Hip-hop goes academic

Mastering hip-hop culture
A generation of young scholars recognize the growing importance of studying the music genre
By Tiffany Pan (DAILY BRUIN contributor, tpan@media.ucla.edu)

When H. Samy Alim, a visiting anthropology professor, does his research, he gets his information straight from those creating the culture he cares about.

That is why, from Juvenile to Jay-Z, he has interviewed more than 100 hip-hop artists.

Reviewing hours of interviews and videotapes, Alim is part of a new generation of young scholars, including several graduate students at UCLA, who are spearheading a movement across various disciplines to bring hip-hop music and culture into the classroom.

The growing importance of the genre globally is what Alim said is bringing it to the forefront of academic research.

"People have had to confront hip-hop culture," Alim said.

One of the students conducting research -- Loren Kajikawa, a graduate student in musicology -- is doing multidisciplinary work with hip-hop, looking at how the sounds of its music matter, as well as examining the racial element in hip-hop music.

He is currently writing his dissertation on hip-hop music, attempting to explain why people, especially non-blacks, find the experience of listening to hip-hop useful and compelling.

Drawing on his experience studying Asian-American jazz musicians as an undergraduate student, Kajikawa makes parallels between hip-hop and jazz, particularly surrounding the legitimation of scholarship in these areas.

"The same things said about hip-hop were said about jazz ñ that there was no effort to develop harmony and melody, that it was just the rhythm," he said. "Also, because it was associated with African-American culture, (people thought) it wasn't worth taking seriously. But now, for a lot of good reasons, there's efforts to legitimate hip-hop as a cultural form."

One way is to teach it. This quarter, Kajikawa is leading a seminar for the interracial dynamics General Education cluster called "Hip-hop and Crossover," which looks at the appeal of the music to races that can't necessarily relate to the experiences presented by hip-hop artists.

"(Hip-hop will) exist, but it'll be different," Kajikawa said. "The world that we live in is always changing, the relationship of the music to that world is always shifting and changing as well."

Christina Zanfagna, a graduate ethnomusicology student, "captures culture that is happening at this moment" by talking to practitioners and audiences in a live setting.

Previously, she studied the effects of hip-hop on the 2004 presidential election; currently, she is studying "a mix between gospel music and spiritual hip-hop, or what they call holy rap," that attempts to reach a younger generation and draw them into the church setting, she said.

"That's the beautiful thing about (hip-hop)," Zanfagna said. "It's something a lot more fluid, innovative and constantly changing. When you try to define something or box it in, you end up paralyzing the analysis and limiting the possibilities of future research."

Often described as a nation, a culture or a way of life, hip-hop has achieved the status of something more than just music, student researchers said.

"Hip-hop is like a frame of reference," said Jooyoung Lee, a graduate student in sociology. "The real struggle is finding the right kind of language to talk about it."

For Lee and others, one method is ethnography, a branch of sociology that relies on participant observation and in-depth interviews to "give descriptive narratives that the people who are studying from the ivory tower could never get."

Most recently, Lee has studied street rap scenes, called "ciphers," in South Los Angeles to document specific instances of the larger experience of hip-hop.

One challenge for Lee and other hip-hop scholars is straddling the roles of participant and observer.

Lee's first exposure to the genre was as a DJ and dancer. Only later did his academic life merge with his recreational interests.

"First and foremost, I'm part of the hip-hop community," Lee said.

But his intimate participation in hip-hop culture both fuels and clashes with his other identity as an objective observer.

"I'm trying to skate that fence, and it's a tricky one to skate," he said. "Some things in academia require you to be an outsider. It's an ongoing struggle, because you're hanging out with people, but then you have to step away from the scene and try to make sense of it."

Lee said the contribution that he wants to make is "to show there's an everyday narrative to (hip-hop)."

"It's the guy who practices his freestyles on his way to work with a beat CD from a friend. It's the person who on the subway or on the bus is like popping their legs," he said. "It's all these little mundane details that are often left out when we talk about hip-hop."

Lee said he wants to give a name, a space and a biography to hip-hop.

"It's about those people," he said, "who feel passionately about these unheard narratives bringing it to light."