Abstract
This research features a discourse analysis of two podcasts: the “Mobb Deep, Shook Ones, Pt. II” episode of Song Exploder and the “Rap on Trial” episode of Hidden Brain. We selected these podcasts through an abductive method of what we call “fortuitous listening” because of how they reveal community cultural wealth (CCW) through their descriptions of the creative process. Specifically, our study addressed two questions: (1) What does an examination of two Hip Hop podcast process texts reveal about CCW? (2) How could a discussion of the CCW that is revealed through descriptions of creative process inform literacy practices? Findings demonstrate how linguistic, familial, navigational, and aspirational capital exhibited in first-person descriptions of rap composition helped to showcase Hip Hop texts as what Bettina Love calls a “complex personhood” well-beyond simplified or stereotypical critiques. Because of how these process texts demonstrate the ways that Hip Hop feature Alim's ill-literacies criteria of being based on intimate, lived, and liberatory experiences, we posit them to be effective tools of cultural brokerage, particularly for educators wishing to enact Hip Hop-Based Education.
In a 2021 TED Talk (Hirway, 2021a), Hrishikesh Hirway shared how he creates his popular podcast, Song Exploder, which features musicians unpacking their processes for composing hit songs. Since a Song Exploder episode typically features an interview with a living artist, it was unusual when Hirway produced an episode featuring archival interview recordings with John Lennon on writing “God” (Hirway, 2021b). Vulture detailed this variation from a typical episode in “How Song Exploder Made Its John Lennon Episode” (Quah, 2021). The way these TED Talks, podcasts, and articles intersect to reveal creative processes are examples of what we call “process texts” (Griffith, 2021).
The continued rise of multimodal literacy (Albers & Sanders, 2010; Kress, 2010) and multiliteracies (Serafini & Gee, 2017) through the popularity of documentary films, podcasts, and online videos alongside traditional genres like memoirs, articles, and interviews provide unprecedented possibilities to examine the creative processes of composers via process texts, which we define as “published works that pull back the curtain on composition to show the techniques, tools, technologies, procedures, and/or inspirations of the creative process” (Griffith, 2021, pp. 121–122).
Process texts are complements to mentor texts (Dorfman & Capelli, 2007; Meixner et al., 2018) in showing how mentor texts were created and disclosing tools, techniques, procedures, and people consulted during composition. We agree with Dollins (2020) that students benefit from moving beyond identifying the moves of skilled composers in mentor texts to engage in facilitating the use of such moves, and analyses of process texts can support this goal. Furthermore, the use of process texts in literacy education can decenter the essentiality of teacher expertise in creative genres to open the door to those less commonly represented in the classroom, including songwriting, filmmaking, stand-up comedy, and others.
In this research, we utilized discourse analysis (Gee, 2018) to analyze two process texts: the “Mobb Deep, Shook Ones, Pt. II” episode of Song Exploder (Hirway, 2020) and the “Rap on Trial” episode of Hidden Brain (Vedantam, 2017). We selected these texts through an abductive method (Brinkmann, 2014) we call “fortuitous listening” (Griffith & Sweet, 2022), noticing a complementary thematic pattern coincidentally before purposefully bringing the pattern into collaborative conversation in what Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) describe as a dialogic spiral. These two texts are particularly worthy of study because of how they reveal community cultural wealth (CCW) (Yosso, 2005), how they demonstrate Hip Hop's “ascension into the mainstream” (Travis, 2016, p. 36), and how they unpack Hip Hop's creative processes to decenter and disrupt normative views like “the White gaze” (Morrison, 1998).
Specifically, our study addressed two questions:
What does an examination of two Hip hop podcast process texts reveal about CCW? How could a discussion of the CCW that is revealed through descriptions of creative process inform literacy practices?
