Critical Minded 20th Anniversary keynote

Ellie Hisama & Evan Rapport27 September 2024

ELLIE: We would like to thank Agustina, Stephanie, Kelsey, Michelle, and Jane Forner for assistance with this fabulous symposium. And all the presenters and Afro Beats Dance Club and LemBo!

It’s a special pleasure for me to return today to the City University of New York, from which I hold three degrees -- a Bachelor of Music in violin, an MA in music theory, and a PhD in music theory. I was thrilled to receive Agustina’s invitation last year to speak at today’s celebration of hip hop at 50, hip hop scholarship and hip-hop practices within CUNY, and the extraordinary students who make CUNY an exciting and wonderful place to be.

Today we also celebrate the work of the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music (HISAM). As a former Director of HISAM, a staff member at CUNY Central, and a former faculty member at three of its campuses (Brooklyn College, Queens College and the Graduate Center), I’m very excited by the fresh energy and ideas Agustina is bringing as an academic leader and teacher of the current generation of stu- dents, continuing work from past director Stephanie Jensen-Moulton and all the directors before me. I treasure the Institute’s history and care deeply about its future.

I’d like to note that tomorrow, September 28, is founding Director Wiley Hitchcock’s birthday, which we celebrated in a gala event last year. As Wiley noted in 1971, the goal of the Institute was to “encourage, support, propagate, and evaluate research in music of the United States” in which he identified vernacular and pop as two of the many areas he wished to include under the HISAM umbrella.

With public universities remaining severely underfunded and fighting for their survival owing to cuts to programs, staff, faculty lines, and resources, struggles that I faced continually as Director, I wish to pay tribute to those who make up the City University of New York system. I received a superb and affordable education at CUNY and remain grateful to my teachers and men- tors for giving me valuable tools which I use every day in my roles as a university administrator, faculty member, researcher, and teacher. I owe many intellectual debts to my former students, some of whom are here today, for asking interesting questions, dreaming up exciting projects, and rolling with my sometimes-unorthodox teaching methods such as publishing a book together.

The first course I gave on hip hop was here at the Graduate Center to a group of students from ethnomusicology, musicology, music theory, composition, American Studies, African American Studies, and anthropology. That seminar owes its existence to a student in the English program, Jonathan Gray, who is now a professor at John Jay College and the Grad Center. Jonathan took my PhD seminar titled “Popular Music and the Politics of Culture”, in which we discussed hip hop for only one week. He helped me to understand the urgent need in the twenty-first century for a doctoral course focused fully on hip hop. His enthusiasm and knowledge encouraged me to pursue hip hop studies in both my teaching and research. The participants in the seminar, History/Theory/ Criticism of Hip Hop, shown here and on the next slide, brought bright energy and fantastic enthusiasm for the material, which powered each seminar meeting for- ward to the next one, and included several auditors as well as registered students.

It was one of those dream semesters in which the students were engaged, reflective, and excited at each session and contributed to vibrant cross disciplinary conversations. We learned from each other. Evan’s suggestion that we publish a set of papers led to the volume Critical Minded. With a grant from the Diversity Projects Development Fund, Critical Minded became the 35th volume in the Institute’s illustrious monograph series, which Wiley established in 1973. There’s a long tradition of publishing graduate student work in the series: Number 3, Bruce Saylor’s The Writings of Henry Cowell published in 1977, was the Institute’s first monograph to start life as a graduate student paper. When Evan said, “let’s publish the essays,” I took his words to mean just that: publish them as a book, copyrighted and with a bar code and with an established publisher. It occurred to me that I happened to be one at the time, as Director of an Institute that had produced a distinguished monograph series with standing orders from libraries around the world, thanks to the seeds Wiley had carefully planted in the 70s.

EVAN: In putting together my thoughts for this evening, the book’s subtitle took on some fresh significance. We called the book “new approaches to hip hop studies” because while I was in the seminar, I felt real excitement about the research my fellow students were producing. It was exciting to be working on hip hop, a style of music that had not received nearly enough scholarly attention, but it was also inspiring to see the original approaches we were taking in analyzing our topics. Ellie was completely open, encouraging us to pursue all the sub- jects and angles that we found interesting, but our distinct perspectives were also shaped by the discussions of our inter- disciplinary group—as Ellie explained, we came from various music disciplines but also anthropology, African-American studies, and American studies—and the fact that we were all members of what’s often called the “hip hop generation.” Hip hop was such an integral part of my life that, to be honest, I was shocked to learn in Ellie’s seminar how scant the extant scholarship on hip hop was, especially in music studies as opposed to more strictly sociological areas. Furthermore, CUNY attracted a large and diverse cohort of graduate students, and in the joyful and stimulating years I spent in the PhD program I met many other students, both in and out of Ellie’s seminar, who were interested in the research opportunities that hip hop presented. However, the diversity issues in music studies that Ellie highlighted in our seminar, and which our volume intended to address, unfortunately remain salient despite a significant growth in hip hop studies.

