Hip Hop Scholarship

Here’s a recent article about bringing Hip Hop studies major into the mix at UC Berkley.

Hip-hop is the primary language students bring with them to school. To ignore the language and the existence of hip-hop culture altogether is a failure to provide equal education under the law.-Kofi-Charu Nat Turner, education Ph.D. candidate.

The beauty of the idea is the chance to create new paradigms or new ways of thinking especially in academia which tends to be stodgy, crusty and snooty. All the moreso within Seminary studies and Asian American ministry. The range of topics and studies for this wave of fresh scholarship in hip hop are practically endless because hip hop touches upon our economical, politcal, and sociological realities on a global-historical scale.

Have we spent time exploring this influence in Asian American culture and ministry at all? Maybe, just maybe at the youth level. I assure you it’s there. I know I can’t excape its influence in my own life. Aren’t we all just trying to keep it real? . . . yo?
So why we frontin?
Hip hop is the new language of the church. F–orget emergent and postwhateva. You can’t say that the lifestyles and lyrical madness that is Jigga, Kanye, and Eminem ain’t on many of our minds or at least on our iPods in the church right up there with David Crowder.
ya heard?

I love that Jeff Johnson (BET producer) at the Q Boutique (fermiproject.com/q/), said these things [captured by djchuang of course but can be fully read through a subscription to fermi words]

Hip hop is relevant to this discussion for one reason.. because it has been able to transcend ethnic and cultural communities.. in a way that Black, Latino, and Asians can come together, without shedding our culture… what brings us together is b/c we love Jay-Z..
so many times I’ve seen urban ministry is just suburban ministry with black face..
“I am us.” that’s what hip hop does..

“In the same way academia examines other social forces, it should pay attention to something that is economically, politically and socially shaping how many view the world and engage with it”

Get real.
Hear the remix.