"Who can tell me what a player is?" asked Dr. Tricia Rose during her lecture, "The State of Hip-Hop," which she gave in Dartmouth Hall last Thursday. The event was part of "Levels of the Boom," a week-long series of events celebrating hip-hop with lectures, panel discussions and film screenings. Each component presented a different side of hip-hop culture, and each made audience members groove.
"Levels of the Boom" addressed a range of issues in hip-hop such as the role of women in the music industry, commercialism, the ethics of sampling, the effects of the music on race relations and the definition of a "player."
"Hip-hop gives marginalized people a microphone and a public voice," Rose said. "It was hip-hop that forced black music into a previously white-dominated music market."
Rose believes that hip-hop is an expressive form of music. "It's a very dense form of storytelling. Before hip-hop, music was very one-dimensional. Hip-hop changed all that -- its lyrics create pictures, portraits, a scene, a place, a social context."
Rose sees hip-hop as a cultural force, though not without its evils. She worries about how mainstream artists have promoted excessive luxury, explaining that the displacement of true self-worth is most damaging to poor people. Another consequence of hip-hop's development is the materialized place of women in the music. "Women have become commodities," Rose said.
"Levels of the Boom" also featured Dr. Joe Schloss, an ethnomusicologist, and his lecture, "Not a Mystery or a Memory: Sample-based Hip-Hop and Its World." Schloss used his turntable to demonstrate how parts of a song may be sampled into a new track.
He discussed the ethics of sampling and the changing nature of songwriting. "At first, hip-hop consisted of a series of 'breaks' with only percussion and bass. During the breaks, the artists would either rap or break dance. That's where the term break dancing comes from, although real break dancers call it b-boying," Schloss said.
Also part of the week-long series was a panel discussion, "From Beat Street to Wall Street: Surveying the Contemporary Hip-Hop Landscape." The panel featured Jeff Chang, a record producer, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, an editor at Vibe magazine and Dr. Jeffrey Ogbar, an historian and author. Chang spoke of what he considered the four elements of hip-hop: graffiti, b-boying, sampling and emceeing.
Dartmouth students who attended the week's film screenings got a great education in hip-hop history. One of the movies, "Wild Style," is set in the Bronx in 1982, the scene of intense music creativity. "Seeing the documentary and then going to 'The State of Hip-Hop' was crazy," said Evan Jones '05. "I'm all about hip-hop, but I never thought about its origins."
Also part of the series was "Style Wars," a film on subway graffiti in New York in the 1980s that explores the psychological reasoning behind graffiti. The film delves into graffiti's role in human character traits such as territorial rights and the need for -- and pursuit of -- recognition. The films and lectures complimented each other and showed hip-hop's influence on our culture.
"I'm really pleased with the turnout," said Nela Suka '04, who helped organize the week's happenings. The series of events and activities began as the culmination project for Adrian Gaskins, a Thurgood Marshall Fellow finishing his dissertation. When Suka and others joined in the planning, the organizers decided to focus specifically on the art, culture and history of hip-hop and make it into a week long celebration of the musical genre.
The week was co-sponsored by the Office of Black Student Advising, the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, the Graduate Student Council, the Women of Color Collective and other student organizations.
Even though hip-hop may have problems, Rose is optimistic about its future. After all, "to truly love hip-hop means to fight with it."