My classmates’ approaches that I found most exciting were those that tackled issues of musical style and less- er-known figures. David Pier’s chapter, on the music of one group among a “surprising number of live hip hop bands,” took an ethnomusicological approach to the ideas and practices of a vibrant scene, but one that has always been woefully under- represented among mainstream acts and commercially successful recording artists. Robert Wood tackled a song by one of the most popular artists at the time, Andre 3000, but he did so with a deep dive into issues of layering, improvisatory aesthetics, and form. Ellie’s own chapter, on “Hip Hop’s Afro-Asian Crossings,” skillfully analyzed the uses and meanings of symbolic cultural elements such as clothes, Chinese characters, and most of all, martial arts disciplines, but what stuck with me the most was her fascinating discussion of the second-generation Korean American rapper Jamez, and what he called “Aziatic hip hop,” a “blend of traditional Asian folk music with contemporary hip hop”. Carl Clements used musical analysis to dis- cuss complex interchanges of rap music and South Asian styles, and through his work I learned about the compelling music of Panjabi MC.

Each of these chapters features a dis- tinct approach to musical analysis. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution to interpreting music, and Ellie helped us figure out what kinds of tools would be best suited to the job. I remember my own chapter was initially a response to Robert Walser’s seminal and ground-breaking article, “Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy,” published in Ethnomusicology in 1995. I was assigned to be the discussion leader in the seminar for the article, and in my notes—which I somehow was able to find—I wrote that the article was “in some ways, an argument against critics who say that rap is not music, using ‘Fight the Power’ as a demonstration of rap’s musicality.” But then I also wrote, “how would the analysis be different if he wasn’t concerned with that debate?” Most of the rap music I liked wasn’t necessarily aspiring to complexity, or oriented around aesthetics that I thought benefitted from a familiar musicological analysis. I wondered, how could we approach rap music that was fundamentally about other aspects of style, even audaciously so? This led me to an interview-based study of the rapper known as Sensational, who my friend Nat Rabb had turned me on to several years earlier, and whose song “Jigglin’ What You Like To See” features rhyming for only 48 seconds; the other five minutes are devoted to variations on the words “wiggle-jiggle” with and without effects. In retrospect, Sensational’s non-rhyming, free-flowing, lo-fi, unpolished style seems to be a forerunner of much of today’s rap, and we definitely need more tools for understanding this sound.

The focus on musical style in our book reflects a wider interest among hip hop scholars at CUNY. Looking at the impressive list of dissertations, books, and articles produced by CUNY graduates and affiliates, one can’t help but notice an emphasis on musical style and aesthetics; I’m thinking, for example, of Patrick Rivers’ 2014 dissertation entitled “The Mad Science of Hip-Hop: History, Technology, and Poetics of Hip-Hop’s Music, 1975-1991.” But Critical Minded also took on other topics, and in some cases, the work was quite groundbreaking. In her chapter on the underground film Anne B. Real, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton took a deeply sophisticated look at the diagetic and nondiagetic music in the film, asking if the use of music in the film might “reinforce or weaken the film’s possible status as a feminist text?” Jonathan Toubin tackled a more familiar subject, hip hop in early 1980s New York, but he did so with an original look at the intersections of hip hop with rock, punk, and the art world. And in what would end up being perhaps the most cited chap- ter in our collection, Ejima Baker tackled issues of race and gender in what was then an emerging style out of the Caribbean, reggaetón.

Returning to this book 20 years later, I’m most proud of the fact that we refined what were essentially term papers into real chapters of a real book, that could then be read, thought about, and used by others. To me, research and scholarship are best when approached as a conversation, dialogue, or in the case of our book, a hip-hop cypher. We extended our stimulating seminar discussions beyond those confines and, because we did so, our discussions continue to resonate. And I learned so much from spending the time that I did on my fellow students’ work, far beyond what I would have ever gotten from what usually passes for sharing in a seminar: the ten-minute final presentation. Twenty years later I have this enduring document of my classmates’ ideas in Critical Minded. Realizing this now underscores the weight of a publication, something we often take for granted as academics.

