In a crowded Seelos Theatre on Feb. 7, Tricia Rose, acclaimed author of Hip Hop Wars and scholarly works on African-American culture, led a discussion at a Montserrat Self cluster event aimed at understanding the place of hip-hop music in American culture.
Arriving at campus in the early afternoon, Rose, who is chair of the department of Africana Studies at Brown University, spent a full day on Mount St. James. She attended a faculty lunch workshop and led a small seminar for selected Self cluster students before the town hall-style event in Seelos.
In her presentation, Rose argued that since the 1990s, the hypercommercialization of hip-hop has effectively limited a vibrant musical genre that once represented a wide range of black cultural expression. The result has been a sharp narrowing of the possible kinds of stories about blackness and the inner city that hip-hop songs can tell, with the current market comprised almost exclusively of an exaggerated form of gangster rap that perpetuates damaging racial, class and gender stereotypes.
“There is a lot more at stake than hip-hop itself,” Rose noted. “It is about how we think and talk about race, and women, and other social issues.”
Rose also challenged her audience to consider how both rappers themselves and consumers of the genre are responsible for allowing these narrow representations of black life to continue to be profitable and to shape our national political conversations. The more than 200 students in the Self cluster had read Rose’s Hip Hop Wars, and discussion picked up quickly. Rose challenged students to be forthright and to engage with the question of how we are all implicated in the debates about hip-hop.
Faculty members involved with the event expressed gratitude for Rose’s willingness to spend time with all those she encountered during her visit. She encouraged prolonged discussions and signed books for faculty and students. Stephanie Yuhl, professor of history and director of the Montserrat Self cluster, noted the significance of Rose’s presence, specifically at a liberal arts institution.
“Tricia Rose’s visit provided Montserrat students and faculty with a rich opportunity to take seriously an essential part of contemporary American youth culture, hip-hop,” she says. “Rose helped us look at this popular music from exciting new angles, and to see it as a site where many American assumptions and anxieties are played out — about race, gender, corporate power, public policy and the politics of our consumer choices.
“We addressed these challenging issues across the seminars and hopefully students carried those lively conversations into the residence halls. I think this event really tapped into two key goals of the Montserrat program — to create spaces and opportunities to think critically in and outside of the classroom and to expand and diversify our idea of what we consider legitimate topics of study in a liberal arts education. I think this text and event were successful on both fronts.”
Students who attended the event found it stimulating as well. Jillian Caffrey ’14 says, “Tricia Rose was captivating; her personality was charming and her intellect about hip-hop influenced my love for the genre even more.”
Brandon Gomez ’14 found the lecture “enlightening,” and noted that while upon first reading the book he disagreed with some of its claims, the live lecture opened up new dimensions of the work to him. Rose “developed her views in a way that is more relatable to fans of hip-hop. I now know what it is that I, as a fan of hip-hop, can do to move toward a less degrading and demeaning attitude for the music.”
Rose’s visit is not the only hip-hop event on campus this semester. On March 14, author Ben Westhoff will hold a discussion of his forthcoming book Dirty South which challenges the claim that several of the South’s most lucrative rappers are “killing” hip-hop. Later in the semester, the Holy Cross community will be treated to a hip-hop festival at which several local, underground hip-hop musicians will perform live on campus. Finally, there will be a panel discussion of scholars to help situate within an intellectual framework all of the hip-hop centered events that were scheduled over the semester.
Related Information:
Tricia Rose Talks Hip-Hop Music and Culture
Acclaimed author spends full day with faculty and students
Read Time
3 Minutes
