As part of its ongoing artist series, Asbury’s music department hosted hip-hop artists-educators for several events on Oct. 24 and 25.
Students walked into the Miller screening room to the sound of hip-hop music for the first event Thursday evening. “The Power of Words” lecture and demonstration featured University of South Florida doctoral student Patrick Cooper and hip-hop artists Kenrick Wagner, James “SoSoon” Gantt and DJ Silva.
Cooper started off by speaking about how hip-hop music reflects the dominant discourses of society. He described discourses as “ways of feeling, acting and evaluating ideas and communication.”
He also explained the history of hip-hop and how rap music is just another form of communication.
Professor of Music Education and Voice, Dr. Jill Campbell, hosted the events because she felt Asbury could benefit from something a little different. “It’s been on my mind and my heart lately that we have lots of ways to communicate with each other that we’re not using,” said Campbell.
“I think that a lot of times hip-hop and rap carry some bias and I wanted to beat the bias. I wanted to have events that showcased things from many ways of listening and learning.”
Cooper had students evaluate rap music and encouraged them to try rapping. He provided guidelines on writing basic bars and gave students 10 minutes to come up with short raps about societal topics, such as women empowerment, or just what they were feeling at the moment.
Some students went all in and performed their raps to a beat created by DJ Silva in front of roughly 30 audience members. Cooper then passed the microphone down each row of seats for everyone else to share.
On Friday, the artists were in the cafeteria at noon to meet up with students and converse about the music business, music education and DJ skills.
Later that evening, Wagner then hosted a rap cypher in the Stuce where students and community members participated in freestyle games and shared their own work.
The night started out with people battling each other in light-hearted freestyle games. SoSoon and Wagner also performed their own songs, then invited anyone to the stage. Some performed raps they had written and others shared work by different artists.
Later in the night, some people shared work about emotional and societal issues. “This went from a fun time to a reflective time to a real time,” Wagner said.
Aside from the events for the whole of campus, the artists took time to speak to music majors and minors during the music department recital hour on Thursday, as well as teach the music education classes.
As far as Campbell is aware, this hip-hop artist series was the first of its kind on Asbury’s campus. She believes the events went well and received overall positive feedback.
“I also think it’s really important for all of our students to see themselves reflected in what’s going on on our campus, and it feels really important to have artists of color on our campus,” Campbell said. “That to me is a huge, important piece for our growth as a campus and I hope that we can continue to sponsor those things in the future.”