MAN & Blackademics Discuss Public Intellectuals, The Boondocks and Gumbo

from Blackademics.org

This Black Music Month our interview is with professor and public intellectual Dr. Mark Anthony Neal. We discuss the role of the public intellectual, Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks and Dr. Neal's contribution to Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic. Enjoy!

Scholars on the Mic: Another Review of 'Born to Use Mics'

Scholars on the Mic

by Sidik Fofana—SeeingBlack.com Literature Editor

In his essay “‘Memory Lane’: On Jazz, Hip-Hop, and Fathers,” Mark Anthony Neal provides context for Nas’s seminal debut, Illmatic, by considering the musical journey of his father Olu Dara. He writes, “Dara’s oldest son, Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones, was born in the place affectionately known as ‘the Bridge,’ not so ironically, at a time when the ‘gumbo’ that Dara sought in his music was simmering throughout the five boroughs of New York City.” The “Gumbo,” which symbolizes Dara’s Mississippian roots as well as the melting pot of South American, Caribbean and African residents in Queensbridge, New York City’s largest public housing projects, also fits the aim of Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic, in which editors Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai assemble top hip-hop scholars to dissect Illmatic into its cultural, political, literary and global components.

Needless to say, much more than celebrating hip-hop’s most canonized opus, the essayists, which include Mark Anthony Neal, Marc Lamont Hill, Greg Tate, Imani Perry and others, analyze the ars poetica of Illmatic, examining the album through the bifocal lens of music and poetry and deconstructing it like a hybrid between Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Their close reading serves as a springboard into the tangential topics of fatherhood, urban decay, prison and post 9/11 New York City—the very dilemmas that make Illmatic such a stalwart work of social commentary.

Almost none of the scribes in Born to Use Mics, feels reserved about elevating Nas to the level of chief ghetto scholar as evidenced by their intense decomposition of his lyrics. Marc Lamont Hill goes as far as to label Nas a celebrity Gramscian, a term borrowed from Mark Anthony Neal. In his essay, “Critical Pedagogy Comes at Halftime,” Hill writes, “Through his lyrical representations, Nas functions as an informal ethnographer by consistently offering an on-the-ground counternarrative of day-to-day ghetto life.” Hill links Nas’s storytelling rhymes to a stark but necessary kind of grassroots urban journalism.

Read the Full Essay @ SeeingBlack.com

'Sampling Soul' Goes Live!

Class to focus on rapper Nas' critically acclaimed rap album 'Illmatic'

'Sampling Soul' Class Open To The Public Via Live Webcast March 16

DURHAM, N.C. -- The public will get a chance to experience the popular Duke University course “Sampling Soul” via a live webcast beginning at 6 p.m. Tuesday, March 16, at ustream.tv/dukeuniversity.

The topic of the class will be the making of the critically acclaimed hip-hop album “Illmatic” by rapper Nasir Jones, aka Nas.

The undergraduate course is co-taught by African and African American Studies professor Mark Anthony Neal and Grammy Award-winning music producer 9th Wonder. Each weekly class emphasizes a different aspect of sampling music, from its history to legal considerations. The “Sampling Illmatic” class will focus on the making of Nas’ 1994 album.

Viewers are encouraged to submit questions for the professors either in advance or during the session by sending an e-mail to live@duke.edu, posting a comment on the Duke University Live Ustream page on Facebook, or tweeting with the tag #dukelive. A recording of the event will be available on Duke on Demand.

“Well before the release of ‘Illmatic,’ Nas was already drawing comparisons to Rakim Allah, often regarded as hip-hop's greatest lyricist,” says Neal. “The album’s release did not disappoint. It began what has been one of the most stellar careers in hip-hop, where Nas has found the perfect balance between maintaining relevancy on the streets while offering trenchant commentary about politics, relationships and everyday black life.”

“Illmatic,” with its lyrics from the perspective of a teenager living in the projects, contains several popular singles, including “The World Is Yours,” “It Ain't Hard to Tell” and “One Love.”

Neal says “Illmatic” also struck a chord because it became the blueprint for sample-based hip-hop production throughout the 1990s, with “contributions from a who's who of producers including DJ Premiere, Pete Rock, Large Professor and Q-Tip.”

