What Hip-Hop Can Teach Academia

"The hip-hop world has a lot more in common with academia than most people think -- and it has important lessons for the endless academic hand-wringing over its public relevance. Beat-making and hip-hop lyrics are essentially a dense web of footnotes and citation. It is as literally impossible for the novice to understand the meaning of the complex, highly local references to Brooklyn personalities, hip-hop history, and gangster culture in a Jay-Z verse as it is for the uninitiated to make sense of a sophisticated theoretical text. Unlike academia, however, hip-hop adapted a long time ago to the recording industry's Internet-fueled crisis -- and came out stronger for its struggles.

For those who don't follow such things, Kendrick Lamar is a young rapper from Compton, California who took the music world by the throat last year. Last year, he released one of the best albums of the last decade, Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, which received rapturously thoughtful reviews and went platinum (even when the album leaked, you see, fans still bought it for proof). He turned in star guest verses for contemporaries like A$AP Rocky, B.o.B, and Pusha T to rap gods like Eminem and Talib Kweli. He opened for Kanye West's Yeezus tour. He appeared on about a million magazine covers, and received seven Grammy nominations.

And then he lost them all -- to Macklemore. ('Nuff said.) Everyone, including Macklemore, understood that this was as close to a crime against humanity as the Grammys allow. But instead of sulking, whining, or grabbing the mic from Taylor Swift, Kendrick used his scheduled Grammy performance to make Imagine Dragons, one of the year's top-selling rock bands, into his backup band and, well, let Kendrick tell it: "I need you to recognize that Plan B is to win your hearts right here while we're at the Grammys." And he did, with a triumphant, uncompromising performance that brought down the house and momentarily made the Grammys matter again. Instead of brooding over the ignorance of the gatekeepers, Kendrick just seized the moment and went out and relegated them to irrelevance.

That's what academic bloggers have been doing for the last decade: ignoring hierarchies and traditional venues and instead hustling on our own terms. Instead of lamenting over the absence of an outlet for academics to publish high-quality work, we wrote blogs on the things we cared about and created venues like the Middle East Channel and the Monkey Cage. Academic blogs and new primarily online publications rapidly evolved into a dense, noisy, and highly competitive ecosystem where established scholars, rising young stars, and diverse voices battled and collaborated."


Read here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/02/03/what_hip_hop_and_kendrick_lamar_can_teach_academia