Describing my 2017 appointment as a school member, the College of Virginia dubbed me the college’s “first” hip-hop professor. Although the task name and the historical nature of the appointment may have merited it, the phrase used to be deceptive.
Kyra Gaunt, a Black lady who’s a foundational determine within the find out about of hip-hop, labored as a professor of ethnomusicology on the College of Virginia from 1996 to 2002. Her ebook “The Games Black Girls Play,” which makes a speciality of Black track practices, used to be printed in 2006. I cited her in my paintings and within the interview I gave earlier than accepting the task.
Additionally cited in my doctoral paintings, offered in my interview with the College of Virginia, used to be student Joe Schloss, who labored on the college 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 thing.
As a rapper and student, I’ve skilled and observed deceptive hip-hop tales that spotlight an impulse to inaccurately report the style’s historical past and provide. I raised this factor not too long ago in a TikTok “office hours” video – a part of a chain during which I reply to target audience 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 task as the primary example of a rapper ever employed as a professor at a school.
That is clearly fallacious. I’m a rapper who since 2017 has labored as a professor of hip-hop whilst freeing track, which used to be a part of the foundation for my incomes tenure in 2023. But even so this, I’m positive there have been rappers with college instructing jobs earlier than me.
The rage of misrepresenting hip-hop historical past isn’t distinctive to communications from puts similar 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 ebook isn’t, because the writer claims, a definitive historical past. It will extra as it should be be described as Questlove’s tackle hip-hop historical past, or a memoir. With out this important difference, unknowing readers may misread the writer’s claims.
Questlove writes about in spite of everything coming to realize Southern rap within the 2000s. However Southern rap historical past predates Questlove’s appreciation through a long time. It doesn’t start when somebody 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 identified through an unique establishment or when somebody 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 issues as instructional questions in 2017 in an album referred to as “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions.” The mission served as my doctoral dissertation.
“Owning My Masters (Mastered)” is the following section of the dissertation album mission. Printed in 2024, it comprises new audio, video, photographs and ancient context. It’s printed with College of Michigan Press via the similar means of an educational ebook.
‘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 techniques American historical past steadily 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 task 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 somebody, or ignoring what could be extra informative.
It’s additionally vital to know the limitations that may have made a mission like mine not possible earlier than 2017. Those come with technological limitations that made recording and freeing track prohibitively dear. And, extra explicit to hip-hop, it comes to a distrust in response to racist historical past that averted scholars from even proposing one of these mission.
No such “first” occurs with out the unsung paintings of others growing the stipulations to make it conceivable.
Finding out from hip-hop
Hip-hop’s documentation must no longer repeat the similar flaws of the recording of American historical past, which will overlook vital other folks and occasions, and which will misrepresent the legacies of racism and systemic violence.
Undeniably, I consider vital hip-hop texts, albums and moments must be studied and documented with instructional rigor. However this must no longer only center of attention on “firsts,” document gross sales or prestigious awards.
Such tales fail to as it should be illustrate that hip-hop is as a lot about how other folks are living daily as it’s about how establishments use it to strengthen credibility or how firms earn a living off it.
Vital sides of hip-hop’s various tradition are excluded when the odd is overpassed.
Growing hip-hop is one amongst the numerous techniques Black other folks have persisted within the U.S.
Universities and different exclusionary establishments helped maintain – and, in positive techniques, proceed to have the benefit of – hellish stipulations like the ones created through slavery.
Hip-hop is, partially, a reaction to this historical past.
At its best possible, hip-hop paperwork American existence extra reliably than American historical past.
Some instructional publishers have began to embody this fact.
My 2020 album “i used to love to dream” is also 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 origin, Decatur, Illinois.
Hip-hop’s recognition, its consistent revision and its accessibility make it an impressive car for disrupting faulty, exclusionary and fabricated stories handed off as purpose details.
The style has documented occasions such because the Tuskegee syphilis find out about – the 40-year experiment, performed with out knowledgeable consent, on Black males through the U.S. Public Well being Provider to review 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 accumulating of Black males in Washington, D.C.
The media ecosystem during which hip-hop has thrived could also be steeped with the scapegoating of its artwork and artists. This scapegoating is weaponized through critics to devalue the tradition.
It sort of feels unwise to me to consider establishments similar to universities and the media to decide what’s deemed culturally important. Together with influencers and podcasters who have the benefit of hip-hop, they may be able to be informed treasured classes from it.
Their skill to decide what’s deemed culturally important is particularly problematic if their possible choices are basically in trade for income or credibility. If hip-hop is seen as a cultural inheritance, then its price – and what’s thought to be traditionally vital – is also higher arbitrated through other folks within the tradition, no longer outdoor forces.
