Is Hip Hop a Legitimate Genre for Academic Writing?
A Report from the Applied Linguistics Winter Conference
HIP HOP COLLOQUIUM: Teaching with Community-Based Vernacular Literacies:
The Case of Rap" presented by Dr. Jon Yasin (Bergen Community College, New
Jersey) and Dr. Michael Newman (Queens College, City University of New York)
Written by Dr. Wendy A. Gavis (Assistant Professor, New York City Technical
College, City University of New York).
Back in 1988, when Jon Yasin was a new professor at Bergen Community
College, students in his writing class regularly said, "Dr. Yasin, I don't
know what to write about."
At the same time that they were saying this,
however, he noticed that they were also carrying around composition
notebooks full of their own writings on a wide variety of topics. When Jon
was allowed to take a look one day, he discovered that these writings were
something new: a new genre, a new style of writing and rhyming called Rap or
Hip Hop.
In time, he realized that the process these kids were using to
write these rap songs paralleled that of the academic essay:
STEP (1) The
rapper thinks of a topic to rap about. (We require the same for an academic
essay.)
STEP (2) This is the "rehearsal" stage in which the rapper groups
together words that rhyme. (In academic writing, this is called the
pre-writing stage.)
STEP (3) The rapper organizes the words so they rhyme
and make sense. Then he or she combines them and synchronizes them to a
beat. (In academic writing, this would be called the first draft.)
STEP
(4) "At this point [if you're a rapper], you stop and drink a cup of water,"
says Jon, because rappers get thirsty. (The academic writing equivalent
would be to take a break for a while to get some distance from the essay.)
STEP (5) This is the revision stage in which a hip hop song is edited until
perfect. (Revision is as essential for writers of academic essays as it is
for rappers.)
Armed with this insight, Jon showed his students that the process they
were using when writing hip hop was the same one they needed when writing an
academic essay.
They immediately understood--same topics, same process,
different writing style. This freed them to write about topics important to
them in an academic mode. At the conference, Jon showed us the fruits of
his labor: an excellent hip hop rhyming song written and performed on tape
by one of his students and its powerful, moving, six-times-revised essay
equivalent. "I don't know what to write about" became a thing of the past.
While Jon Yasin focused on the process of turning rap writing into
written essays, Michael Newman analyzed spoken data from a freestyling, or
improvisational, session at a high school in Queens, NY.
The participants
were students in a class on hip hop production, and the format Michael
observed is called a "cipher." A "cipher" is a form of freestyling in which
participants sit in a circle and proceed round-robin to rap in rhyme on a
particular topic.
The topic Michael recorded was a response to a fight
between two students who were not present at this session. Analysis of the
data revealed several patterns:
(1) rap is a sophisticated form of
expression used to express complex ideologies, and
(2) as a genre, rap
allows for a sophisticated statement of one's position, but not for the
support of it. In this way, it is unlike academic writing which is designed
for both statement of one's views and supporting details. This, however,
should not be construed as a negative. Ciphers can be used as a pre-writing
activity allowing students to give voice to their initial feelings and
ideas.