Michael Berry's Blog

In part I and part II of this series, I talked about the importance of actually talking about race in the classroom. I also discussed the importance of counter-storytelling and provided some examples of how it can be used in the classroom. Both are anti-racist content. In this post, we'll see what an anti-racist pedagogy--a way of teaching that content--might look like.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge one aspect of teaching hip-hop classes--particularly those that aim to do anti-racist work--that often goes unremarked, and that is considering the demographics of the student body.

I have two more counter-storytelling exercises that I like, and they're a bit of a deeper dive than those in part I of this series.

I often introduce my students to the Black Panther Party at some point in my rap classes. Tupac's mother and other family members were active members of the party, and its influence looms large in the lives of other artists as well.

In her opening remarks to one of the hip-hop sessions at the 2018 joint meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) and the Society for Music Theory (SMT), Lauron Kehrer asked the audience to think about what it means for there to be a session on hip hop in which all of the presenters (and most of the audience) were white at the AMS in 2018.

For Labor Day, a very long post on the adjunct life...

I’ve been teaching for about 15 years now at the university level. I have taught at community colleges and R-1 institutions; online and in-person; graduate and undergraduate; music majors and non-majors; first-generation, honors, and adult students. At Texas Tech, I earned tenure and promotion to associate professor.

Some thoughts on trauma:

A traumatic event creates a rupture in our narrative. Different people experience it differently: some are more resilient; some are less resilient. Cultural conditioning plays a role in this (one author gives the example of the death of a child in a country that has a high infant mortality rate). The symptoms of trauma are often presented as avoidance (or constriction), intrusion, and hyperarousal.

Some thoughts on repetition:

As mentioned in the last post, repetition brings structure and predictability to our lives. Repetition leads to "masterplots." Repetition is characteristic of language and music. Elizabeth Margulis writes about how music tends to be more repetitive than language, since music is an "information-poor" system and language is "information-rich." Repetition operates in music in many respects: tonality, form, genre, etc.

Some assorted thoughts on narrative:

Narratives of “overcoming” pervade our conversations about disability: a disability is something that must be overcome, such that the disabled person can be a member of “normal” society. These narratives make us feel good, particularly in cases of spectacular overcoming: Beethoven overcame his deafness to become one of the greatest composers of western classical music, for instance.

When I wrote my rap textbook, I had a general structure in mind. I saw somewhere that an average textbook is 120,000 words. I came up with twelve chapter headings, figuring 10,000 words per chapter. I divided each chapter into four subheadings, each 2,500 words. This was mainly in response to a criticism I had of the other rap textbook on the market: that it felt very unbalanced: some ideas got a paragraph; others, ten pages.

I’ve been trying to map this book out that way, and it’s not working.

In his book To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip-Hop Aesthetic, William Jelani Cobb writes: "The telling of one's tale is a human rite. And in the end, we are simply the stories we tell" (137). Cobb is among many who believe that narrative--in this case, autobiography--defines who we are.

Narratives range from the simple and intimate ("I went home") to the complex and overarching (narrative archetypes, or master plots).