Nickcardo Blake                                                                                                                    3/23/16

                                Hip-Hop Artist Influence on Informal Education

          
      “We’re not being taught to deal with the world as is it is. We’re being taught to deal with this fairy land that we’re not even living in anymore. And it’s sad. Because it’s me telling you. And it should not be me telling you”. - Tupac Shakur

         
         Many of us take for granted the knowledge we gain from the artist of the Hip-Hop Community. More than just a music genre, Hip-Hop is a culture, one that has quickly come to dominate the world in popularity, according to Spotifys analysis of over 20 billion tracks. It is no surprise that with such a large following, the culture has also gained a large amount of animosity for its vulgar and sometimes tasteless lyrics. Although lyrics are often plagued with swears and derogatory terms, Hip-Hop serves as an informal educational tool. For the past few decades artist in the Hip-Hop community has been informing the public of the social and current events that take place within the world.

           Critics of Hip-Hop try to diminish the genre’s educational benefits by claiming the lyrics promote a lifestyle that only includes violence and dropping out of school. However Jeanita W. Richardson and Kim A. Scott make a good argument against the idea that Hip-Hop is making people more violent. In fact they believe Hip-Hop is an offspring of America’s well-established culture of violence. They also state that Hip-Hops language, although offensive at times it is not homogeneous throughout the whole genre and it is simplistic to label rap artist as socially deviant without taking in their life experience into context. They create music that relates and tells stories about the life they are living or used to live. When the topic of dropping out of school appears, it is most notably a reference to the “College Dropout” himself, Kanye West and how he influenced kids not to go to college. However many don’t see Kanye West has also visited many institutes and spoke on the purpose of higher education. He states “It is true you can be successful without college, but this is a hard world, a real world, and you want every advantage you can have.”

            When the argument of vulgar lyrics is thrown out, Hip-Hop can be seen as a tool used to educate people. The economic and social struggles of the “hood” are told through rap stories not to glorify the street life, but to educate people of the life they live. For example in J.Coles “A Tale of Two Cities” he raps a story of about his old situations and how he comes from a city where getting robbed is normal and even friends turned  killers because of the poverty of the city:

“Picked up the paper and they say my nigga Eddie caught a body, I'm convinced
Anybody is a killer, all you gotta do is push 'em to the limits…
Last night I had a bad dream
That I was trapped in this city
Then I asked is that really such a bad thing?
They robbin' niggas on the daily
Can you blame a nigga that ain't never had things?”

            Hip-Hop shows a different side of America that conventional education does not teach. Hip-Hop is an informal educational tool used to demonstrate and give insight on social issues located in the neighborhood of many urban areas. Although the lyrics of the music may seem indecent, the genre overall increases the knowledge of the youth who listen to it.

Work Cited

Prier, D. D.. (2012). Chapter 7: Conclusion: Translating the Pedagogy of Hip-Hop between the Streets and the Academy. Counterpoints, 396, 187–211. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/42981569

Richardson, J. W., & Scott, K. A.. (2002). Rap Music and Its Violent Progeny: America's Culture of Violence in Context. The Journal of Negro Education, 71(3), 175–192.  http://doi.org/10.2307/3211235