As Santos delves into her work, the tremor in her voice begins to fade, the delay between her words shortens, and a passionate glint appears in her eyes. She tells me how hip-hop is one of the biggest venues for youth activism around the world. Santos flips through her dissertation, showing me pictures of hip-hop figures in São Paulo engaging with various political figures and institutions; in one picture, former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva poses with several teenagers wearing hip hop attire.

Her passion is why she is here at the Hiphop Archive, researching the importance of a movement she loves. “I research—I don’t sing anymore,” Santos says. “But hip-hop gave other things for our lives. You don’t need to be an MC, a DJ, a graffitier, a b-boy. We can be lawyers, we can be anthropologists, we can be doctors. Hip-hop gave us the instruments to construct new perspectives for our lives.”

Santos’ connection to her work illustrates the possibilities of hip-hop. It can give voice to an entire class, an entire generation, not just in its birthplace in the United States but all over the world. It is overwhelmingly a tool of empowerment through expression. And studying hip-hop, bringing it into an academic setting, gives it the legitimacy it thus deserves.

NO ECHO CHAMBER

But all this research into hip-hop would not mean much if it were just noise in an echo chamber. Hip-hop research has practical applications.

Wilson, the other Hiphop Archive Fellow, focuses on the intersection of schooling and the millenium hip-hop generation. “Schooling” consists of all that is taught in a classroom, as opposed to education, which encompasses every learning environment—the family, the church, the classroom, and the street. Wilson emphasizes the importance and prevalence of the concept of “schooling” in hip-hop.

“Hip-hop is obsessed with school,” Wilson says. “Obsessed metaphorically, obsessed in how it categorizes generations—so now you’ve got old schools and new schools of hip-hop.”

When she first began her research, she sought to explore what hip-hop lyrics said about the benefits of formal schooling. Her results were less than glowing. “We still have to find out how to make their formal schooling a little more relevant to what [minority youth’s] issues are,” says Wilson.

Wilson believes that hip-hop can reach young people of ethnic minorities in a uniquely powerful way, so she is developing a program of leadership education—she calls it “hip-hop leadership pedagogy”—that uses hip-hop and its artists to teach kids how to be leaders. In one lesson, for instance, she discussed with KiD CuDi what it means to be a black man in America in front of a young audience at Morehouse College, Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater. She filmed the exchange and calls it her “KiD CuDi lesson.”

Her approach has not been met with universal enthusiasm. “Some of the misconceptions that people settle on when you’re thinking about hip-hop in any kind of environment in formal schooling is [that] all hip-hop talks about is violence and misogyny,” Wilson says. “That’s one of the challenges that I’ve had to deal with in bringing hip-hop into this...very intellectual space.”

But Wilson insists on hip-hop’s value and potency. “Hip-hop is an intellectual exercise,” she says. “These are stories. These are people’s narratives. Even the most violent song—you can take that and turn it into a teachable moment.”

THE SOURCE

Hip-hop is a mouthpiece for minorities and the oppressed, but hip-hop’s most surprising aspect is that it is a self-aware, self-critical system—much like academia itself—which is capable of critique within its own borders.

Morgan, the director of the Archive, explains this capacity for introspection. Hip-hop has five fundamental elements. “We have DJing, turntableism; the b-boy/b-girl dance aspect; the graffiti and the art that comes out of hip-hop; and then the emcee, the lyricism, the writing, and all of the lyrics,” she says. And then there’s the fifth element—knowledge. “There was this expression when hip-hop first started out—‘keeping it real,’” Morgan says. “It really was a quest for continuing to understand and critically analyze the world that they were experiencing at every conceivable level.”

The critique is one of the most important aspects of hip-hop. “If you have skills—if you come to the table with knowledge—it’s like,  ‘Let’s do it!’” Morgan says. “And if you don’t have knowledge, it’s like, ‘Why don’t you come back?’”