Hip-hop is so much more than just sounds and lyrics. On Tues., Feb. 13, Dr. Bryan Santin led a conversation with UCLA English Professor Dr. Adam Bradley at the Polis Plaza LLC event on the poetics of hip-hop. 

“[Hip-hop] opened up a world to me…hearing that music for the first time was a profound thing,” said Bradley. Bradley is the founding director of the Laboratory of Race and Popular Culture at UCLA and is also an avid hip-hop fan. Santin held a discussion with the professor about his hip-hop background, research and incorporation of it into the classroom.

“Hip-hop performers are artists. As much as we want to make them icons, celebrities, truth tellers… ultimately [hip-hop performers] are artists and artists have freedom to use language in ways that artists often do,” said Bradley. 

Bradley is well known for his studies of hip-hop music as poetry and has written multiple books such as “Book of Rhymes: the Poetics of Hip Hop” and “The Anthology of Rap.” He has also held interviews with various artists.

Bradley took a deep dive into hip-hop artists as cultural influences rather than just music makers.

“[Bradley] said ‘hip hop performers are artists’ and I think he meant that they can do things that they want to do, to disturb us,” said Trevor Dixon, a sophomore who attended the event.

This event came in the midst of Black History Month and Bradley stressed the importance of how “Black American literature emerges” out of rap as “[rappers] shape what it is perhaps even to be Black…Rap is defining a certain type of Black voice.”

“[Hip-hop] tells us something about African American literature as a heritage and African American cultural production,” said Santin.

Along with the importance of hip-hop to the Black community, is the fact that it is an art form to impact the whole world beyond one culture. “As Black as the history of rapping is, it is itself an artistic practice [with] a set of tools and a body of language and tradition that can be learned,” said Bradley.

Think hip-hop and classwork are an unlikely pairing? Prominent hip-hop artists like Kanye West have family ties to education. “Kanye West’s mom had a PhD in English,” said Santin, who teaches a number of English courses where hip-hop is involved in the curriculum, such as the analysis of a Kendrick Lamar album.

Santin currently teaches a class called “Modern and Contemporary Poetry,” which is unofficially referred to as “African American Poetry and Hip-hop.”

“Whenever I was reading Shakespeare or poetry, I saw a lot of thematic similarities [to hip-hop],” said Santin. “To introduce Shakespeare, I would take some rap songs and show that these are not worlds apart.” While hip-hop and classical poetry are different mediums of expression, they are very similar thematically in what they try to accomplish.

Hip-hop is more than words and rhythms. It is a reflection of where society is at a point in time. Upon viewing hip-hop as poetry rather than simply adolescent music, it can become a tool to learn about people.

“We’re surrounded by popular culture and it is something that we should be able to critically analyze because it shapes who we are and how we think,” said Santin. “An education should give you critical ways of thinking of everything, not just things in the past.”

Santin ensures that his students are well informed on contemporary culture, especially involving rap. However, his students only receive about “25% of what [he’s] researched” as he dives deep into the topic on his own and presents at conferences, including one on his most recent paper entitled “The Bard of Avon meets the Bard of Compton” which will compare William Shakespeare and Kendrick Lamar.

“Often it can be a challenge to have something that students feel is worth spending their time on. This time, we had a really good amount of students at the [Polis Plaza] event compared to past events,” said Julia Swan, junior and one of the organizers of the event. “It was really cool to see how hip-hop songs are kind of just modern poems.” Swan deserves a huge shoutout for her work in advertising and arranging the amenities of the event.

Attendees at the event could consider themselves in good company. “Hip-hop is associated with coolness,” said Santin. 

For more information about Santin, hip-hop and his classes involving hip-hop, please reach out to bryan.santin@cui.edu. There will also be a Polis Plaza event with Santin and Reverend Dr. John Nunes on Christianity and identity politics in April.

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