Literature Review
As Hall (2017) details, educational research around Hip Hop music and culture, collectively known as Hip Hop Based Education (HHBE) (Hill, 2009), dates back over 20 years. HHBE research identifies productive tensions related to our work. For example, Hall (2017) suggests that, despite over two decades of research, HHBE still trends toward textual analysis of rap lyrics and arguments justifying Hip Hop in the classroom, and he calls for more classroom-based studies showing how students and teachers engage with Hip Hop. Of course, there have been notable studies grounded in the classroom, including Morrell’s and Duncan-Andrade’s (2002) seminal piece demonstrating Hip Hop texts and analysis for achieving standardized curricular goals in high school English, Hanley’s (2007) incorporation of HHBE into teacher education, Kelly’s and Sawyer’s (2019) reflections on learning from HHBE pedagogical missteps, and Kelly’s (2020) unpacking of her HHBE course for preservice teachers. However, Hall's critique holds true if we consider there are few classroom-based studies or pedagogical examples showcasing how White teachers effectively engage in HHBE, and the ways that Black culture and White consumerism converge around Hip Hop is a productive tension to consider.
Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2002) claimed that “Hip-hop got its start in Black America, [but] more than 70 percent of albums are purchased by Whites” (p. 89), which Kelly (2020) echoed decades later, stating that the majority of popular Hip Hop consumers continue to be White teenagers. Alim (2011) listed three major components of “ill-literacy studies,” or the complex ways in which Hip Hop intersects with literacy; “[l]iteracy must be Intimate, Lived, and Liberatory” (p. 123). It is important to point out the tension between Black culture and White consumerism within Hip Hop because, while White, suburban, middle-class teenagers can listen to and enjoy Hip Hop, they cannot intimately know the lived and liberatory experiences of Hip Hop culture. Hanley (2007) describes how Hip Hop, uniquely, “grew out of the poverty and degradation of the mid-70's South Bronx” (p. 38) with elements including, in addition to rap, dance, graffiti art, DJs, and emcees. Love (2016) further detailed this history and labeled Hip Hop a “complex personhood,” because of how it embodies the contradictions of being built on stereotypes of urban blight in 1970s New York City while simultaneously being a tool of resistance against those stereotypes. So, we, the authors of this study, recognize because of our White and suburban privilege (which we reflect upon in the next section), we cannot know the intimate and lived experiences of Hip Hop culture. We listen to, love, and appreciate Hip Hop, but we do not and cannot live it.
This type of reflection on Black culture versus White consumerism extends to education. Hall (2017) claimed that Black men tend to dominate HHBE research, while White female teachers are the demographic most interested in practicing HHBE. While we recognize Hanley (2007), Love (2016), and Kelly (2020) as notable exceptions to the first part of the claim, we acknowledge the second as true based on the current demographics of the teaching workforce being predominantly White and female (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 2018). Hanley (2007) suggested that Hip Hop provides opportunities for White teachers to confront their assumptions about Black males. She wrote, “[u]nconscious and conscious fears of black males and the fear and shame of harboring those thoughts and feelings are reflected in many teachers’ biases against rap and hip hop, about which they know little” (p. 38). Similarly, Alim (2011) recognized, “there is a widespread tendency for Hip Hop pedagogies to sanitize Hip Hop for inclusion in schools” (p. 138) and that well-meaning educators reify hegemonic language, class, and cultural norms to more closely resemble middle class, heterosexual, male Whiteness, by only including Hip Hop music with perceived social justice messages rather than lyrics which might include violence, misogyny, profanity and other negative but authentic hallmarks of the genre, which all HHBE researchers note is imperative for applying critical literacy to Hip Hop. There is evidence of tension between educators allowing Hip Hop just to be, and working with rap texts as is versus curating sanitized texts not fully representative of the genre or the youth who created them from intimate lived experience.
