Does hip-hop music help or hurt students' attitudes toward education? Teaching media literacy skills is key to helping kids filter out negative messages in popular rap music. by Daniel Gray-Kontar
More than 25 years after urban youth fused rap music, breakdancing, DJing and graffiti art into a phenomenon now commonly known as hip-hop culture, civic activists, educators, psychologists and sociologists are increasingly analyzing the impact hip hop has on youth values and their attitudes toward education.
They ask whether hip-hop culture — which today dominates the landscape and lifestyles of urban children and their parents — motivates or hinders academic achievement. Little, if any, empirical data exist to make the case for either side. Still, two divergent strains of thought have emerged. (See stories, pages 15 and 16.)
One group contends that hip-hop music has had a detrimental effect on urban youth. They argue that the music inspires youth to violence, sexual promiscuity and academic underachievement that places too many urban kids on a teenage pregnancy and prison track instead of a path to achievement, they argue.
Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, declared in the 2000 PBS documentary "The Devil's Music:" "Unless we speak against this [rap music], it will creep continually into our society and destroy the morals of our young people."
Another camp counters that hip-hop culture itself does not have a negative influence on attitudes toward education. Instead, they contend that the source of the problem is a recording industry that fails to give fair play to rap music that carries a more positive, uplifting, even educational message.
In the early days of rap music, there was a certain social and political consciousness that today's rap music lacks, notes George Goins, a 1992 graduate of the Cleveland public schools and local promoter and rapper. He blames the predominant message of today's popular rap —violence, misogyny and prison culture — on corporate and commercial influences.
Local rapper and hip-hop concert promoter Suave Gotti agrees: "A lot of the music is actually designed to destroy youth by putting out mindless stuff. It's to the point where, on the streets, it has now become cool for young people to be dumb. It hasn't always been that way."
Says Assata Wright, former politics editor for The Source Magazine of Hip-Hop Music Culture and Politics, "It's almost as if a certain formula has been set. It's a winning formula, a money-making formula that gets played on videos and on the radio. If you're going to go outside that formula, it's very risky financially."
In the lives of impoverished youths like the majority who attend Cleveland's schools, that negative rap music message often goes unchecked because young parents themselves are listening to it or are too busy working to monitor what their kids are listening to. By the time teachers tune in and attempt to counter or challenge the message, it can be too late. Students have already been programmed to glorify rappers like 50 Cent, proclaimed a "real brotha" because he survived a shooting.
Media literacy starts at home
At Catalyst presstime, a district spokesperson was unable to ascertain whether the district has a media literacy curriculum, but, recognizing the need, some teachers may have come up with their own program.
To combat that trend, those who contend rap can have a positive influence on kids call on parents and educators to develop and practice media literacy skills and teach them to kids so they can filter out negative images and messages.
Ronald Ferguson, lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, defines media literacy as understanding how to decode, question, analyze and assess the messages in popular mass media, from advertising to film, news, video and rap music. (See story, page 15.)
Ferguson argues that the aim should not be to restrict youth access to hip-hop music and culture. Instead, parents and schools should act as a guide, teaching children how to sort out the negative messages from the positive ones that often get lost, say proponents of media literacy. Without that direction, the preponderance of negative rap lyrics can profoundly impact a child's perception of many things — including his or her education, leaving it up to teachers to pick up the pieces.
Since rap music often deals with adult themes and adult language — easily accessible through popular media — how can parents manage their children's exposure, especially, if the parents themselves are entertained by the music?
Mark Matthews, who came of age as a DJ at John Marshall High School in the early 1990s, teaches media literacy to his 11-year son, a 6th-grader at Greenview Upper Elementary School in South Euclid.
Matthews' approach is to expose his son to a diverse array of musical styles — from improvisational jazz of John Coltrane to blues rock fusion of Jimi Hendrix — in hopes that his son understands that there is more to life than what's on radio and television. Matthews also has learned to use hip hop as a history lesson — a timeline connecting the music of the present to the past.
It's a far cry from reading "Curious George" to your child, but Matthews believes the type of studying father and son practice is an equally important exercise.
Goins admits that today's popular hip-hop music doesn't make raising his 3-year-old son any easier. Still, he can look to early rap to teach lessons about Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. "I learned a lot of stuff from rap that I didn't learn in school when we came up. It was the power of information through the music that added to my educational experience."
When Matthews' son Kris was a 3rd- grader, Matthews sent him to hip-hop summer camps created by Progressive Arts Alliance (PAA), one of a few organizations in the country that coaches teachers and parents to use the elements of hip-hop culture as an instructional tool.
"He started gaining a lot more confidence ... a sense of belonging," Matthews recalls. "And he started to become more curious about the world around him."
But many Cleveland parents —mostly single heads of households — do not have the time for quality, one-on-one media literacy lessons that Matthews gives his son. That's where teachers can play a role.
Media literacy in the classroom

A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation makes the case for teaching media literacy. It concluded that children ages 8 to 18 spend a total of 6.5 hours a day under the influence of mass media, including one hour and 45 minutes with music. Organizations like the Santa Monica-based Center for Media Literacy have emerged to train teachers to create media literacy curricula.
To succeed, a media literacy program should have strong support from school administrators, good teacher professional development and access to experts in diverse media professions, and strong collaboration among teachers, parents, researchers, and media professionals, the center says.
A good program should also teach students to ask:

• Who created the message?
• What techniques are used to attract my attention?
• What lifestyles, values and points of view are presented in or omitted from the message?
• Why was this message sent?
• How might different people understand the message differently from me?

These kinds of questions form the basis of media literacy programs like the one at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md. There, media literacy instructor Kenneth M. Smith works with the Social Studies, English, Art, Radio, Music, and Technology departments. The music department, for example, focuses on producing music. The media literacy program, in turn, focuses on analyzing it.
Smith created a unit designed around hip-hop culture. He says that each time he introduces it to a new students, it's an eye-opening experience for him.
Hip hop "is now an image-driven industry, more so than any other kind of music," says Smith. "So I start out with culture first as the foundation, then I move into the music and images, so that we can deconstruct them." However, says Smith, often students don't understand the social context of the music that they've been seduced by. "Nor do they want to when they first come in. All they know is BET [Black Entertainment Television] and what's on radio rotation all day."
But Smith doesn't condemn the students or the music. Instead, he allows them to bring in the hip hop that is a part of their everyday environment, so that together they can deconstruct the music, messages and images.
"Corporate America spends millions of dollars to try to get into the heads of consumers, and the reason is it's good for their bottom line," says Smith. "But instead of flipping it for the bottom line, I flip it to empower kids. That's real education."