Embracing Rap

Hip-hop has long been used as a vehicle for education – check out the countless children’s videos that teach fundamentals like spelling and math through rap. 

But ask any serious hip-hop head and they will attest to the fact that dissecting the culture – understanding something that bloomed from concrete and found its way into pop culture and beyond – is a science. 

The mainstream may not regard rap as particularly scholarly, but that could set to change with the advent of 9th Wonder's Hip-Hop Institute, a new interdisciplinary program based in the history department of North Carolina Central University, which he will launch this fall.

9th Wonder, born Patrick Douthit (above), became a “professor” at the college when he was named Artist in Residence in 2006. Prior to that, Douthit was an assistant professor at NCCU for a Hip-Hop 101 course taught by Play of the legendary rap duo Kid-N-Play. 

However, the idea of teaching was not new to him.

“I went to school any way to become a history teacher,” Douthit explains, though he did not complete his studies, instead going on to produce for artists like Jay Z, Chris Brown and Erykah Badu. 

“In the area where I live [Raleigh, North Carolina] there are a lot of people I went to school with who ended up being teachers,” he says. “They would ask their friend who had just worked with Jay Z to come by to talk to their students. Once I got back into the classroom and talked to these kids, I realized this was why I wanted to teach in the first place. But I wasn’t teaching something they were learning in school; I was teaching hip-hop.”

Douthit, some might say, is a trailblazer, but he is not alone in mixing hip-hop and academia. 

In 2010, rapper-producer and Ruff Ryders figurehead Swizz Beatz became the first Producer in Residence at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. 

That same year, UGK veteran Bun B became a professor at Rice University for hip-hop and religion & humanities. 

In 2013, the de facto leader of the Roots, Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson, became a professor at NYU for a course called Topics in Recorded Music: Classic Albums and currently teaches a course there on Prince.