Breathe In- Breathe Out

I hope you enjoyed the song that I used to start the seminar on monday. For me, it is really atmospheric, thought provoking and soulful in the tradition of the very best music inspired by the urban environment. Black Star are Brooklyn rappers Mos Def and Talib Kweli and their only album ' Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star' was released in 1998. The title is a reference to the Black Star Line, a shipping line founded by Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. Many respected lists rightfully have it as an all-time classic of hip-hop. Watch the video of the sing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeTnog5RRQo

I think you'll agree it does the song justice.

The song that I played- 'Respiration'- also features Chicago rapper Common. I previously played two of his tracks in class, 'The Corner' and 'I Used to Love H.E.R.'. Why use hip-hop in an academic context? Surely academia is about 'high culture' and hip-hop is base, popular or 'low culture'? Not at all. Well, first hip-hop is an example of what Paul Gilroy, in his famous text The Black Atlantic calls 'expressive culture', creative acts that communicate socio-cultural, ideological, political, aesthetic and personal aspects of living. In other words, hip-hop offers access to the experience of groups that we may not be able to access otherwise, often because these are groups that tend to be 'spoken for' rather than heard speaking for themselves. Hip-hop offers a counter culture to that of modernity, it supplies for its intended audience some of the courage needed to go on living in the present. Hip-hop stars like Mos Def can be said to act like 'organic intellectuals'. This is a notion used by Antonio Gramsci to describe working class intellectuals who, unlike bourgeois intellectuals, maintain links with local issues and struggles that connect to the people and their experiences. They also use their grounded positionality to cultivate strategies for helping their communities to develop a self-inspired, organic consciousness. Second, and this is a related point, the best hip-hop lyrics can be used to reinforce aspects of academic theory and they can also be used to get us to think about academic ideas in a new light. The main refrain of the song, that evokes a living, breathing city- 'breath in, breath out' is fascinating and can be thought of against many academic understandings of the city- dual city, bulimic city, centripetal/ centrifugal space etc. The hip-hop lyrics offer a more poetic reading of the city that demands reflection. Try for yourself!