Pop music and culture can be such a powerful vehicle for activism, in part because it can slip into people's minds before they even realize that they are being challenged with art or before they fully realize that they're learning something. That's the thing that I marvel at with media, like obviously, all the music we've been talking about. But also graphic novels and the whole array of graphic arts in that regard with television and film and the capacities for these things to do important work in our culture. With the rap lab, we've done several things where we've marshaled the the comfort and the cool that these things bring to folks in order to teach things that otherwise might be off-putting or might distance some learners and take something out of the technical terms for poetic language. If you want to teach scansion or the different varieties of rhyme or different species of figurative language, this can all seem really dull when you're just looking at a list of terms and definitions. But when you bring those things to life in particular in a song that someone loves or knows with great familiarity, then something really tremendous can happen. A connection can be made where someone is finally able to see the utility of some of that learning by knowing that it's already at work and the things that matter to them. What we've done is to cultivate in large part, also with the help of students at CU, where I was up until last year with you in particular, Chris, and your help over the years and getting the lab going. It's been such a wonderful thing to have student participation in shaping a curriculum for K-12 education that uses popular music across genres to teach skills that often teachers have a difficult time getting students to master because it just feels so alien when it's connected to something at a distance from them. Even if it's really great literature, like a Shakespeare play or Sonnet that has all of these same things at work. The time travel required to relate to a language that is so foreign to the ear of a contemporary reader demands something that makes the other demand that we put on them to learn this terminology of this critical approach, sometimes too much. Why not take something that is already within the flow of their students' experience, learn those terms and then find a bridge to the whole body of literature that's available to them after that, by virtue of already having mastered and equipped themselves with a certain set of critical tools. When I say that we should study hip hop as poetry, I'm not saying we should stop studying poetry written on the page over the last millennia. I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that it invites a return to that earlier language by virtue of our experience with the language of our present. That, at least part of it, is that power of opening up these connections and it happens too in other settings. The lab also works in incarcerated populations to empower folks to use their voices, both the spoken voice and the voice on the page, to communicate and to do so at first by drawing on examples from hip hop and other spaces that connect to the folks in direct and personal ways. I taught a seminar on Tupac at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado. To see this group of men from different backgrounds, mostly black and brown, but from all different backgrounds, Crips and Bloods, the tenuous Serrano, even the Aryan Brotherhood was in the class, all drawn to Tupac; His philosophy of thug life, his music, his film, engaging with it critically and using that as a starting point to engage with their own past, with their own struggles, with their own hopes and promise for the future by virtue of that art. It can be a wonderfully tethering thing that connects us to things that give us energy and allow us to move through the world, even through times of profound struggle and pain. That's what the lab has been doing. Its thinking about that potential for an activist impulse in our popular fan culture, by virtue of these independent connections to music and also to the communal experience of going through it together, talking about it, celebrating it and finding ways to direct that energy into new new frontiers. What a powerful mission, that sense of popular art in popular music being a vehicle of transformation, both personal and societal and cultural. We could keep this conversation going for hours, Chris. In fact, we have different points of our lives in conversation and that, the thing is more a call to action. A call to this: whatever it is that you're listening to next to try to apply some of the principles that we've been talking about. Just try it out and see if the music resists it, if it invites it, if it asks for something different from what you're giving to it. It could be just trying different experiments, like listening to a song with your eyes closed. Your roommate might look at you a little cross-eyed with that, but try it or try to listen to a song, then turn it off and recapture it in your head. Recapitulate it in your head and see what happens with that. In other words, just try to find different points of entry into the music that you listen to. In doing so, that'll only enhance your appreciation and your sense of fandom for the groups that you love, for the artists that move you and may just open up avenues of connection to whole other communities of listening and whole other sounds in the music. I'm just so excited for folks to to listen broadly as I try to do and to learn from each other and each other's tastes as well in doing this.
