This document discusses hip-hop pedagogy and its role in music education. It argues that hip-hop culture can inform teaching and learning with values like keeping it real and staying fresh. Integrating hip-hop allows students to produce original work using digital audio tools. However, simply adding hip-hop songs to the curriculum does not challenge the paradigm of learning through performance. The document also discusses issues around cultural appropriation and authenticity when non-Black artists cover hip-hop songs. It suggests having students write their own songs instead. Overall, the document examines how hip-hop culture and practices can shape music education in meaningful ways.

1. Hip-hop pedagogy for a
post-performance age
Ethan Hein
New York University

2. For the
purposes
of this
talk, hip-
hop is a
culture,
while rap
is a genre
of music
emerging
from that
culture

3. Beyond its role as a subject area, what can
hip-hop norms and values contribute to
the field of music education more broadly?
The question of whether to include
hip-hop in the curriculum is a question
about the goals of music education

4. Hip-hop is “a distinct worldview with
related sensibilities and epistemologies
that can inform teaching and
learning” (Petchauer, 2011)

5. Being hip-hop: keeping it real, flipping
the script, making some noise, and
staying fresh (Adam Kruse)

6. If we diversify
ensemble
repertoire, the
underlying
paradigm of
obtaining
musical
knowledge
through
performance/
possession
remains
largely
unchallenged

7. Digital audio production tools make it
possible to teach music as an art class,
in which students produce original work

8. Hip-hop aesthetics,
values, and practices
differ more widely
from the Western
European art music
tradition than those
of any other popular
form

9. Rap, like all current pop, exposes its
mediating technologies rather than
concealing them (Anne Danielsen)

10. Music technology is a story of “values,
not inventions” (Paul Théberge)
A core value of hip-hop is the use of
recorded music as raw material,
including copyrighted material

11. Digital sampling
transforms linear
ideas into circular
ones
Sampling has political
valence, both because it
is widely considered to be
stealing, and because it
“Africanizes” its source
material (Joseph Schloss)

12. Deficit narrative: Young people in the Bronx began using
turntables and samplers because they were too deprived to
be able to play ‘real’ instruments
Prince Paul: “You know, everybody went to a school that
had a band. You could take an instrument if you wanted to.
Courtesy of your public school system, if you wanted to.
But, man, you playing the clarinet isn’t gonna be like,
BAM! KAH! Ba-BOOM-BOOM KAH!”

13. Present-day hostility toward rap
mirrors the rhetoric of cultural
authorities of the past against
black, immigrant and Native
American musics (Ruth Gustafson)

14. “[T]he artistic potential of hip-hop is
great. But without the addition of melody
and harmony, its strictly musical potential
will remain limited” (Martha Bayles)
Condemning rap for its failure to live up to
Eurocentric standards is “epistemological
colonialism” (Deborah Bradley)
Uh
and
when
I
wake up
I
rec-
og-
nize
you
pay cut
the
for
me
at
look-
in’

15. Anti-racist music education can challenge
an institutional culture shaped by “racism
without racists” (Robin DiAngelo)

16. Hip-hop education supports cultural
competence, an understanding of
one’s culture of origin, coupled with
a fluency in at least one additional
culture (Gloria Ladson-Billings)

17. “Singing another person’s song void of its contexts
would not be keeping it real. Nor would creating music
that does not connect in anyway to one’s individual local
experiences” (Kruse, 2016, p. 54).
Hip-hop “foregrounds identity with an explicitness well-
nigh unprecedented even in the ethnically and gender-
loaded world of popular musics” (Krims, 2000, p. 9).

18. Is it acceptable for white musicians to
perform songs that speak directly and
exclusively to the personal experience
of black artists? In other words, should
Chris Thile cover Kendrick Lamar?

19. Marco Petrilli: “Not a single student
of mine, black or white, ever
considers covering a rap. My
understanding of their view is that a
rap must be uniquely personal (at
least in word play and rhythmic
invention). Has any popular artist,
black or white, ever successfully
covered a rap? Is it possible that
popular American music, heavily
weighted with white appropriation of
black forms, has finally broken free
from the tradition of covers?”
One conspicuous exception: Snoop
Dogg’s “Lodi Dodi” (1993), a cover of
“La Di Da Di” by Slick Rick and Doug
E Fresh (1985)

20. Having students write their own songs
sidesteps the issue of profane lyrics

21. Realness and
originality are
related but not
the same thing
Sampling,
quoting and
interpolation
are fine; biting
is not

22. ethanhein.com | @ethanhein