Describing my 2017 appointment as a college member, the College of Virginia dubbed me the college’s “first” hip-hop professor. Even supposing the process identify and the historical nature of the appointment would possibly have merited it, the phrase was once deceptive.
Kyra Gaunt, a Black girl who’s a foundational determine within the learn about of hip-hop, labored as a professor of ethnomusicology on the College of Virginia from 1996 to 2002. Her guide “The Games Black Girls Play,” which makes a speciality of Black tune practices, was once printed in 2006. I cited her in my paintings and within the interview I gave ahead of accepting the process.
Additionally cited in my doctoral paintings, offered in my interview with the College of Virginia, was once student Joe Schloss, who labored on the faculty from 2000-2001. In 2009, he wrote “Foundation: B-boys, B-girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York.” And in 2014 he wrote “Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop.”
After pushback from readers on-line, UVA As of late amended its unique headline documenting my appointment and added Gaunt’s contributions to the item.
As a rapper and student, I’ve skilled and noticed deceptive hip-hop tales that spotlight an impulse to inaccurately file the style’s historical past and provide. I raised this factor lately in a TikTok “office hours” video – a part of a sequence wherein I reply to target market questions from the vantage of hip-hop artwork and analysis.
Deceptive hip-hop tales
After Johns Hopkins College introduced that Lupe Fiasco have been employed to show rap there in fall 2025, some on-line platforms, together with The Root, incorrectly reported on his task.
They described his upcoming process as the primary example of a rapper ever employed as a professor at a school.
That is clearly mistaken. I’m a rapper who since 2017 has labored as a professor of hip-hop whilst liberating tune, which was once a part of the root for my incomes tenure in 2023. But even so this, I’m sure there have been rappers with college instructing jobs ahead of me.
The craze of misrepresenting hip-hop historical past isn’t distinctive to communications from puts corresponding to Johns Hopkins College or the College of Virginia.
In 2024, the writer of musician Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s “Hip-Hop is History” described it as “the book only Questlove could write: a singular, definitive history” of hip-hop.
Questlove’s guide isn’t, because the writer claims, a definitive historical past. It could extra appropriately be described as Questlove’s tackle hip-hop historical past, or a memoir. With out this vital difference, unknowing readers would possibly misread the writer’s claims.
Questlove writes about in spite of everything coming to comprehend Southern rap within the 2000s. However Southern rap historical past predates Questlove’s appreciation through a long time. It doesn’t start when any individual like him in spite of everything acknowledges its significance.
In a similar fashion, hip-hop doesn’t start when it’s in spite of everything known through an unique establishment or when any individual will get some extent for it.
Lupe Fiasco will train rap at Johns Hopkins College beginning in fall 2025.
Steve Jennings/WireImage
Making hip-hop historical past
I printed those considerations as instructional questions in 2017 in an album known as “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions.” The challenge served as my doctoral dissertation.
“Owning My Masters (Mastered)” is the following section of the dissertation album challenge. Printed in 2024, it incorporates new audio, video, pictures and historic context. It’s printed with College of Michigan Press via the similar technique of an educational guide.
‘Owning My Masters (Mastered): The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions’ album duvet.
College of Michigan Press
“Owning My Masters (Mastered)” demonstrates how hip-hop resists the tactics American historical past continuously excludes Black resistance, Black fulfillment, Black storytelling and, in the end, Black other folks.
However the exclusion that my paintings highlights is muted when the seeming novelty of my process appointment or my dissertation album are the focal point. Once I’m requested if I’m the primary particular person to earn a Ph.D. for creating a rap album, I take a look at to reply to extra expansively to steer clear of deceptive any person, or ignoring what may well be extra informative.
It’s additionally necessary to grasp the obstacles that would possibly have made a challenge like mine unattainable ahead of 2017. Those come with technological obstacles that made recording and liberating tune prohibitively pricey. And, extra explicit to hip-hop, it comes to a distrust according to racist historical past that averted scholars from even proposing the sort of challenge.
No such “first” occurs with out the unsung paintings of others developing the prerequisites to make it conceivable.
Studying from hip-hop
Hip-hop’s documentation will have to no longer repeat the similar flaws of the recording of American historical past, which will put out of your mind necessary other folks and occasions, and which will misrepresent the legacies of racism and systemic violence.
Undeniably, I imagine necessary hip-hop texts, albums and moments will have to be studied and documented with instructional rigor. However this will have to no longer only center of attention on “firsts,” document gross sales or prestigious awards.
Such tales fail to appropriately illustrate that hip-hop is as a lot about how other folks reside daily as it’s about how establishments use it to reinforce credibility or how firms make cash off it.
Necessary sides of hip-hop’s various tradition are excluded when the atypical is overpassed.
Developing hip-hop is one in every of the numerous tactics Black other folks have endured within the U.S.
Universities and different exclusionary establishments helped maintain – and, in sure tactics, proceed to get pleasure from – hellish prerequisites like the ones created through slavery.
Hip-hop is, partly, a reaction to this historical past.
At its very best, hip-hop paperwork American lifestyles extra reliably than American historical past.
Some instructional publishers have began to include this fact.
My 2020 album “i used to love to dream” could also be noteworthy as the primary rap album to be peer-reviewed and printed with an educational press. Extra importantly, its contents are about historical erasure of Black other folks and Black historical past in my place of birth, Decatur, Illinois.
Hip-hop’s reputation, its consistent revision and its accessibility make it a formidable car for disrupting faulty, exclusionary and fabricated stories handed off as goal information.
The style has documented occasions such because the Tuskegee syphilis learn about – the 40-year experiment, performed with out knowledgeable consent, on Black males through the U.S. Public Well being Carrier to check the consequences of the illness when left untreated.
Hip-hop has additionally cataloged tragedies such because the 1921 Tulsa race bloodbath – a two-day attack through white mobs on their Black neighbors – and the 1995 Million Guy March, a big collecting of Black males in Washington, D.C.
The media ecosystem wherein hip-hop has thrived may be steeped with the scapegoating of its artwork and artists. This scapegoating is weaponized through critics to devalue the tradition.
It kind of feels unwise to me to believe establishments corresponding to universities and the media to resolve what’s deemed culturally important. At the side of influencers and podcasters who get pleasure from hip-hop, they may be able to be informed treasured courses from it.
Their talent to resolve what’s deemed culturally important is particularly problematic if their alternatives are basically in alternate for income or credibility. If hip-hop is considered as a cultural inheritance, then its price – and what’s thought to be traditionally necessary – could also be higher arbitrated through other folks within the tradition, no longer out of doors forces.
