NC: University to Teach Rap Music Class

Daily Stormer
May 13, 2014

North Carolina Central University is going to begin offering classes in rap music.

Dis bee da cultural, nigga.

From the Guardian:

9th Wonder, born Patrick Douthit, became a “professor” at the college when he was named Artist in Residence in 2006. Prior to that, Douthit was an assistant professor at NCCU for a Hip-Hop 101 course taught by Play of the legendary rap duo Kid-N-Play. But the idea of teaching was not new to him.

“I went to school any way to become a history teacher,” Douthit explains, though he did not complete his studies, instead going on to produce for artists like Jay Z, Chris Brown and Erykah Badu. “In the area where I live [Raleigh, North Carolina] there are a lot of people I went to school with who ended up being teachers,” he says. “They would ask their friend who had just worked with Jay Z to come by to talk to their students. Once I got back into the classroom and talked to these kids, I realized this was why I wanted to teach in the first place. But I wasn’t teaching something they were learning in school; I was teaching hip-hop.”

Douthit is a trailblazer, but he is not alone in mixing hip-hop and academia. In 2010, rapper-producer and Ruff Ryders figurehead Swizz Beatz became the first Producer in Residence at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. That same year, UGK veteran Bun B became a professor at Rice University for hip-hop and religion/humanities. In 2013, the de facto leader of the Roots, Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson, became a professor at NYU for a course called Topics in Recorded Music: Classic Albums and currently teaches a course there on Prince.

“I started to see the deeper connection between hip-hop and the youth,” says Douthit, of his own research. “I started to look at the connection between the older generation and the younger generation and how I was the bridge for that. Then I started to look at vinyl sampling compared to literary licenses and I got deeper and deeper and deeper. While I was still making beats, I was still very much into the academic discourse of what hip-hop used to be and what it still is.” In 2010, he taught a course at Duke called Sampling Soul, flanked by Duke’s African American studies professor, Dr Mark Anthony Neal.

In addition to setting up the Hip-Hop Institute, Douthit is currently a professor at Harvard University, a three-year fellowship where he is conducting his thesis on the samples that encompass his Top 10 albums and teaching a Standards of Hip-Hop course. It’s documented in his film The Hip-Hop Fellow.