ELLIE The project was designed to give the students a taste of the publishing process: how to work with an editor, tighten an argument, write clearly and persuasively, proofread, fact check, secure copyright, and perhaps most importantly, how to realize that you had something to say and that something should be shared with others. On the occasion of Critical Minded’s 20th birthday, we searched for the contributors, and were pleased to find that after graduate school, they have forged careers as teachers, scholars, administrators, writers, and musicians; one is a DJ, and another is an archivist.

We solicited reflections from the contributors; I’d like to share excerpts from two of the authors. David Pier, now at the University of North Carolina, writes:

We had all grown up with hip hop music and culture--especially in its fertile period of the late 80s and early 90s--and were eager to analyze and argue about it. I am grateful [Ellie and Evan] did [this project], because I got my first article publication out of it, which helped me get my first job. (…) Definitely that seminar and writing project shaped my subsequent research and teaching on Ugandan popular music.

Stephanie Jensen-Moulton of Syracuse University reflects:

The paper that changed the course of my career, and in many ways, my life…was a midterm paper I wrote for the class that weirdly triangulated hip hop, Cirque du Soleil, and freakery. That paper received Ellie’s indelible feedback: “If you’re interested in Disability Studies, you should show this work to Joe Straus.” I did, and as a result, Ellie and Joe persuaded that DMA student to become this musicologist with a PhD.

Twenty years on, many of the questions about music notation and music listening in hip hop that authors in Critical Minded explored still provide fruitful paths of inquiry for scholarly pursuit. I’m sure I join the other authors in celebrating a collection that was an important milestone in our careers and in hip-hop studies.

Affordably priced at 10 dollars, Critical Minded is owned by some 150 libraries worldwide, across North America from Maine to New Mexico, Georgia to Washington State, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the UK. It continues to be cited across many fields including African, African American, and Caribbean Studies; ethnic studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, music theory, religion, English and comparative literature, and in various formats: master’s theses, dissertations, books, articles, and a podcast.

EVAN Critical Minded was a product of a truly collaborative approach to scholar- ship, teaching, and learning, which brings me to the second way I revisited the idea of “new approaches to hip hop studies”— that of the book as a whole, something more than the sum of its parts. Critical Minded, in my mind, was based on musical models, and it flowed quite naturally from my experiences as a musician. Before going to graduate school, I studied at a conservatory, along with fellow contributor Dave Pier, and I was fully immersed in the world of making music. Crucially, music is a fundamentally and essentially collaborative activity based on listening, exchange, and call-and-response as much as self-expression. In bands, for example, we freely edit and adjust each other’s contributions in service of a greater whole, and in Critical Minded, we approached editing and critique in the same spirit. My idea to publish the book directly stemmed from the do-it-yourself recordings I had self-produced through independent label mechanisms. When we worked on some- thing creative and meaningful we wanted to see it all the way through and put it out in the world. In the ethnomusicology proseminar I took with Stephen Blum in my first semester, I was exposed to a huge range of publication formats, including stapled-together conference proceedings that were just as DIY as any punk zine. While there are lots of electronic self-publishing options available now, there is something special and enduring about a tangible document. The constraints of various formats inspire creativity and problem-solving capacities.

Perhaps most of all, in reflecting on this project twenty years later from the vantage point of being a senior scholar who has taught hundreds of students, I’m most grateful for the opportunity to have collaborated so closely with Ellie when I was a graduate student. This too, mirrored the way I had learned music, as I mostly learned to play the old-fashioned way, on the job. Thinking about my experiences working on Critical Minded brought me back to other dear teachers I’ve had, such as Paul Scimonelli, who would often invite me on low-stakes gigs in hotels and lounges, where I quickly learned how to play for different audiences and what was expected of a professional musician. I still remember failing quite spectacularly on an early gig, feeling prepared with difficult bebop standards but unable to play modest requests such as “Build Me Up Buttercup.” In the same way, editing Critical Minded with Ellie taught me countless lessons about the true job of “academic” and “professor,” and what was involved in putting together a publication. Ellie took the brave step of putting her own essay in the book, which lent our publication the important voice of an established scholar, but which also meant that I had the daunting task of editing it as her student. I was uneasy at first, but the more I did it, the more I realized that I had something to bring to the table, and I realized that the work of writing involves lots of revision, regardless of whether you are a tenured professor or a graduate student.

