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 Illmatic' Draws 10,000 Viewers

Webcast of 'Sampling Soul' session attracts 10,000 online viewers

The World Listens In to Class

By Camille Jackson

Thursday, March 18, 2010

On Tuesday evening heads were nodding in a lecture hall on East Campus. But this time, people around the world could tune in and share the class's energy.

A special webcast of the popular spring course, “Sampling Soul,” set a record Tuesday for live streaming video at Duke with an audience of more than 10,000 viewers.

The class is co-taught by Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African American Studies, and Grammy-winning music producer, 9th Wonder. Bucknell English professor James Braxton Peterson, Duke ’93, joined them Tuesday for a discussion of rapper Nas’ 1994 album, Illmatic.

While Neal’s students filtered into Richard White Lecture Hall, students of hip hop gathered online to take in the lecture and offer real-time commentary on Twitter. Minutes before the event started, hundreds of online viewers had announced their anticipation on Twitter.

By the end of the night, the number of Twitter postings for the session almost reached 500. Others emailed dozens of questions ranging from the academic to the absurd.

Neal said the webcast showed the reach university intellectual discussions can have.

“I have always envisioned the study of popular culture and music as the study of public cultures, so it just seemed a natural fit to make a course like ‘Sampling Soul’ available to a broader public,” said Neal, who moderated the discussion.

“Additionally, I take the concept of being a public intellectual seriously, and the work that Professor Peterson, 9th Wonder and myself did during the webcast is the kind of work that public intellectuals should be doing,” he said.

Many viewers wanted to know if Nas himself was watching. Others were drawn by the celebrity of 9th Wonder. The most passionate online audience members debated the merits of “Illmatic” and Nas’ lyricism on Twitter among themselves.

Using Ustream as an online host, Duke’s Office of News & Communications (ONC) has produced webcasts for the past year in the form of online “Office Hours.” The program is usually held on Friday afternoons and encourages viewers to informally submit questions on a particular topic to a featured faculty member. History professor Laurent Dubois’ Office Hours on politics and the World Cup held the previous record for viewership, with 7,900 unique visits.

Tuesday’s class was perhaps the first time a classroom discussion at Duke has been publicly webcast with interaction from viewers through social media. The event demonstrates Duke’s commitment to sharing faculty expertise with a broad audience, an idea that Duke alum Neil Williams, Duke ‘06 appreciates.

“I think these live lectures are awesome and a great way to spread knowledge and the Duke brand to the global community,” said Williams who watched the webcast and tweeted comments. “I think alums would love to see more lectures broadcast on the net, as long as the subject matter is interesting.”

Williams found out about the webcast through 9th Wonder’s Twitter page, which has 30,000 followers.

“He's a trusted name in hip-hop so it would make sense for people to tune in based on his recommendation alone,” Williams said. Both ‘Sampling Soul’ instructors have large followings on the Internet. Neal has a blog, New Black Man, and is also an active Facebook user. He uses these platforms to “help break down some of the boundaries between the so-called Ivory Tower and the rest of the world.”

Adds Neal, “I'm thankful that there are folk at Duke who see the immense possibilities of these kind of experiences.”

© 2010 Office of News & Communications

'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.

© 2010 Office of News & Communications

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

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

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