The purpose of our study, then, is not to contribute another textual analysis of rap lyrics or to simply make another argument for why Hip Hop belongs in the classroom, nor are we contributing a grounded, classroom-based study showcasing how to integrate HHBE. Instead, we give space to how podcasts, which many Americans listen to for news (Walker, 2022) and entertainment can serve as an intermediary tool of cultural brokerage. Petchauer (2009) observed how scholarly works in HHBE are often separate from the lived experiences of people who identify with and create Hip Hop. Process texts, like the podcasts we analyzed, give voice to rappers directly and allow them to explain why their craft, art, and text matter in the context of their intimate, lived experience. This explanation, in turn, allows White teachers and their students to see Hip Hop not just as text but as culture. These process texts about Hip Hop center composers, showcase their process, reveal the CCW reflective of the “complex personhoods” (Love, 2016) of the artists, their communities, and their audiences.
Situating our Experiences with Hip Hop
We approach this work as literacy researchers and teacher-educators, situating our analysis in the context of teacher education. Drawing from sociocultural perspectives on literacy (Gee, 2015; New London Group, 1996) and asset-based pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Moll et al., 1992; Yosso, 2005), we explore how process texts might serve as artifacts for educators to recognize and lift up out-of-school, cultural, and community literacy practices. Acknowledging the importance of how our backgrounds affect our critical stance (Vasquez et al., 2019), we take space to consider our positionalities as Hip Hop listeners.
Place/Space
We grew up and experienced Hip Hop across different decades and locations. Joe grew up in West Los Angeles in the 1980s in a predominantly White neighborhood but attended highly diverse schools due to desegregation busing. He witnessed rap and dance battles at school. He heard of major Hip Hop artists and was familiar with Hip Hop culture, but because of the media portrayal of Hip Hop, the portrayal and reality of gang violence, and the systemic racism that pervaded LA, Hip Hop, in his experience, was not something adolescent White boys were doing and consuming. For Jason, growing up in the 1990s on the rural outskirts of a small town with moderate racial diversity presented few opportunities to engage with Hip Hop locally. However, with the emergence of Hip Hop on MTV and mail-in CD ordering services, he was able to access and experience Hip Hop in ways that were unavailable to Joe just a few years earlier. Similarly, in the early 2000s Anthony grew up in a conservative suburb of Phoenix where Hip Hop wasn't present in his life and was often vilified within the community. As a result, he had no experience with Hip Hop beyond what he saw in the news.
Tools of Mediation
Since we did not grow up within Hip Hop culture, our experiences listening to Hip Hop had to be mediated by sources outside our families and communities. Jason's earliest experiences with Hip Hop came independently through mail-in CD ordering services. Jason began curating a collection of popular 1990's Hip Hop artists. Anthony started listening to Hip Hop in high school when music became more digitally accessible: sharing music on burnt CDs, downloading mixtapes from websites, and eventually buying music from Napster. Additionally, websites like MySpace and YouTube introduced Anthony to local Hip Hop artists. As described, Joe directly observed Hip Hop emerging in 1980s LA, but the only media available at that time were mixed tapes, which were shared primarily by Black listeners and cultural insiders. As a White listener, Joe didn't have access to Hip Hop media until later in high school and college when it was commodified into commercial cassette tapes and cable television programing. Since accessing Hip Hop music media isolates the art from its context, we additionally consider how understandings of Hip Hop culture were brokered through texts and teachers.
Cultural Brokerage
Our early experiences with Hip Hop music and culture came from a variety of sources as we learned the evolving discourse of Hip Hop. Jason's early experiences with Hip Hop were mediated by shows like MTV News and Yo! MTV Raps, which proved formative in fostering an understanding of Hip Hop as more than just an entertainment genre but also as deeply embedded in, reflective of, and building with culture, community, and identity. As a result, Jason continues to enjoy Hip Hop for entertainment, as well as seeking opportunities to engage with critical texts and discussions about rap. It was not until Joe started teaching high school in The Bronx, that he began to listen intentionally to Hip Hop. As Love (2014) reminds us that when students do Hip Hop culture, they are practicing what she calls “the latest iteration of Black genius” (3:34). Joe was introduced to Hip Hop by his Black and Brown students and consumed what his students listened to. In this way, he shares his students’ connection to the cultural significance that Hip Hop carries in the lives of communities.
