Students get schooled on hip-hop at Minn. college

Students get schooled on hip-hop at Minn. college – Yahoo! Philippines News

ST. PAUL, Minn. – DJ Freddy Fresh slaps a vinyl record on the turntable, cues it up and tells a student, “Remember, the top of the note was there, right? Grab it.”

The student places his hand on the disc. Freddy Fresh sets the tonearm down on a record rotating on a second turntable. He starts the first record spinning as a percolating beat fills the classroom, then twiddles some knobs.

“Bing, bing, boom. There it is,” Freddy Fresh says while showing the student the precise beat where to stop the platter. “Let’s hear it. Scratch a little so we can hear the top of it.”

The student “scratches” the record, moving his left hand back and forth, then lets the disc go.

“Perfect,” Freddy Fresh declares.

A professional DJ since 1992, Freddy Fresh (real name Fredrick Schmid) is among the new teachers brought in by McNally Smith College of Music for a hip-hop studies program that school officials say is the first in the nation.

The private downtown St. Paul college _ where rapper-actor Ice Cube already funds a scholarship for music technology studies _ began the hip-hop program in September and hopes the first students, after completing a recorded project and a live performance, get their diploma certificates at commencement next summer.

Even though hip-hop is only 30 years old, McNally Smith officials say the urban culture of rap has become a dominating commercial force and deserves serious study. Students say they enjoy the chance to learn from established rappers and DJs.

“What I like the most about it is there are actual artists teaching us, as opposed to just some guy coming in a suit and tie and being like, ‘This is what hip-hop is,’” said student Tim Wagner, 19, who came to McNally Smith to learn studio production and polish his MC skills.

“They know what they’re talking about because they’ve done it.”

College classes on the language of hip-hop or how to work turntables are not new. Berklee College of Music in Boston held its annual Business of Hip-Hop Symposium in October and has had visits from pioneering hip-hop DJ Grandmaster Flash and rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently hosted a semester-long fall lecture series on hip-hop. Marcyliena Morgan, a professor at Harvard University, founded The Hiphop Archive in 2002.

But McNally Smith is offering a full, 45-credit, three-semester hip-hop program. Courses include “Deejay Techniques,” “Diaspora of African Music” and “The Language of Rap and Spoken Word III.” The school hopes that hip-hop graduates will then enter McNally Smith’s two- or four-year programs, where those students can apply some of their credits, said Cliff Wittstruck, dean of academic affairs.

The hip-hop program grew out of a summer workshop at McNally Smith that attracted 22 young people, mainly of high school age. When it was time to draw up courses for the college program, organizers made sure “that it was not just something that was sort of, ‘Oh, we’re going to have a hip-hop diploma and somebody grab the graffiti font and we’ll be all set,’” said workshop director Sean McPherson, bassist and leader of the Twin Cities hip-hop band Heiruspecs.

Program coordinator Toki Wright, a Twin Cities MC and poet, says the program aims to teach all the behind-the-scenes roles in hip-hop: promoters, DJs and producers. Classes on hip-hop business practices, music production and history are among the course offerings.

“So you don’t have to be a great rapper to still receive a diploma,” Wright said.

Fourteen students _ 12 men, two women _ are enrolled in the hip-hop program, which has eight teachers. Overall enrollment at McNally Smith stands at 685, and the school _ founded in 1985 by two guitarists _ has 118 faculty members.

McNally Smith President Harry Chalmiers says rapping _ although it sounds spontaneous _ is not easy.

“The best rap is fine art. It is poetry. It is music. It is rhythm. It is color. It is living history. It is of political, societal commentary. It’s significant work. None of that is easy,” Chalmiers said.

Margret Wander, who raps under the name Dessa Darling with the Minneapolis hip-hop collective Doomtree, had been teaching songwriting at McNally Smith when the school invited her to become a teacher in the hip-hop program. She says she could have used some formal training when she was learning to rap.

“I did a lot of my learning in a Festiva parked outside an Old Country Buffet while one of the guys who was my mentor was pounding on the hood of the car. He goes, ‘Nope, you’re not getting it.’ And I continued to rap and rap and rap until I got it right,” Dessa said.

“And I learned it, but I’d loved to have not had to have sat in a Festiva for six hours.”

