has been criticized for its misogyny, homophobia, racist language, and glorification of violence. But is it so different from any other art form? Hasn\u2019t the artist always sought to mirror back to society its triumphs and its failures? Hasn\u2019t art always been about giving voice to thought?<\/p>\n Africa Costarica Smith \u201918 loves words. She writes a haiku a day as a kind of personal check-in. \u201cI\u2019ll write in my journal, just write out what I see, and then condense it. My parents are house-hunting right now. I wrote a whole thing about a house being condemned. I ended it with \u201cempty of everything being full,\u201d Smith says. \u201cSo I\u2019ll start a poem from that line.\u201d<\/p>\n Smith, a spoken-word artist and former member of 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Slam Poetry Club, intends to make a career in university administration. Art is her outlet. \u201cMy parents grew up in New York City and Brooklyn,\u201d Smith says. \u201cMusic, hip-hop, has always been a part of my family\u2019s life. My dad had a boom box and an Afro and was into freestyling. My parents used music as a connector. There wasn\u2019t a day music wasn\u2019t played in my house.\u201d Smith\u2019s dad has a beat machine. \u201cHe\u2019d be riding the rhythm. It got him out of bed in the morning,\u201d Smith says. <\/span><\/p>\n Smith, who competed in slam poetry contests at 溏心vlog免费B站, says the allure of rap and hip-hop is its accessibility. Still true to its urban roots, hip-hop is narrative in the tradition of the epic poem, speaking to universal truths, meant for mass consumption. This is the language of youth speaking their truth.<\/p>\n \u201cHip-hop and rap give people a chance to tell their story,\u201d Smith says. \u201cAnd the more woke you are, the harder it is to sleep. The more woke you become, the more aware you are of injustice in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n As an undergraduate, Smith sometimes found herself the only nonwhite person in a classroom. Writing and performing proved a release from the unease she sometimes felt. \u201cPoetry helps me put it all into perspective. Then I can reflect and feel better about things. In the black community, we don\u2019t talk about mental health. Rap and poetry address personal and societal issues,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople can find themselves in someone else\u2019s story and not feel so alone in this world.\u201d<\/p>\n Bob Dilworth, professor of<\/b> art, teaches painting, drawing, design, \u201cThe idea for this series of paintings, for the new work I\u2019m doing, is to focus on lives affected by shootings and killings of young kids in the streets,\u201d Dilworth says. \u201cThere are families affected. We never hear from the moms, the dads, the aunts and uncles. We never hear how they feel.\u201d<\/p>\n Then Dilworth watched a get-out-the-vote ad featuring former first lady Michelle Obama. In it, she exhorted everyone to vote. Not just Democrats, but all people. It moved him. \u201cI thought, how wonderful! Her concern isn\u2019t about black or white or yellow or green. It\u2019s about everyone voting. She saw it on a higher level, and everyone\u2019s getting the call,\u201d Dilworth says. \u201cIt\u2019s a call that we need to stop, take pause.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe way the world has to change is through acceptance and through love,\u201d Dilworth says. So now the show\u2019s working title is \u201cBlack Love Matters: The Aesthetics of Repair.\u201d \u201cThe suggestion is that something needs addressing,\u201d Dilworth says. \u201cWe need to create a new space for repairing what\u2019s wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Art as activism plays well on the grand canvases Dilworth creates using acrylics and spray paint, Sharpie markers and fabric. It\u2019s an involved process. Dilworth photographs and interviews the subjects of his paintings. Then he makes stencils on grids that are reproduced on the canvases. Square by square, his drawing grows until figures tower and a stepladder is needed. <\/span><\/p>\n While his is not graffiti art, per se, Dilworth\u2019s paintings echo the energy, movement, and emotion of graffiti art. Standing in front of a painting in its infancy\u2014several life-sized female figures in black outline rendered over Montana Gold acrylic paint\u2014Dilworth ruminates on art\u2019s provocative nature.<\/p>\n \u201cPart of what\u2019s happening is artists of color have had to create a visual expression of what\u2019s happening in the country today, and how to counteract or address the issue is through art,\u201d he says. \u201cArt has always been a way to comment, to give some expression to what\u2019s going on. Art reflects life, reflects people who are trying to understand a rapidly changing society, a rapidly changing world. And they\u2019re expressing it in novels and poetry and painting and song,\u201d Dilworth says. \u201cArt helps other people to understand what\u2019s going on in their world. Artists can create, through metaphor, a window into what\u2019s going on in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Teaching students about hip-hop artists like Basquiat, Banksy, and Keith Haring exposes them to the idea that they, too, can contribute a verse. \u201cBasquiat had a unique perspective on life. Basquiat, Romare Bearden\u2014these are the people you study. The ones that have that unique vision,\u201d Dilworth says. \u201cSometimes it takes someone who\u2019s way out in left field to help us so that we can see the world in the unique way they\u2019re looking at it.