Eurotrash
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4/11/2008 9:29:54 AM
Street Talk
Last May, a friend of mine, well aware of my interest in hip-hop scholarship, informed me of a book release party at the Bookstore. The book was called “Street Conscious Rap,” and it was the third volume in a series that utilized articles and interviews to explore the lesser known, more socially conscious side of the movement.
Upon attending the engagement, I discovered that one of the book’s authors was H. Samy Alim, a Stanford doctoral student in the School of Education. I recently had the privilege of meeting with Alim to discuss his invaluable book, hip-hop scholarship in general and the possibility of a class that would bring such scholarship to Stanford undergraduates.
Let’s start very basically. What is it that got you into rap and hip-hop in the first place?
I guess rap and hip-hop for me came unconsciously. ’Cause I can remember being into hip-hop before I knew what the thing called hip-hop was. It was never really talked about, but we’d be at the roller rinks, just, you know, it was Planet Rock, [Africa] Bambata, Grandmaster Flash, Melly Mel, all that old stuff before I even knew what it was, ’cause I was like six.
And then it was break dancing. So we got into it like that, just messing around with break dancing, messing around with a little rapping — me and my brothers. It grew into a scholarly enterprise when I entered undergrad at University of Pennsylvania.
That’s what I was wondering, ’cause being a fan of hip hop seems fairly common nowadays, but to approach it academically seems like a whole different story. To go from the person listening to Grandmaster Flash to interviewing him for a book . . .
Yeah! It’s a crazy experience. I was just looking through the book before you came. It’s kind of mind bogglin’, ’cause I don’t have a chance to sit down and reflect on it, ’cause life moves on to the next project, the next thing, so you don’t get a chance to think about it.
But, I’ll tell you specifically how my interest in hip-hop scholarship really came about. There was a class at the University of Pennsylvania — it’s a pioneering class — it was taught in 1996, I believe, ’96 / ’97, by James Peterson, a graduate student in English. It was a writing class called “Writing in, of and about Hip Hop Culture.” I think the subtitle was “keeping it real.”
And it was the academic approach to hip-hop. That’s what we did in that class, we analyzed it and everything. That class led to my working on this book, and this is how [James] Spady, who was in Philadelphia, and I — I was at [the] University of Pennsylvania — were invited to speak to our class, because we were reading the second book in the volume.
So Spady obviously had some establishment before [you worked with him].
Right. It’s a privilege and an honor to be involved in something as large as this. This is what now has become, I guess, a 15-, 20-year study of hip-hop culture. From the early days ’til now. It’s an ongoing thing.
And to be working with somebody like Spady is incredible, ’cause he’s like a pioneer in this. He had a book called “Indiginé,” and what he did in that book was sort of predict a mass-based, street-based, cultural form. What we saw happening in rap music on a major level in the early ’80s, all the way through ’til now. And then he began with “Nation Conscious Rap in 1991” — it was several questions that he was asking and documenting about hip-hop culture that no one else was really asking.
’Cause what he sought to do, and what we try to do, in all three of these volumes and in our research on hip-hop culture, is speak directly with the culture creators. You know, sidestep all the bull, sidestep all the guessing and pontificating, theorizing: We go straight to the heart.
How does that bring about challenges of actually putting the book together?
It’s a huge challenge. Anyone who’s ever transcribed spoken speech, spoken word, knows that it’s a huge challenge because we don’t speak as we write. So to put the
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