Unlike his co-authors, Anthony learned about Hip Hop during college. In a US History class, Anthony had a Black professor who taught about the history of Hip Hop to the predominately White students in the course. Later, Anthony took a course titled, “Hip Hop and Teaching of English,” during which he learned about the craft of Hip Hop. The course also raised his critical understanding of issues within Hip Hop, including homophobia and misogyny. These academic experiences with Hip Hop developed a greater appreciation and critical understanding of what had previously been only consumed as entertainment.
Each of our overlapping experiences feature mentors, both people, and texts, which apprenticed us into a broader, literary understanding of Hip Hop music and culture. Recognizing and honoring the historical and sociocultural importance of Hip Hop, we apply Yosso’s (2005) conception of CCW to explore how the wealth of Hip Hop is revealed in these process texts.
Theoretical Framework
Our research emerges from working with preservice teachers who often are unfamiliar with or unsure of the value of literacy practices not traditionally taught or acknowledged in classrooms (Buck & Sylvester, 2005) as well as bound by “canonical loyalty” (Miller, 2020) to hegemonically White and normative notions of literature. Despite efforts to recruit more diverse teacher candidates, undergraduates enrolled in colleges of education remain predominantly White. This representational disparity contributes to the perpetuation of the White gaze in classrooms and education (Paris, 2019), as well as to deficit views of students and their cultural capital (Endo, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Reyes & Torres, 2007; Yosso, 2005).
Literacies and CCW
Outside the classroom, young people engage in various literacies, including an ever-increasing number of practices in digital spaces (Gee, 2017), often mediated by peers, online tutorials, and community members. These “literacy sponsors” (Brandt, 2001) have the power to support and encourage students as they engage in these literacy practices. Rather than competing with out-of-school literacies, teachers should position themselves as sponsors of student literacies by valuing the practices outside of school, and disrupting the ways dominant discourses in schools position students and their literacies as deficits.
One way to disrupt deficit-oriented teaching practices regarding youth and youth culture, including Hip Hop, is by highlighting CCW (Yosso, 2005). Yosso conceptualizes CCW from a critical race theory perspective, critiquing the traditional interpretations of cultural capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), which view students as being deficient in cultural value. However, CCW contends that students possess a variety of capital that is historically, socially, and culturally situated within their communities. Yosso (2005) identifies six areas of the capital: aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant. Importantly, while each of these forms of capital is unique, they often overlap.
In this article, we present selected findings for linguistic, familial, navigational, and aspirational capital. These four capitals emerged from our discourse analysis of the two podcast texts we selected as data through a process of fortuitous listening, which we describe further in the next section. While we initially highlighted key scenes from each podcast because they overlapped thematically and because we suspected that they featured CCW, generally, we found these four capitals to be most prominent after engaging in the steps of analysis we detail in the “Methodology and Methods” section.
For linguistic capital, we explore “the intellectual and social skills attained through communication experiences” demonstrated in the process texts, including communicating via “art, music and poetry,” and storytelling skills including attention to detail, vocal tone, volume, rhythm and rhyme (Yosso, 2005, pp. 78–79). These elements also represent the “Discourse” of Hip Hop that artists were working to enact (Gee, 2018). For familial capital, we explore how the artists’ families contributed to their development. Familial capital “expands the concept of family to include a more broad understanding of kinship,” and it explores how kin “model lessons of caring, doing and providing, which inform … occupational consciousness” (Yosso, 2005, p. 79). When analyzing for navigational capital, we explore how artists learned the skills to maneuver social institutions “not created with Communities of Color in mind,” such as the music industry (p. 80). The last capital we share in the findings is aspirational capital, which “refers to the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the future, even in the face of real and perceived barriers” (p. 77). Elements of aspirational capital include dreaming of future possibilities and working toward goals of success and advancement. Taken together, these forms of capital–and the many ways they overlap–demonstrate the social, linguistic, and cultural richness of Hip Hop.
