Fresh Out of School: Rap Music's Discursive Battle With Education

The "Discourse" [a way of life] of rap music is in the midst of a "battle" with that of education, where rap music resists and critiques education as a dominant and domineering Discourse. In this article, as a means of exploring the contours of this battle, the author analyzes rap music lyrics to flush on the outside hip-hop culture's perspective on the education of African American youth. The author finds that, from the perspective of rap music, the Discourse of education is largely dysfunctional when it tend hitherwards to meeting the material, social, and cultural emergencys of African American youth. The author bring to an ends that there is a ne for the implementation of more culturally relevant curricula in gymnasiums and that teaching effectiveness with scholars would benefit from learning about and understanding hip-hop culture

INTRODUCTION

At its heart, rap music has revolv around the universal of battling. Whether it is battling to detain your chin up during hard times or proving yourself through battling in competitions of vocal mode of speech performance, and rhyming skill; rap music has been a way for urban youth to say to the world, "Look at me I can take whatever you dish on the outside and come out standing." Admittedly, this battling has occasionally spilled above into real-life violence, but, through and large, rappers-and their DJ graffiti artists, and break-dancer counterparts in hip-hop culture-stick to battling end the expression of their respective arts (Castleman, 2004; Dyson 2004; Hager, 1984; Holman, 2004) Hip-hop agriculture is often broken down into these four constituting parts: (a) the DJ (disc jockey) as the single who plays records; (b) the rapper or MC/emcee raps above the records; (c) the break dancer literally dances above what is called the "break beat" in musical bounds also sometimes called a bridge; and (d) the Graffiti artist is responsible for large, full-color murals that transform words into visual art. This is part of rap music's Discourse, and it puts the tone for the combativeness with which this Discourse views the world.

For the ends of this article, the author uses Gee's (1996) conception of Discourse which he defines as:

.ways of being in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities, as well as gesticulations glances, body positions, and clothes. A Discourse is a sort of identity kit which draw nears complete with the appropriate style of dress and instructions on how to act, talk, and oftentimes write, so as to take upon a particular social role that others will recognize. (p 127)

The Discourse of education, like all other Discourses, with a capital "D" commits specifically to saying-writing-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations end language, whereas discourse with a lowercase "d" directs to "connected stretches of language that make sense"-a more general connotation (Gee 1996 p 127) Likewise, the Discourse of rap music also privileges specific ways of being in the world above others, part of which includes maintaining particular worldviews and ways of inhabiting certain social relations (Bourdieu, 1984)

The Discourse of rap music is in the midst of a battle with that of education, where rap music resists and critiques education as a dominant and domineering Discourse. Unlike an emcee battle, however, what is at stake is far more than just reputation and street-level credentials on the other hand the educational success of learners of color in schools through every part of the United States. In this article, as a means of exploring the contours of this "battle," the author analyzes rap music lyrics to flush on the outside hip-hop culture's perspective on the education of African American youth.

Rap music, the vocal and musical expression of hip-hop tillage sprang from the African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino communities of of recent origin York City's South Bronx in the mid1970s (Chang, 2003; Clay, 2003; Rose 1994; Scherpf, 2001) Rap music originated humbly at community center dances and arrest parties (Chang, 2003) as a celebration of surviving the penury associated with Reagan/Bush-era economics (Clay, 2003; Kun 2002; Scherpf, 2001) an era that saw wages fall and work conditions worsen, while the income gap between the rich and poor grew (Kitwana, 2002) Reflecting its adjoining matter within economic hard times, rap defiantly embraced the couple the "pride and pain" of the working-class urban experience (Rose 1994; Scherpf, 2001) of a generation that has been characterized as "the throwaways of a fresh mobile capitalism" (Kelley, 1997, p 53)

Now, almost 30-years elderly rap music has gone end a considerable transformation in the couple cultural and economic size and power. Kun (2002) remarks that,

[H]ip-hop has gone from being a cumulative inter-American, Afro-Caribbean production of Reagonomic violence on U inner cities, the booming crack trade, and massive deindustrialization campaigns. .to being a confirmed U national commodity that can bring in above $1.8 billion in sales during a single year [as it did in 2000] (p 581)