A hip-hop music industry pro agrees. Ted Lucas, founder and CEO of Slip-N-Slide Records in South Florida, says marketing, promoting and getting your record played are all skills that a hip-hop artist could stand to learn in school.

“I think it’s a great thing. I wish someone would have had something like this for me when I first started,” says Lucas. “It took me a long time to learn this business. It wasn’t something that just happened overnight.”

Freddy Fresh, the McNally Smith teacher, calls DJ’ing _ seamlessly mixing songs at a disco, party or wedding reception _ an art.

“It’s the knowledge of the music. It’s mapping out the tempos on your songs. It’s the ability to blend smoothly records that have similar tempo ranges to provide a fluid, nice mix during the evening to keep people on the dance floor. There’s many elements to it,” he explains.

Toyosi Duroshola, the student working the turntable in class with Freddy Fresh, says he appreciates learning from a professional. A rapper since he was 13, Duroshola plans to complete McNally Smith’s hip-hop program and sees a possible future as a DJ.

“I’m able to learn this, make some money off of it,” Duroshola says. “This could actually turn into my passion, instead of being an MC.”

___

On the Net:

McNally Smith College of Music: http://www.mcnallysmith.edu

Freddy Fresh: http://www.freddyfresh.com

Doomtree: http://www.doomtree.net

The Hiphop Archive: http://www.hiphoparchive.org

Slip-N-Slide Records: http://www.slipnsliderecords.net

Australia’s New Subculture

They dress like their going to the gym. They have undercuts and spiky hair. They have a few tattoos, hidden from their parents view. They listen to R&B and rap. They hang out in garages, playing cards, swearing and smoking pot. Their ideology of masculinity is a man that won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, has control over his ‘Mrs.’s’ and can stand up for himself. They speak with slang derived from the African American slang, with a few Arabic words here and there. They drive fast, done up cars with controversial personalized number plates. Females are not welcome in this gathering nor are adults. Who are they? They are the Lebanese youth. Their offshoot, ‘hanging out’, is the symbolic axis and working social hub. This subculture is heavily reliant on being ‘in the know’- on being cool, calm and dangerous. If one were to describe the social culture of this group, it would have to be ‘coolness’. But what is this cultural value? How is it embodied? How is it displayed? Why it is so important to the Lebanese youth? What are its social uses, its demographics, its biases and discriminations?

They belong to a unitary culture. They maintain the same dress codes, dance styles, music genres and catalogue of authorized and illicit rituals. They are a subculture from an ethnic culture. They generally congregate on the basis of shared ethnicity and ideology, their consumption of the same media and, most importantly, their preference for youth of the same ethnicity to themselves.

Taking part in this subculture builds affinities, socialising participants into knowledge of the likes and dislikes, meanings and values of the culture. This community will last for several years until these boys decide to settle down through primarily marriage. This subculture will then melt into the ‘mainstream’.

The opposition of the ‘mainstream’ is undoubtedly how many constituents of youth subcultures characterize their own behaviour. However we can’t take youthful discourses literally; they are not a transparent window on the world. This is a constant mistake that has been made by cultural studies. They have been inadequately critical of sub cultural ideologies, first, because they were preoccupied by the task of perforating and challenging prevailing ideologies and, second, because they were biased and tended to correspond with the sub cultural discourse
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s of the youth cultures they study. Academics have acclaimed subcultures, while youth have celebrated the ‘underground’. Where young people have condemned the ‘commercial’, scholars have criticised ‘hegemony’; where one has grieved over ‘selling out’, the other has conceived ‘incorporation’.

Youth visualize their own and other social groups through sub cultural ideologies, they declare their idiosyncratic nature and assert that they are not nameless affiliates of an undistinguished heap. The cultural theorists are not giving non-biased explanations of the way things really are, but incorporate ideologies that fulfil their specific cultural agenda. One should therefore not simply delve into the way of life of a cluster community, but consider the way they make ‘meaning the service of power’.

The distinctions made by the Lebanese youth are not simply affirmations of equal difference; they entail a strong claim to authority and presume the inferiority of others. They are challenge the weight of, namely the police and laws established by the government and see other sub cultural ethnic groups as inferior to them.

Within this subculture, elevated levels of income and property do not associate with high levels of cultural capital, as the two often conflict. Comments about the ‘nouveau riche’ reveal the likely frictions between those affluent in cultural capital but fairly poor in economic capital (like those Lebanese youth that are academics) and those rich in economic capital but less affluent in cultural capital (like professional football players).