Methodology and Methods
Discourse Analysis
The principle of choice, according to Gee (2018), is central to discourse analysis; analyses of people's discourse must take into account what someone said and the options available that they excluded. The analysis must consider the ways in which what people say is linked to how they are recognized as members of their communities. People's CCW can be mutually recognized and valued through their understanding of “big D” Discourse. Big D Discourse, according to Gee (2018), signifies the ways people enact, adopt, or recognize socio-historically situated identities while little d discourse are “conversations” that negotiate multiple Discourses. When doing an analysis, it is also noteworthy that Discourses often have blurry boundaries; what constitutes a Discourse is contingent on the context of a particular place and time. That is, the Discourse of a musician is both regionally and time period specific; musician (or any other activity-based Discourse) is different now than it was 50 years ago just as it varies in different regions. Likewise, all Discourses evolve as people innovate and cultural values shift.
For the analysis below, what counts as a rapper requires an understanding of rap Discourse, which evolves and is always in relation to other Discourses. Further, activity-based identities and their Discourses exist in a reciprocal relationship with various social groups, including fellow rappers and those whose framework is outside of rap Discourse. To engage in analysis, the researcher must know who the speaker is trying to be here and now and also how those in relation to the speaker understand the Discourse of the speaker. This principle guides the way we conduct our analysis.
Data
Our study analyzed 13 transcripted scenes from two podcasts: the “Mobb Deep, Shook Ones, Pt. II” episode of Song Exploder (Hirway, 2020) and the “Rap on Trial” episode of Hidden Brain (Vedantam, 2017). In the first, Havoc explained the processes and inspiration he and his partner Prodigy in the duo Mobb Deep consulted to compose their hit “Shook Ones, Pt. II.” In the second, journalist Shankar Vedantam told about aspiring rapper Tosin Oduwole, who was arrested and charged with attempting to make a terroristic threat because of a written rap lyric misperceived as a threatening note. A detailed description of Oduwole's creative process was central to his legal defense and eventual acquittal.
These scenes comprise what Brinkmann (2014) called “stumble data” (p. 723) because we noticed their relationship through a process of “fortuitous listening.” Stumble data are data that one stumbles upon. Brinkmann writes: An experience of stumbling, which causes a situation. … where inquiry is meant to result in a regaining of one's balance. If we allow ourselves to be sensitive to the strangeness of the world, there are numerous things to stumble upon. … Usually, these are not simply given, as “data,” but, at certain times, they may cause us to stumble—and thereby become data. (p. 724)
With stumble data and fortuitous listening, we first noticed complementary themes as individual listeners which prompted us to systematically re-listen, from our critical stance as researchers, and engage in conversations about scenes that intrigued or challenged us. Bringing these scenes into conversation reflects what Brinkmann (2014) labeled an “abductive process,” which is concerned with “the relationship between a situation and inquiry. It is neither data-driven nor theory-driven, but breakdown-driven” (p. 722). That is, it is concerned with moments that we stumble over, instances of uncertainty that cause our understandings to breakdown. It occurs in moments of surprise and bewilderment. Though it may seek explanations for why or how something happened, it is an approach that situates research as part of life processes. It is not looking to create fixed or universal knowledge through the collection of data but rather offers a way to think with the problem presented, which can be revised or challenged through an ongoing recursive process.
Methods
To analyze the data, we conducted a discourse analysis. First, we transcribed the identified scenes and performed what Gee (2018) called “discourse organization”: “the organization of the text into lines and stanzas, as well as the way language patterns within and across these lines and stanzas” (p. 196). Each line comprises a particular thought; each stanza represents the perspective of how the speaker considers the topic under discussion. The ways speakers arrange their words highlight distinguishing aspects so that the reader/listener knows how to read/listen to the utterance and make meaning from it. Looking at the syntactical, lexical, and semantic choices allows us to examine the process of enacting the speakers’ Discourses. The figures in the Findings provide examples of our detailed transcriptions, how we organized the stanzas, and how we conducted our analysis.