Neal contributed an essay on jazz, hip-hop and fathers to the newly released book Born To Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic (Basic Civitas, 2010). Nas’ father is jazz and blues musician Olu Dara. The volume was edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai and is one of several texts used in the class.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of four books, including “New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity” and the forthcoming “Looking for Leroy.” His essays have been anthologized in a dozen books.

9th Wonder, born Patrick Douthit, is a former member of the hip-hop trio Little Brother, which released albums such as “The Listening” and “The Minstrel Show.” He has produced music for Jay-Z, Destiny’s Child, Mary J. Blige and Erykah Badu among others. He also scored the music for “The Boondocks” animated television series. He was recently selected as the NAACP’s national ambassador for hip-hop relations and culture.

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615 Chapel Drive, Box 90563, Durham, NC 27708-0563

(919) 684-2823; After-hours phone (for reporters on deadline): (919) 812-6603

Literature from The Underground: 'Born to Use Mics'

Does a new anthology devoted to a hip-hop classic elevate the genre to its rightful place as a literary form?

Literature from the Underground

ADAM SERWER | February 5, 2010

Illmatic, the first album by hip-hop elder statesman Nas, is a masterpiece. Released in 1994, its tales of scowling corner boys, prowling drug addicts, undercover cops, treacherous lovers, and remorseful gangsters are so vivid that you can almost feel your nostrils being singed as Nas brushes the marijuana ash from his clothes. From out the gate, Nas identifies himself as a writer's writer ("see with the pen I'm extreme") and proceeds to prove himself right, offering lines that are poetic ("with more kicks/than a baby in a mother's stomach"), bleak ("straight-up shit is real/and any day could be your last in the jungle"), and cautiously hopeful ("that buck that bought a bottle/could have struck the lotto").

As the legend goes, the frenetic pace of Nas' flow, his complex internal rhyme schemes, and his dense lyricism had people wearing out their cassette tapes, rewinding them over and over again in disbelief. It's the one album in all of hip-hop whose artistic value, regardless of the critic's personal taste, is unassailable. Even Nas' longtime nemesis, Jay-Z, frankly confesses that the first time he heard the album, "the shit was so ahead/thought we was all dead."

Despite not being a commercial success at the time, Illmatic was recognized as a classic almost immediately. A lean album comprising 10 tracks that eschew trendy beats and high-profile guest appearances, its mythical status was virtually assured when The Source magazine -- then still widely known as hip-hop's bible -- broke its embargo on giving albums a five-mic rating (the equivalent of a five-star rating) to bestow the honor on Illmatic. Nas was praised for reclaiming hip-hop from the gangsta rap groups of the West Coast and ushering in an East Coast renaissance that included the likes of the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z himself.

The new anthology Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic, edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai, is a love letter to Illmatic, a self-conscious effort to preserve the album as a classic of poetic nonfiction. There's plenty of academic work on hip-hop as a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon. But despite being the most distinct and dominant form of poetic nonfiction of the past 30 years, it has yet to be given its due as literature. Sure, your average liberal-arts college has more than its share of rap-focused classes taught by hip professors ready to act as urban-culture guides for wide-eyed private-school kids. (My class at Vassar was called "Literature from the Underground.") But these are seen as quirky electives. For the most part hip-hop is still fighting a dulled American impulse -- the same one that dismissed jazz out of hand as "noise" for so long -- that the artistic contributions of urban black culture are just fodder for the groundlings. If Illmatic fails to persuade the reader of hip-hop's intrinsic value as poetic nonfiction, the editors seem to be asking, what else could?

Read the Full Review @ The American Prospect

Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Caitlin Fitzpatrick, 212-340-8136
Caitlin.Fitzpatrick@perseusbooks.com
Publication Date: Jan. 4, 2010

BORN TO USE MICS: Reading Nas’s Illmatic
Edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai

The Best and Brightest Writers of the Hip-Hop Generation
Reflect on the Era’s Landmark Album: Illmatic

* * *

At the age of nineteen, Nasir “Nas” Jones began recording tracks for his debut album and changed hip-hop and the face of the music world forever. Released in 1994, Illmatic is a captivating, personal account of life in New York’s Queensbridge housing project, as well as a meditation on the larger issues of the isolation, inequality, and the despair of urban poverty. Unprecedented in its lyricism and the power of its beats, the album was hailed as a masterpiece and set a new standard for hip-hop culture. Certified platinum by the RIAA, Illmatic soon took its rightful place amongst the most influential albums not only within hip-hop, but in all of popular music.

