Tricia Rose & Hip Hop Scholarship
Happy Holidays all!
I am applying for graduate programs this winter and one of the people I have fallen in love with in the process is Tricia Rose, a faculty member in Africana Studies at Brown University. In addition to her work on feminism, African-American history, and social justice, she is most known for her work on/in Hip Hop. I think it is pretty clear on this blog that I love rap and listen to it incessantly. Therefore, to find an individual doing honest critical work about hip hop among other things in a program I am interested in is really exciting. I have decided that hip hop/Afro/African contemporary music (specifically, rap - including Drakesque rap/rnb sub-genre, reggae, Ghanaian hip life, among others) is going to be, beyond a doubt, a chunk of my intellectual work in graduate school and beyond.
In many ways, I believe I bring some different understandings to this rap/hip hop/Afro/African contemporary music discourse than those I have come across. I am in the middle of a post about this - specifically, how I came to know of this music genre, what it has meant to me, and what love about it and understand of it. Part of what I know for sure is that being a poet definitely situates me in a different context than perhaps other hip hop affectionados/critics. I feel an affinity for the craft not just as a subject of our culture to be studied or entertained but primarily as a production, a story, work. I find that I deeply enjoy some rumbustious, problematic rap because the art often speaks deeply to my heart as a poet before I can contextualize, intellectualize, and problematize it. It is therefore a lot of going back and forth for me:Wayne & Mrs. Officer, Lupe & Bitch Politics, etc.
Moreover, having grown up in the Bronx (as did Prof. Rose), going to parties/ clubs, loving reality TV, rap culture, and just being a Millennial in general endows me with some different understandings and appreciations which I do not necessarily see in other scholarly work. I will explain this in my wanting/working to be a rap/Afro/African contemporary music scholar post.
I am thinking about creating a hip hop (and short fiction) tab as I see myself diving more deeply into this in the coming months.
There is so much to learn from Tricia Rose and I love hearing her speak:
I am applying for graduate programs this winter and one of the people I have fallen in love with in the process is Tricia Rose, a faculty member in Africana Studies at Brown University. In addition to her work on feminism, African-American history, and social justice, she is most known for her work on/in Hip Hop. I think it is pretty clear on this blog that I love rap and listen to it incessantly. Therefore, to find an individual doing honest critical work about hip hop among other things in a program I am interested in is really exciting. I have decided that hip hop/Afro/African contemporary music (specifically, rap - including Drakesque rap/rnb sub-genre, reggae, Ghanaian hip life, among others) is going to be, beyond a doubt, a chunk of my intellectual work in graduate school and beyond.
In many ways, I believe I bring some different understandings to this rap/hip hop/Afro/African contemporary music discourse than those I have come across. I am in the middle of a post about this - specifically, how I came to know of this music genre, what it has meant to me, and what love about it and understand of it. Part of what I know for sure is that being a poet definitely situates me in a different context than perhaps other hip hop affectionados/critics. I feel an affinity for the craft not just as a subject of our culture to be studied or entertained but primarily as a production, a story, work. I find that I deeply enjoy some rumbustious, problematic rap because the art often speaks deeply to my heart as a poet before I can contextualize, intellectualize, and problematize it. It is therefore a lot of going back and forth for me:Wayne & Mrs. Officer, Lupe & Bitch Politics, etc.
Moreover, having grown up in the Bronx (as did Prof. Rose), going to parties/ clubs, loving reality TV, rap culture, and just being a Millennial in general endows me with some different understandings and appreciations which I do not necessarily see in other scholarly work. I will explain this in my wanting/working to be a rap/Afro/African contemporary music scholar post.
I am thinking about creating a hip hop (and short fiction) tab as I see myself diving more deeply into this in the coming months.
There is so much to learn from Tricia Rose and I love hearing her speak:
Comments
Post a Comment