It's How You Flip It. Multiple Perspectives on Hip-Hop and Music Education (2024)

During the past decades rap and hip hop culture have been utilized and institutionalized in public programs combating the radicalization and criminalization of marginalized ethnic minority youths in Denmark. Such a use of rap music, in particular, in institutionalized social work and political matters has created what I refer to as a ‘rap as resource industry’ that operates within the social sector, parallel to the ‘regular’ music industry. This article analyses personal and political inferences in policies of the system among rappers who engage with this industry as social workers and educators. Such engagements are examined by way of the metaphor of the feature: a musical practice distinct to hip hop, based on reciprocity and mutual gain. This article examines how their precarious position as mediators between youths and the system affects the individual rappers and how they handle the implicit or explicit demands and expectations placed upon them. Many of such social, rap-based p...

With over 30 years of tradition, breaking in Germany provides fascinating insights into the learning of dance in Hip Hop culture, reaching from informal street learning to the introduction of courses in educational institutions. This article draws information from a qualitative empirical study based on the Grounded Theory Methodology. The study asked subjects ranging from first-generation German B-Boys and B-Girls to teenage students about how they have learned and currently learn to break. The interview material reveals a rich and self-regulated learning culture with strong impact on protagonists. A synergy of social, aesthetic, and ethical principles seems to be characteristic, creating a gravitational field of learning with a unique and complex form of imitation at its core. (DIPF/Orig.

While Hip Hop culture has increasingly found itself positioned as object for study within academia, this was a unique Hip Hop-focused creative project based in self-ethnography. Indeed, academic and critical considerations of one's own Hip Hop-based musical production is a novel venture; this project, as a fusion of theory with practice, was therefore undertaken so as to occupy that gap. The study's specific concern is with how (independent) Hip Hop recording artists work to construct their own selves and identity (as formed primarily through lyrical content); the aim here was to explore Hip Hop music and the construction of artistic self-presentation. I therefore went about the task of creating my own album – my own Hip Hop cultural and musical product – in order to place myself in the unique position to examine it critically as cultural artifact, as well as to undertake (self-)analyses concerning various aspects of (my) identity formation. The ensuing outlined tripartite theoretical framework is to serve as a model through which other rappers/academics may think about, discuss, and analyze their own musical output, their own identities, their own selves.

British Journal of Music Education, 2013

Social activism and education have been associated with hip-hop since it emerged in New York City 38 years ago. Therefore, it might not be surprising that universities have become interested in hip-hop. This article aims to highlight this ‘hip-hop academisation’ and analyse the discursive mechanisms that manifest in these academisation processes. The guiding research question explores how hip-hop scholars talk about this academisation. The theoretical framework is informed by the scholarship of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Hip-hop scholars were interviewed in New York City during 2010. The results demonstrate themes of hip-hop as an attractive label, a door opener, a form of ‘low-culture’, a trap and an educational tool.

Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 2012

With over 30 year of tradition, breaking in Germany provides fascinating insights into the learning of dance in Hip Hop culture, reaching from informal street learning to the introduction of courses in educational institutions. This article draws information from a qualitative empirical study based on the Grounded Theory Methodology. The study asked subjects ranging from first-generation German B-Boys and B-Girls to teenage students about how they have learned and currently learn to break. The interview material reveals a rich and self-regulated learning culture with strong impact on pro-tagonists. A synergy of social, aesthetic, and ethical principles seems to be characteristic, creating a gravitational field of learning with a unique and complex form of imitation at its core.

Global hip hop studies, 2021

Kulturelle Bildung - Bildende Kultur, 2017

The work in this article (re)traces the nuances embedded within the aesthetics of the Wu-Tang Clan to draw attention to two theoretical, Wu-based concepts: Shaolin and swarming. This article leans into fugivity and critical race theory (CRT) to demonstrate how hip-hop music can be a capacious avenue for theorizing alternate ways to disrupt hegemonic, oppressive, and racist educational structures and master narratives. In particular, we use two Wu-Tang tracks (e.g. "Can it be all so simple," "Triumph") to demonstrate how static approaches to hip-hop-specifically the Wu-Tang-reduce and flatten engagements with hip-hop music in educational contexts. Central to our argument is that the aesthetics of the Wu-Tang Clan are more than economically damaged narratives that tether various culture entities together: Wu-Tang is theory.

Paper delivered at the inaugural meeting of the European HipHop Studies Network, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany, March 9, 2018.

Journal of Literacy Research, 2023

In this theoretical and conceptual article, we consider how meaning-making, literacies, identities, power, privilege, and in/equities are entangled with/in non/human sociomaterial force relations. Inspired by Rose, we build theoretically on the philosophical principles of hip-hop—flow, rupture, layering, and sampling. Conceptually, we invite literacy educators to attune to “in-the-red frequencies,” or “noisy” political philosophies and practices that Black people have used to create alternative realities to white supremacist patriarchal systems of oppression. Afrodiasporic approaches to mobility and sounding pivot us away from humanist ways of knowing/being/doing/researching literacy and toward more creative, emergent, and “fugitive modes.” Ultimately, we argue that theorizing affective literacies via flow↔rupture↔layering↔sampling enables ethical teaching, learning, and research practices that respect multiple perspectives, histories, and truths; account for affect, power, privilege, positioning, and complicity; and highlight “otherwise worlds” not predicated on hegemonic whiteness, anti-Blackness, and sociopolitical violence.

PhD Dissertation, 2020

This research project illustrates, through the voices of Toronto hip-hop artists, how the complex, mutually influential interactions between individuals and their communities shape and create knowledge, while encouraging the articulation of difference through unique performance identities. Their learning spaces are not institutional classrooms, but rather public spaces such as community centres, church basem*nts, and concrete city squares, where the line between teacher and student is crossed and blurred. I employ narrative methodology as a means of obtaining the rich accounts necessary to illuminate these community-based learning processes. Hip-hop’s history is passed on orally and aurally as artists cultivate their craft. Artists’ personal stories are essential to the way hip-hop’s history, together with its teaching philosophies, are internalized and passed on in community spaces. Narratives elicited through interviews, conducted as dialogue, have the potential to more respectfully trace these individual-communal relationships. As such, the body of my data consists of the narratives of three Toronto hip-hop artists – B-boy Jazzy Jester, DJ Ariel, and MC LolaBunz – presented and interpreted according to the themes or moments that they have voiced as significant to the development of their skills and of their performance identities.The narratives presented here show the dialogic relationship between musical creativity and identity-building, resulting in embodied, performed expressions of an engagement with the tensions of lived experience. Each artist reveals their personal engagement with layers of normative discourses that are constantly at play, accepted, rejected, and creatively manipulated to fashion one’s own performance identity expressed as style.

German Studies Review, 2021

The article develops the notion of the transnational and multilingual feature song (TMFS), in which rappers feature guest rappers performing in a different language and often located in a different country. It theorizes the TMFS as a musical-literary form of German and European rap music that emerged from early hip-hop's performance practices and through which rappers perform hip-hop communities under the conditions of the genre's globalization and technological reproducibility. It then discusses the TMFS in the music of Freundeskreis and DJ Tomekk. The TMFS allows for an examination of the "multidirectionality" (Nitzsche) of global hip-hop based on a specific musical-literary form.

CyberOrient, 2013

Sociology of Sport Journal, 2020