Professional development has always been a key component of Ellie’s teaching, and one of the main takeaways for me, which I’ve tried to pass on to my own students, is doing one’s best to understand “what really is the job?”—not the ideal or fantasy you might have of a particular profession. I have vivid memories of editing, editing, and more editing, and then, when I thought we were close to done, realizing we had to work out details of copyright permissions, format illustrations and musi- cal examples, choose fonts, and figure out how many pages the book would be. We had to get blurbs and create the cover, which ended up being designed by my old bandmate Jerry Lim, who also set and laid out the text. This do-it-yourself publication went even farther than usual in teaching me about the ins-and-outs of academic publishing, because we had to get our own barcode and ISBN number! I loved every aspect of the process, and the fact that I loved it made me realize that this was indeed a good career for me. This was true mentorship and working with Ellie in this way was an incredible privilege. And here we are again, discussing work, sharing drafts, and figuring out how to best compose this keynote address.

ELLIE: Evan was the ideal co-editor. His ability to help authors work on the flow of and support for the argument and his attention to the tiniest detail (I still remember when he gently corrected something I had written which desperately needed fixing); I appreciate especially his keen eyes on my essay (editors of course need editing, too). He also wasn’t fazed by the long trek to Brooklyn College and some- what byzantine process of working with our printer, who sent us back to the office to fetch a hard copy of the entire manuscript (in 2004, it wasn’t yet a fully digitized process). Working with Evan turned into a long and fruitful relationship--he was the Assistant Editor of a journal I edited, and we have kept in touch with regular exchanges and an annual lunch.

Teaching my first seminar in hip hop studies at the Grad Center and publishing Critical Minded made me eager to continue work in hip hop studies. In the decades that followed, in my next job at Columbia University, I designed an undergraduate elective titled Listening to Hip Hop, with public-facing mixtapes created by small groups, and another doctoral seminar in hip-hop in which two graduate students, Kevin Holt and Katie Radishofski, wrote dissertations on hip hop topics. I also published research on DJ Kuttin Kandi in American Music Review and on freestyling as improvisation in the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, drawing on an extended conversation with hip hop artist Ace Patterson, a student who took Listening to Hip Hop.

EVAN: Critical Minded and Ellie’s seminar also shaped my career. When I started teaching at the New School, I introduced our own hip hop seminar, designed to bring together liberal arts students and students studying jazz performance. I knew, from Ellie’s seminar, that hip hop is an ideal forum for collaboration among students with diverse musical backgrounds and experiences. We also started a Djing class. Sixteen years later, although I no longer teach the hip hop seminar, these classes are both still running and an integral part of our curriculum. My experiences in Ellie’s seminar gave me the confidence to pursue these projects.

Thinking about the collaborative nature of Critical Minded, Ellie’s seminar, and the classes we introduced at the New School brought me to another realization about this book, and something that marks it as a product, in some ways, of a very different time. For me, besides practicing and special unaccompanied solo repertoire, music has always been a group activity, both in terms of making music and listening to it. As a member of Generation X, this even extended from live music audiences to listening to recordings, as my sister and I would compete for use of the family stereo in the den. The way we approached Critical Minded reflects this attitude toward music and music-making, and indeed, the group is also at the core of a seminar. And too, the hip hop we studied in Critical Minded was very collaborative and relational. I’m struck, revisiting the book, how strong this aspect is. Almost every essay is focused on exchange: Ellie’s and Carl Clements’ chapters on Asian music and hip hop, for example, and Dave Pier’s piece on an actual hip hop band, the Alter Egos. Jonathan Toubin’s historical piece also looked at exchanges, in his case, between the “uptown” and “downtown” New York scenes. Even my essay, about “listening” to one rapper’s music, was really about a community of listeners and the dialogic processes that produced that one rapper’s albums.

In some ways, hip hop and hip-hop studies are still very much entrenched in collaboration and dialogue and blazing a trail for what can be done with collaborative methods. In a dramatic example, Mark Katz and Alim Braxton co-authored the new book Rap and Redemption on Death Row: Seeking Justice and Finding Purpose Behind Bars, a memoir documenting Braxton’s “attempts to record an album while on death row, something no one has done before.” The hip hop of competition, sharing, and call-and-response is alive and well, thriving in places such as the Legendary Cyphers in Union Square. But I also notice, more and more, that for my students, not just hip hop or rap music but music in general is understood as a soli- tary activity: created by oneself, perhaps alone in a room working on a laptop, and listened to by oneself, almost always on headphones. In returning to Critical Minded, I’m reminded of how productive and generative it is to understand music, and hip hop especially, as essentially collaborative, public, and a product of exchange.