Additionally, we drew further on our theoretical frame in our analysis by adding labels identifying representations of Yosso’s (2005) CCW. In the section below, we attributed which capital the speaker employed based on how they enacted their discourse.
Findings
Our findings fall under three broad themes: tools and techniques, influence and support of family and other community members, and inspiration and motivation. These themes collectively demonstrate what Yosso (2005) calls linguistic, familial, navigational, and aspirational capital. We present each theme below with highlighted excerpts from our transcripts.
Tools and Techniques
Both podcasts feature rappers talking about specific tools and techniques they used during composition. For example, Havoc describes using an MPC60 sampler to record drum loops and samples he pulled from records he acquired at vinyl conventions (Figure 1).
Excerpt from transcribed scene from Song Exploder, Mobb Deep, “Shook Ones Pt. II”.
Using the sampler and vinyl records, Havoc created the beat for the song with purposeful consideration of the audience and the genre, drawing from his linguistic capital of Hip Hop. This beat, and later the lyrics, allowed their Artist and Repertoire (A&R) representatives (see Figure 6) to guide them to the final version of the song. Tosin Oduwole mimicked the plot of an episode of Law & Order as a mentor text for the narrative introduction technique he used in his composition, which was at the heart of his legal case (Figure 2).
Excerpt from transcribed scene from Hidden Brain, “Rap on Trial”.
Oduwole's recognition and application of a technique from a specific episode of a television show is crucial because, in recalling and describing his process, it provides a clear and convincing reason for the violence in his lyrics, which caused others to suspect him of planning violence. In this case, Oduwole is enacting rap Discourse; he looks to an episode of Law & Order as a mentor text through which he composes his piece, and in this way Discourse and identity are intricately linked. As Gee puts it, I will call an identity (e.g., doctor, gamer, African-American) and all the stuff it requires in order to be enacted a Discourse, with a capital D. … Discourses are ways of enacting and recognizing socially significant identities based on how a person uses all the “stuff” required to get recognized as having that identity. (2018, p. 78, emphasis in original)
Thus, rappers cannot exist without the Discourse of rap; a person cannot be recognized as rapping, according to Gee, without performing all of the right ways of accepted rap Discourse, including speaking, acting, and wearing the appropriate clothes. However, law enforcement investigated Oduwole from a different Discourse, one that does not understand rap Discourse, and, in fact, appears incapable of recognizing how Oduwole performed this Discourse.
The Influence and Support of Family
Havoc explains that Prodigy's grandmother bought their first recording equipment (Figure 3) and the records he sampled came from his father and Prodigy's grandfather (Figure 4). Oduwole describes how his love of 1990s West Coast rap came from listening to it alongside his five brothers in a household surrounded by music (Figure 5).
Excerpt from transcribed scene from Song Exploder, Mobb Deep, “Shook Ones Pt. II”.
Excerpt from transcribed scene from Song Exploder, Mobb Deep, “Shook Ones Pt. II”.
Excerpt from transcribed scene from Hidden Brain, “Rap on Trial”.
Both Havoc and Oduwole describe familial capital including the equipment and records that Havoc's and Prodigy's family members purchased or lent them, and Oduwole's forming of a familial listening community with his brothers solidified their appreciation of West Coast rap, despite living in the suburban Midwest. The CCW and familial support these excerpts reflect indicate a shared Discourse regarding how one enacts rapper identities/Discourses. Both Oduwole and Havoc share capital in CCW and rely on mentor Discourses to “do all of the ‘stuff’” required to gain recognition as rappers.
Both rappers also benefit from the support of other community members. Havoc mentions the importance of developmental record label representatives in introducing him to vinyl conventions where he acquired records for the drum beat and loop sampling. The same representatives fostered his confidence in what beats and hooks would be commercially successful (Figure 6). Oduwole describes how praise from peers in his congregation built his confidence in performing original music (Figure 7).
Excerpt from transcribed scene from Song Exploder, Mobb Deep, “Shook Ones Pt. II”.
Excerpt from transcribed scene from Hidden Brain, “Rap on Trial”.