In BORN TO USE MICS: Reading Nas’s Illmatic (Basic Civitas: Trade Paperback Original; Jan. 4, 2010), editors Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai have brought together an original collection of critical voices to confront to confront Nas’s masterpiece in a “literary remix.” In a novel application of hip-hop’s method of sampling other musicians’ work and interpreting it in a new way, Dyson and Daulatzai use Illmatic as a sample, letting each contributor reinterpret and meditate on Nas’s work with a fresh perspective. Each scholar assesses an individual track from the album, using the song as a jump-off point for their own analysis. Understanding its legacy, charting its relationship with the evolution of hip-hop culture, and exploring the social forces that surround hip-hop music as a whole, the contributors to BORN TO USE MICS bring a fresh viewpoint to a classic album. Along with original reviews from the album’s release, interviews with Nas, and artistic “freestyles” on the themes and legacy of Illmatic, these new riffs are a brilliant engagement with and commentary upon one of the most incisive and incendiary sets of songs ever laid to wax.

BORN TO USE MICS assembles an impressive group of journalists, poets, filmmakers, musicians and scholars, all of whom are products of the hip-hop generation. Together, they cover a variety of issues, including:

• Mark Anthony Neal on jazz, hip-hop, and fathers
• Imani Perry on lyrical transcendence
• Sohail Daulatzai on the significance of “N.Y. State of Mind” in a post-9/11 America.
• Marc Lamont Hill on Nas as a black public intellectual
• Kyra Gaunt on the intersection of Nas, hip-hop, gender, and patriarchy
• James Braxton Peterson on hip-hop worldviews

Along with a number of other essays, BORN TO USE MICS reaffirms the influence and brilliance of Illmatic while also cementing hip-hop’s place in American music as a catalyst for dialogue and a call to action.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Michael Eric Dyson, named by Ebony as one of the hundred most influential black Americans, is the author of seventeen books, including Can You Hear Me Now?, Holler if You Hear Me, Is Bill Cosby Right?, April 4, 1968, and Know What I Mean? He is currently University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. He lives in Washington, DC.

Sohail Daulatzai has written about race, culture and U.S.–Muslim relations, and is an executive producer on Free Rap, a benefit album for Jamil Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown). He is the author of the forthcoming Black Star, Crescent Moon: Black Radicalism and the Muslim Third World, and a graphic novel on the film The Battle of Algiers. He is an Assistant Professor in African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

ABOUT THE BOOK

BORN TO USE MICS: Reading Nas’s Illmatic
Eds. Michael Eric Dyson & Sohail Daulatzai
Published by Basic Civitas
Trade Paperback Original
Publication date: Jan. 4, 2010
ISBN: 9780465002115
$15.95 (US) / $20.00 (CAN)

▫ Contributors to BORN TO USE MICS will be available for interview, please inquire ▫

For additional information about BORN TO USE MICS and other Basic Civitas Books,
visit us online at www.basicbooks.com or follow us on Twitter at @BasicBooks

Sampling Soul and Reading Illmatic

North Carolina Public Radio--WUNC
The State of Things Hosted by Frank Stasio

Hip Hop Generations
Wednesday, January 06 2010

This semester at Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal of Duke's African and African-American Studies Department is joining forces with Grammy Award-winning music producer 9th Wonder to teach a class called "Sampling Soul." It's a look at how the songs that made up the social soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement remain relevant in contemporary culture. Neal also contributed to the new book, Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic (Basic Civitas Books/2010). It's a collection of essays that brings hip-hop scholars together to analyze the early artistry of Nas track-by-track. Bucknell University’s James Braxton Peterson (Duke '93) joins Neal and host Frank Stasio to talk about the importance of "Illmatic" and how it resonates with a new generation of hip-hop artists.

Listen HERE