Approaches to Facilitating Hip Hop Creation

The following are suggestions, not any kind of prescribed method for teaching Hip Hop. Just like Hip Hop artists are responsible for taking inspiration and then innovating their own style, Hip Hop educators might adapt ideas from other teachers to their own context. In this way, we hope to see teaching approaches in Hip Hop that look different in different places and continually evolve and adapt—just like Hip Hop art forms do.

Acknowledging Positions. It is imperative for educators and students to acknowledge and critically question their relationship to Hip Hop culture. Using the previous information in this chapter— particularly the essential questions Lamont posed—might serve as a starting place for this work, but it should be a continuous activity. Ultimately, if music educators want to realize any of the transformational potential of engaging with Hip Hop culture, everyone involved should be thinking about their motivations, their backgrounds, and their actions.

Folks who are distant from the culture, inexperienced, or uninformed are still welcome to participate, but they should be aware of the potential baggage they carry. Even those who feel well-versed may have their own baggage. Students and teachers alike may hold stereotypical views based in racism and classism or assumptions about musical values steeped in Eurocentrism. Regardless of intention, they may perform acts perceived as appropriative or culturally insensitive. In addition to understanding Hip

Hop at a culture level to inform this reflective dispositional work, we also strongly encourage engaging with Hip Hop artists in your community as consultants, guest artists, and collaborators. Their insights and skills will likely be invaluable—particularly for music educators with less experience in Hip Hop.

Building Community. At the summer youth Hip Hop Camp that we co-direct at the University of Illinois, we spend our first afternoon with the artist instructors and the youth campers getting to know one another, building trust, and developing a sense of community. That work continues all week for us and has shown to be a vital ingredient for the creative work that happens. We have two expectations for all campers: 1) Everyone has to be themselves entirely and unapologetically, and 2) Everyone is everyone else’s number one fan. We encourage—and model—geeking out about niche interests, embracing idiosyncrasies, and anything else that might set artists apart as individuals. Sometimes people bond over shared interests, but especially when they don’t, we celebrate these differences and honor the unique perspectives that come forth.

We also expect—and model—emphatic support of any creative work that campers share. Everyone present has an active role as audience member for one another and we practice showing and giving support to one another. There is ultimately more pressure on the listeners than the performers when we repeatedly share during the week. By the time we have our public performance at the end of this week, campers and instructors alike know one another’s creations and sing and dance along as if they are attending a show by their favorite artist on an international tour.

In turn, this demonstrates expected audience behavior for the rest of the performance attendees and the community vibe in the venue is simply electric. These expectations—of unapologetically being yourself and giving exuberant support to your peers—are prerequisites for our creative work. We often put as much or more effort into the community vibe with our campers as we do their musical creations and performances because we trust that youth are brilliant and given a supportive environment, they will shine.

Listening and Creating. As Lamont mentioned above, listening, and creating work together reciprocally is central to Hip Hop composition. There is a rich history in Hip Hop of drawing inspiration from obscure sources in order to bring something new to the party. Classroom work might embrace this concept. Instead of listening with the sole goal of copying, perhaps music educators and their students might learn to listen for ideas that inform creation. Understanding the loop of creating and listening might encourage deeper appreciation and skill-building while exploring endless source material for inspiration. In this way, Hip Hop creative activity in a classroom setting need not be limited to only engaging with Hip Hop recordings.

Students might sample or remix existing material from anywhere, they might blend seemingly disparate musical styles into new hybrids, or they might create a brand-new aesthetic that reflects their own interests and experiences. At the end of the day, an innovative creation that flips source material into something contextually meaningful is perhaps more culturally Hip Hop than students performing a note-for-note cover of a Missy Elliott song.

Considering Representation. Participation in Hip Hop culture is rich and always growing in diversity. Examples of songs, the inclusion of guest artists, the use of instructional videos, or any other moments of representation in a music classroom should reflect this diversity. Hip Hop production—like many corners of fields related to music technology— is incredibly male-dominated. Seeing examples of female and gender diverse producers is important for everyone. It is also incredibly important to honor and include the Black American roots of Hip Hop, and its current Black American practitioners as well. However, considering representation from other angles is also incredibly meaningful for students to see themselves and others in Hip Hop culture.

YouTube alone gives teachers and students access to examples of Hip Hop in countless languages, from artists of any age, from artists with disabilities, from a universe of gender expressions, and from seemingly any other perspective imaginable. Exploring how a world of individuals have connected to the culture while making a style all their own could help in developing an appreciation of Hip Hop’s evolution as well as inspiring original student creation. Of course, not every example in the world will be respectful and cognizant of Hip Hop’s foundations, its indelible mark of Black genius, or its connection to oppression and resilience, but these moments may also provide important opportunities for classroom discussion and critique.