In Figure 6, Havoc reveals evidence of navigational capital again as the A&R representatives helped him negotiate various helpful spaces like vinyl conferences, and the representatives supported his linguistic capital by validating his beat-making and helping him to recognize which hooks might be commercially appealing. Havoc recognizes A&R as being privy to rap Discourse in a way that he is not, and he relies on them to learn the Discourse to perform it correctly and thus to be recognized as a rapper.
Oduwole also demonstrates his linguistic capital as his performance earns praise and adulation from his peers, which compels him to want to create and perform more. He is enacting the Discourse and thus the identity, for the identity requires doing all the stuff of the Discourse correctly; when one does this, they are recognized as a member of the “socially and culturally specific lifeworld Discourse.” When we speak, we must speak as some sort of who engaged in some sort of what. We argue that this is particularly evident in activity-based Discourses, such as rap. Gee writes that activities are “organized around a certain ‘identity’ (2018, p. 73). In this way, the act of rapping is an activity-based identity, which, Gee contends, “are a reciprocal relationship between a person and a social group and its core defining activities” (p. 74). In both examples, the artists draw from their linguistic capital to perform their music to demonstrate their skills and identity in Hip Hop.
Inspiration and Motivation
Havoc explains how Mobb Deep's lyrics were informed by and reflective of their experiences growing up in Queensbridge, NY, a place with love and community but also violence and brutality (Figure 8). Oduwole's motivation came from wanting to foster an autonomous voice and to “make it” as an entrepreneur and aspiring artist (Figure 9).
Excerpt from transcribed scene from Song Exploder, Mobb Deep, “Shook Ones Pt. II”.
Excerpt from transcribed scene from Hidden Brain, “Rap on Trial”.
In reflecting some of the rappers’ inspiration and motivation, these final two figures offer an intriguing contrast in aspirational capital. Havoc describes how Mobb Deep's lyrics aspired to reflect the duality of Queensbridge as a tough, sometimes violent neighborhood, but also one filled with love and community if you knew how to navigate it. Here, Havoc appears to be negotiating multiple Discourses regarding community and violence, both of which remain entangled with the discourses of living in urban public housing. Oduwole, by contrast, having grown up relatively privileged in the suburban Midwest, concocts a money-making scheme involving drop-shipping guns to fund his recording equipment. It's as if Havoc is trying to reveal the softer side of his tough neighborhood, while Oduwole sought to toughen up his privileged image.
Discussion
As listeners, transcribing and unpacking these coordinated scenes was an important part of fortuitous listening. After recognizing a thematic connection between the two podcasts, intentionally identifying and analyzing scenes in which the rappers described their creative processes was significant because of the way they, individually and collectively, reflected Yosso’s (2005) notion of CCW in the form of linguistic, familial, navigational, and aspirational capitals, and, in doing so, disrupted harmful prejudices against Hip Hop.
For example, our analysis of Mobb Deep's Song Exploder episode suggests that violent lyrics are not necessarily gratuitous or encouraging of violence but rather a reflection of the violence Havoc and Prodigy witnessed and experienced in the community where they grew up, which also, as demonstrated by Havoc's description of the process, included the love, support, and resources to foster Mobb Deep breaking through in the popular music industry. We are old enough to remember the White backlash of the 1990s to the emergence of so-called Gangsta Rap, which was led by Tipper Gore and featured publicized stunts like steamrollers crushing piles of CDs with the iconic “Parental Advisory Explicit Content” labels. Allowing Havoc, in his own words through the Song Exploder episode, to share his complete story, which is filled with CCW, helps recast this Gangsta Rap anthem as a “complex personhood” (Love, 2016) that encompassed much more than a simplified critique of violent lyrics.
