Today is the Black August Concert at BB Kings (11pm Aug 31)

I've been teaching hip-hop for over 12 years doing some of the more innovative things with hip-hop in the classroom. and I am not a comprehensive teacher. I would call myself a niche professor. I specialize in race, gender and the body in hip-hop. I focus on context not content. I might not know the latest beats, but as I said in class, I learn a great deal I couldn't learn on my own from my students. I don't hang at a lot of concerts but I strongly encourage YOU to do so so we can be out in the world experiencing hip-hop culture on the fly.

I am part of the first generation outside of NYC to identify with rap and hip-hop culture. I am a sleeper. I slept on its power as I graduated high school in 1979. Rapper's Delight was a "fad" then. As a freshman in college studying classical music but wanted to be Chaka Khan, an R&B singer, I learned to think of rap as "jungle music" at first. Right up there with go-go as it was emerging in my suburb of Washington, DC. I grew up in Rockville, MD.

Now it's 2008. 20 +1 years later and hip-hop reflects the world in ways we need to learn about. So we don't and can't go back to the South Bronx and find its roots. But we can use Web 2.0 technologies -- blogging, video-blogging (v-blogs), twitter, facebook, myspace and more -- to discover the worlds (plural) of hip-hop including how people learned to think, feel, believe and behave, hip-hop concepts, symbols, and expressions. Beats, rhymes and life, following A Tribe Called Quest (ATCQ), might be our motto.

I opened an e-blast this morning about Black August at BB Kings tonight (Sun Aug 31 at 11pm). April Silver, head of Akilaworksongs, sent it. She manages many hip-hop artists and activists. One of her clients produced:

“HIP-HOP: BEYOND BEATS AND RHYMES”
Award-winning documentary
www.bhurt.com
www.itvs.org/outreach/hiphop/