Therefore, the third category-social capital-that stems not from what you know or what you have, but from who know, can be attributed fore mostly to the subculture of the Lebanese youth. Connections in the form of friends, relations, associations and acquaintances can all bestow status. ‘Tell the boys that you know so and so and watch them worship you’.

The ‘second nature’ of their knowledge is a quality that members of this subculture must possess. Nothing diminishes capital more than the spectacle of someone trying to hard. For example, a subdued and pale looking Anglo Saxon male attempting to act, dress and associate himself with the subculture of the Lebanese youth.

K. Gelder and S. Thornton argue that ‘the difference between being in or out of fashion, high or low in sub cultural capital, correlates in complex ways with degrees of media coverage, creation and exposure’. In regards to the aforementioned subculture, commercial news and the content of their broadcasting are discussed often amongst each other. They are in passionate resistance to the negative portrayal of their subculture. It can be argued therefore that due to the fact that their subculture is used as the ‘topic of the day’ so readily, that this actually encourages them to become increasingly rebellious against the ‘mainstream’ and forms of authority.

The convertibility of cultural capital into economic capital is what ultimately defines cultural capital. Whilst sub cultural capital may not convert into economic capital, in being a market niche, with the same ease or financial reward as cultural capital, a variety of occupations or increased capital for existing occupations can be gained as a result of ‘coolness’. American clothes designers, especially sportswear designers, such as Nike and Adidas, American artists of hip-hop, rap and R&B and sad to say drug dealers all make a living from their sub cultural capital.

Sub cultural capital is not as class-bond as cultural capital, even though it converts into economic capital. Class does not correlate in any uninterrupted way with levels of youthful sub cultural capital. For instance, it would not be uncommon for a Lebanese boy that was raised in an area that was densely populated with Lebanese households, like Bankstown, to remain dressing, acting and speaking in the same way if he was to move to an area that was densely populated with Anglo-Saxons and of a cl
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ass.

Gender, after age, is the social difference along which sub cultural capital is aligned most analytically to. Generally, the girls associated with this subculture invest more of their time and identity in doing well at school. The boys, in contrast, spend more time and money on going out, listening to music and ‘hanging out with the boys’.

The ‘refusal of complicity’ might be said to categorise the majority of Lebanese youth. These youth are not as anchored in their social place as those younger and older than themselves as they are not settled with a partner nor have they integrated into ‘Australian culture’. By investing in this act of leisure, Lebanese youth further reject being fixed socially. They can postpone ‘social aging’ or that ‘slow renunciation or disinvestment’ which leads people to regulate their goals to their purposes, to support their state, become what they are and make do with what they have. Acting as a barrier against social aging may be one of the reasons as to why it is so attractive to people well beyond their youth.

Lebanese youth can be seen as temporarily taking pleasure in the taste of independence. Freedom from necessity, therefore, does not mean that youth have wealth so much that they are exempt from adult commitments to the accumulation of economic capital. They simply reveal a methodical dedication, which allows practises that are discouraged by the mainstream.

The term ‘subculture’ is therefore useful as a means for analysing the position and experiences of the Lebanese youth of Australia. Sub cultural capital is the key player of a substitute chain of command in which the affiliation of age, gender, sexuality and race are operational in order to keep the resolves of class, income and occupation aside. Sub cultural capital discloses itself most clearly by what it dislikes and by what it definitely isn’t. The vast majority of Lebanese youth distinguish themselves against the mainstream that, to some degree, can be seen to stand in for the masses- this distance is a measure of their cultural worth. Sub cultural ideology unconditionally gives alternative interpretations and values to young peoples, particularly young men’s. It reinterprets the social world. The Lebanese youth jockey for social power through these popular distinctions; they are favouritisms by which members are both given social statuses and endeavour for a meaning of self-worth. This perspective foresees popular culture as a multi-dimensional social space rather than as a flat culture or as simply the end of the social ladder. The Lebanese youth should therefore not be categorised through their cultural differences as being ‘resistances’ to hierarchy or to the isolated cultural supremacy of some ruling body. They should be looked at as the microstructures of power entailed in the cultural competition that goes on between more closely associated social groups.

For another great article on culture click here.

By: Joe Student

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