How has music education dealt with hip hop culture or rap music let alone issues of race and class when discussing listenership? Baakari Kitwana author of the recent book “Why White Kids Love Hip Hop”wrote a recent article in the Village Voice that looked at the fact that most “conscious” hip hop shows ( non-commercial and politically progressive) are attended predominantly by white youth.
Some people might observe that more often than not, there tends to be a disassociation between music and political context when we teach in our classrooms. Books such as Jeff Chang’s recent “Can’t stop Won’t Stop A History of the Hip Hop Generation”
Ted Vincent’s “Keep Cool: The Black Activists Who Built the Age of Jazz”,
“Rebel Musics: Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the Politics of Music Making” edited by Fischlin and Heble
among many others focus on the connection between music and political context.
While many teachers decide not to deal with these issues, there’s a good chance they are simmering under the surface of our classrooms. Dialogue can only help us to begin attempting to deal with them and the implications of opening them up.