Additionally, Havoc's account of process is foundational for considering the “Rap on Trial” episode in which lyrical violence is not reflective of Oduwole's suburban and private boarding school environment, but instead an homage to the West Coast rap which fostered his sense of autonomy and individuality. By understanding the CCW he reveals in his description of process, we recognize his attempt to enact—through writing violent lyrics and trying to drop-ship firearms to raise money for recording equipment—his perception of the Discourse of a rapper, which was, in turn, misinterpreted by the White gaze of law enforcement who, unfamiliar with Hip Hop Discourse(s), mistook Oduwole for a potentially violent criminal rather than an entrepreneurial artist engaging with mentor texts.
This discussion clarifies how these process texts served as tools of cultural brokerage for us, helping us to better understand Hip Hop as culture based on intimate, lived, and liberatory experiences (Alim, 2011). Re-acknowledging our White and suburban privilege, we hope that our analysis, both in method and findings, can inform or serve as a model for the majority White consumers of Hip Hop (Kelly, 2020; Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002) and majority White female teachers wishing to enact HHBE (Hall, 2017) who desire to improve their cultural critical consciousness (Gay & Kirkland, 2003) around how descriptions of enacted Hip Hop Discourse(s) reveal CCW. Since many adults get some news from podcasts (Quah, 2021) and podcast audiences are continuously growing more racially diverse than the majority-White audiences of National Public Radio (Izadi, 2021), how these texts reveal CCW and foster cultural brokerage is worthy of continued study in literacy research, especially considering how first-person descriptions of process are storied through podcasts.
It is important to acknowledge that both of the podcasts we selected for analysis, Song Exploder (Hirway, 2020) and Hidden Brain (Vedantam, 2017), are hosted by journalists who identify as South Asian, but we are not suggesting that a non-Black person must broker Hip Hop to White audiences, instead we selected these texts because of how effectively they center the first-person experiences of the featured rappers Havoc and Tosin Oduwole, respectively. Additionally, we recognize a number of excellent examples of Hip Hop process texts produced and hosted by Black Hip Hop insiders such as Hip Hop Evolution (Kabango, 2016) and The Art of Rap (Ice-T & Baybutt, 2012).
Finally, engaging in our research has fostered greater critical awareness to recognize the extent of racist, institutional ways that Hip Hop music is vilified within the U.S. justice system. Since we completed our analysis, the New York Times published an editorial (Lee, 2022) detailing how rap lyrics have often been introduced as evidence in murder, drug, and gang-related cases, with Hip Hop Discourses being routinely misinterpreted by juries and judges. “[R]ap is far more likely to be presented in court and interpreted literally than other genres of music” (para. 7). Additionally, we discovered the Louder than a Riot podcast (Carmichael & Madden, 2020), a series dedicated to revealing the interconnected rise of Hip Hop and mass incarceration including, most recently, the racketeering prosecutions of Young Thug and Gunna in Atlanta. As literacy educators, we wonder if and how misapplications and misinterpretations of Hip Hop in education contribute to the School-to-Prison pipeline, and we recognize further research is necessary as to if and how White teachers engage with tools of cultural brokerage, like the podcast process texts featured in our study, might help to bring awareness to such questions and even contribute to disrupting such patterns.
If we return to Hall’s (2017) assertion that more attention needs to be given to how to enact HHBE and that the majority of educators wishing to enact HHBE are White practitioners (informed by Black scholars), we posit that engagement with process texts like those featured in our work are tools for White teachers to honor and understand better the culture of Hip Hop beyond the simplified textual analysis of rap lyrics. We also hope that our work may provide a pedagogical model for how teachers and teacher educators can critically engage their own students with process texts, perhaps by having students curate their own and analyze the CCW they reveal. By engaging with process texts as an instructional tool, the first-person experiences and context of the creator are centered, de-essentializing the expertise of the classroom teacher in under-represented genres, like Hip Hop, as teachers can instead facilitate and model how to engage with the self-selected process texts that youth identify as important. In this way, the instruction can shift to how process texts, like podcasts, and their first-person descriptions of the creative process reveal CCW and cultural capital to validate student interests and expand notions of the communities and contexts not often represented by the traditional literary canon or by traditional notions of the genres of literary texts.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
