More than just a music genre, hip hop is a culture defined by inner city pressure
Hip hop is more than just a genre of music, and one York professor hopes to share its intellectual value with students.
A new urban studies course at York, created and taught by Simon Black, a researcher in urban social policy at the City Institute at York University, will teach students about urban issues through the lens of hip hop.
Black, a longtime hip hop fan, says the course was something he had wanted to do for quite some time, but it was Brooklyn, where he was completing his PhD comparing the access to childcare for single mothers in New York City and Toronto and where he saw hip hop in university curricula, that inspired him.
After a successful trial run in the summer of 2012, “Hip Hop and the City” is being offered at the 3000 level for the winter 2012-2013 term as a three-credit class with a three-hour lecture every week. The course is available to urban studies majors and anyone who has taken a social sciences course.
Using the four main elements of hip hop—graffiti, emceeing, break dancing, and DJing—Black says the course will tackle important urban issues, including race and marginalization, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality, as well as violence and gangs.
“The idea is to have a global perspective on hip hop in this course,” says Black. “We talk about the birth of hip hop in the midst of the urban crisis in the United States in the South Bronx, so what was going on there in terms of race and marginalization and equality that led to the birth of this culture, which is now global,” says Black.
The course will cover a new issue every week from graffiti in Toronto, to examining questions of public space, public art, and property rights, to a week Black calls remixing Canadian urbanism, which looks at multiculturalism.
The curriculum also covers First Nations hip hop and the role of hip hop during the Arab spring.
The course syllabus lists weekly themes like “Graffiti Wars: Hip Hop, Public space, and Public Art” and “Deconstructing Thug Life: Youth Violence in Toronto.” Aside from readings, there is a required listening component to the class. Artists that students are required to listen to include Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar, Tupac Shakur, and KRS-One, among many others.
There are few courses at York that touch on hip hop, or take it seriously, says Black.
“Hip hop is now a global urban culture, probably the most important cultural movement to have emerged from the cities from the past 25 to 30 years,” says Black.
Black says he hopes the course will show students and faculty, who may have only been exposed to commercialized hip hop, how broad and heterogeneous the culture really is.
“The first thing I want students to take away from [the course] is that hip hop is serious, that it deserves their intellectual effort,” says Black.
By Munirul-Haq Raza, Staff Writer