\u201d<\/p>\n 溏心vlog免费B站 alums and rappers Duval <\/b>\u201cMasta Ace\u201d Clear \u201988 and Sage Francis \u201999 stepped into the world of hip-hop after graduation. Both recommend that path, in that order. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe main reason I went to 溏心vlog免费B站 was to get on the radio,\u201d Francis says. \u201cI grew up listening to WRIU\u2019s hip-hop shows, back when DJ Curty Cut had a show. I ended up visiting the station and rapping on it whenever the DJs would allow me to. I became a fixture to the point where I was actually given a show before I was even a student at 溏心vlog免费B站. It was fun as hell and it helped us whip up a legitimate hip-hop scene in Rhode Island.\u201d<\/p>\n Francis is the founder of Strange Famous Records, an independent label he established in 1996 because, according to his website, he decided to stop waiting around for a label to discover him. His advice to up-and-coming college rappers comes in the form of a question: \u201cWhy are you on a campus if you\u2019re an up-and-coming rapper?\u201d His answer and his advice: \u201cYou\u2019re not. So have a fallback plan. Get that degree.\u201d<\/p>\n Thirty-year hip-hop veteran Masta Ace offers similar advice. He counsels those who would follow his path to be equal parts artist and pragmatist. \u201cI tell young people that all things are possible. Look within and find that strength, that drive, that desire\u2014and go for it. But make sure music is not your plan A,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I was starting out, one in 1,000 made it, got a deal, put a record out. Now, these kids are up against the world. The odds are much worse now. My marketing degree from 溏心vlog免费B站 was my plan A.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t want to wake up at 35, sleeping on your mom\u2019s couch, eating your mom\u2019s food, with a baby here and one on the way.\u201d Ace says. \u201cIt\u2019s almost clich\u00e9. You don\u2019t want that. Make music your plan B.\u201d<\/p>\n Poet, essayist, and master\u2019s<\/b> degree candidate Reza Clifton \u201903 is a \u201cHip-hop was conceived of and grew in an underfunded city at a time when cuts to music programs were happening in schools,\u201d Clifton continues. \u201cHip-hop was like The Little Engine That Could\u2014<\/i> pressing on whether there was funding or not. It is a message of self-determination that underlies the founding of hip-hop.\u201d<\/p>\n Derek Lacy \u201919 also raps about <\/b>life. He is fully funding his education with an inheritance he got from his grandfather. He\u2019ll be the first of his family to graduate from college. If he could, he\u2019d have his future as a rapper start today. \u201cIt\u2019s the streaming age, and rap is a young man\u2019s game,\u201d Lacy says. \u201cI gotta really get myself together here. I just want to make people feel something.\u201d To hear him is to believe he just might. \u2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Kendrick Lamar won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for music, it signaled a recognition by the cultural elite that hip-hop has something to contribute. It is art, poetry, philosophy, big business…and, for some, even salvation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall-2018","architecture-features"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":587,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions\/587"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMartins says.<\/p>\n![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/magazine\/sites\/13\/2018\/11\/646A7097-1-500x316.jpg\")
\nHip-hop is getting to the TRUTH<\/h2>\n
\nHip-Hop is finding a VOICE<\/h2>\n
![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/magazine\/sites\/13\/2018\/11\/DSC_3272-1-364x264.jpg\")
\nHip-hop is taking a STAND<\/h2>\n
\nand African-American art history in the Department of Art and Art History, in addition to chairing Africana Studies. Standing amid his larger-than-life paintings in his Providence studio, he says that he considered naming his next show \u201cBlack Lives Matter.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/magazine\/sites\/13\/2018\/11\/ARS-20180723-NL-049.jpg\")
\nHip-hop is taking your SHOT<\/h2>\n
![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/magazine\/sites\/13\/2018\/11\/MastaAce_originals_zoefotografie_1554-500x426.jpg\")
\nHip-Hop is keeping it REAL<\/h2>\n
![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/magazine\/sites\/13\/2018\/11\/ALM-20180920-NL-009-500x685.jpg\")
\nformer WRIU DJ who introduced the campus to female rappers and musicians through the radio show Voices of Women<\/i>. \u201cThe reason hip-hop will continue is because it still represents the voice and mood of the culture of the oppressed,\u201d Clifton says. Hip-hop is a genre where you don’t need to have formal music training; you don’t have to be able to play the violin or the piano.<\/p>\n