DJ Justice -- I think being a teacher is a lot like being a DJ -- we sample from different readings, put them together in our own distinctive way, and our goal is to get the students "dancing" on the floor so to speak. I think of teaching as part of a search for justice: knowledge is power in a basic sense, and teaching, I hope to share some of the analytic tools that can empower students to remake the world in a more just form. But I also like to teach and learn about struggles for justice in all their diverse and often contradictory forms. Hip hop may be among the most contradictory, and for that reason, enticing objects of study.
My relationship to hip hop -- I was the kind of kid who was clueless about all kinds of music, a follower not a leader in popular culture taste among my friends. I owned no records until mid way through high school, and then bought my first, a Madness album. So I didn't know much about hip hop, or any other kind of music. My first memories of hip hop are young African American boys on the corners in the Fillmore beating out beats on over-turned white plastic buckets, and b-boys who would lay out cardboard on busy streets to break dance for tourists. I grew up in between the Mission, the Fillmore, and the Castro in San Francisco -- each neighborhood marked with a specific identity -- the hearts of latino, black and gay SF respectfully. My junior high school was majority black and latino, but also highly segregated internally by tracking. White kids were tracked into honor's classes, so although white kids were a minority in the school, we were a majority in my classes. I don't think until I was much older that I even noticed that basic structural fact. Back to hip hop, in junior high, when people asked what kind of music I listened to, I would freeze up because of course the real answer was none. But that's not really an acceptable answer for a 13 year old. At that age (and far after) we perform our identities -- we show the world who we are through what we buy and largely through popular music (and the subcultures that grow up alongside it). Through our choices of clothes, the music we buy, the radio stations we listen to, we define ourselves and our relationships to other groups. My friends largely listened to rock and then later ska. But I didn't really know enough to situate myself in the terrain of these different styles. So my answer to the dreaded question was: "I listen to everything except rap." So why was that my answer? This was the early-mid 80s, when rap had exploded out of New York but was still years from being fully incorporated at the center of American popular music. It was very much still a black urban cultural form. And I think my refusal to incorporate rap into my self-definition was as much an unconscious embracing of whiteness (and a reflexive rejection of hip hop as "not real music" which was dominant among white elites at the time -- and still is among many adults and elders white and black).
My interest in hip hop began much later. I was introduced to hip hop by teenagers on Chicago's westside who demanded control of my radio dial as we drove around the city. And then as I did research in Oakland, I saw how important hip hop was as a means of self-expression, a way of claiming and expressive love for neighborhoods like East Oakland that were dismissed and disrespected by the rest of the city. And even more important, I learned from youth activists how they used hip hop as a means of politicizing a generation that Jeff Chang says has been abandoned and forcibly contained. Dead Prez and the Coup played at rallies against Proposition 21 and I began to follow Oakland political hip hop as part of my research. I was never, and am not now a hip hop head. I am woefully ignorant of an enormous amount of hip hop language, culture and music. But I am interested in hip hop: How it provides such a flexible language and style of resistance that means as much in the slums in France, Brazil and South Africa as it does in Oakland or NY? How it encourages young people to cross racial lines, to embrace blackness as an identity? And yet how and why it reifies the worst racial stereotypes?
My research touches many forces that have been central to hip hop's origins and transformations: urban crises, fears of youth, the criminalization of black and latino young men, and rising generational tensions within black communities.
So here are some of the songs I like right now:
And see the classic Grand Master Flash -- The Message