Prioritizing Access and Scaffolding Success. When considering technologies to employ in a Hip Hop classroom, we recommend prioritizing those that will be most accessible and easy to use for students. This might even mean eschewing digital technologies altogether when necessary. Promoting success, instilling confidence, and building trust are far more important than preparing students for a potential career in the music industry. So many of the relevant DAW skills transfer between the cheapest and the most expensive software, that we suggest starting students on software they can also access at home. After all, engaging Hip Hop in music education should break down traditional barriers to participation, not create new ones. Also, focusing on tools that get students to making music and expressing themselves artistically right away should take a front seat compared to software with steep learning curves that require hours of experience and endless menus and settings.

In general, the practice of scaffolding smaller and simpler experiences into larger ones is worthwhile. As students grow in experience and curiosity, they may need to move to new, more powerful programs. Start with composing a four-measure loop, and then move to creating an entire beat. Write two lines that rhyme and celebrate those before trying to write an entire original song. Improvise single rhyming words before trying to freestyle an entire 16-measure verse. Whether we are teaching Hip Hop in a one-hour workshop or a semester-long course, with elementary students or adults, we generally follow these processes: Start small, then grow. Share often, celebrate enthusiastically.

The confidence that comes from these processes fuels a lot of artistic development in ways that avoid prescription or too much direction.

Supporting Youth Music. In order to keep Hip Hop pedagogies in music classrooms sustainable and fresh for the future, we highly recommend that music educators avoid dictating taste or limiting student choices. Acknowledge that Hip Hop takes inspiration from virtually everywhere and that innovation and change are expected in the culture. Even if the music educator has a favorite artist or style, it is likely not always going to match the taste of young people. Again, their Hip Hop is not your Hip Hop. Exploring Hip Hop of past eras can be educational but limiting Hip Hop to a music appreciation course centered on someone’s perception of the “greats” will be missing out on so much. We encourage music educators to keep an open mind and even though they may not love every new trend, they might embrace and appreciate the constant shift in aesthetics and a priority for artists innovating new styles.

Dismissing youth’s preferences for some bygone days of when people made “real” Hip Hop is arguably no better or different than ignoring popular music in favor of centuries’ old orchestral music from Europe. By focusing on youth culture and encouraging students to pursue their own styles, music educators might avoid limiting Hip Hop into a schoolified institutional version that few young people will actually want to experience. Thinking back to our summer Hip Hop Camp, one of the young campers whose work has been most inspirational, engaging, and popular has sounded very little like what most would consider Hip Hop.

Describing this camper’s style is actually really difficult as it blends elements of indie rock, singer-songwriter vibes, pop anthems, rapping, string instruments, and general eclecticism into something entirely new. In this way, we often argue that this camper is just as Hip Hop in their core as some of the other folks who can fine tune an 808 or spit an amazing freestyle. We see no productive purpose in limiting their choices or dictating a style when they are clearly capable of developing their own.

References: Abe, D. (2009). Hip-hop and the academic canon. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 4(3), 263-272. https://doi.org/10.1177/1746197909340872

Alim, S. H. (2007). Critical hip-hop language pedagogies: Combat, consciousness, and the cultural politics of communication. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 6(2), 161-176. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348450701341378

Chaney, C. (2018). “You can never kill me”: Racism and resilience in Hip Hop. Journal of Popular Music Education, 2(1), 81-100. https://doi.org/10.1386/jpme.2.1-2.81_1

Chang, J. (2005). Can’t stop, won’t stop: A history of the hip-hop generation. Picador.

Crooke, A. H. D., & Almeida, C. M. (2017). “It’s good to know something real and all that”: Exploring the benefits of a school-based Hip Hop program. Australian Journal of Music Education, 50(1), 13-28. https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=967435258266803;res=IELHSS;subject=media

Elpus, K. (2015). Music teacher licensure candidates in the United States: A demographic profile and analysis of licensure examination scores. Journal of Research in Music Education, 63(3), 314-335. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022429415602470

Evans, J. (2020). Connecting Black youth to critical media literacy through hip hop making in the music classroom. Journal of Popular Music Education, 4(3), 277-293. https://doi.org/ 10.1386/jpme_00020_1

Fraley, T. (2009). I got a natural skill . . . : Hip-hop, authenticity, and whiteness. Howard Journal of Communications, 20(1), 37-54. https://doi.org/10.1080/10646170802664979