CAN WE BE DOPE?

For seven semesters, as a graduate student in the Rhetorics, Communications, and Information Design Ph.D. program at Clemson University, I wrote and recorded “mixtap/e/ssay” projects. As a genre, the mixtap/e/ssay isn’t making a new claim or attempting to create a new genre, though it hybridizes the mixtape – a self-produced or independently released album issued free of charge to gain publicity – and the personal and scholarly essays. These projects perform versions of the type of exploration and analysis of the issues highlighted by P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods in “Hip Hop Studies in Black.” These projects also provide the bulk of the content for the archive I eventually hosted on the website:  http://phd.aydeethegreat.com. This archive is the host site for the dissertation.

What I submitted to the graduate school in place of the more traditional prose document was something that resembled liner notes for the album. Instead of a document like the book-length project that was included with my 2011 album/novel-hybrid project, COLD (Mayhaven Publishing, Inc.), the contents of Owning My Masters are a rap album and digital archive fully hosted online. The full track list and producer/collaborator credits for each song are included in the notes, as well as pictures – some that I shot myself and others from various sources like university communications, student organization online posts, and screenshots of relevant direct communications – and some introductory prose to frame the album.

I have had lots of time to think about the content of the work while writing, recording, and releasing mixtap/e/ssay projects titled Sleepwalking¹⁸ and teaching as Associate Professor of Hip Hop & the Global South at the University of Virginia. I believe these projects and the ones that follow are just as potent, just as important to share and think through as they were when they were completed.

Almost a year to the date before I defended the dissertation that became this current project, the executive leadership team of Clemson University had me and four other students arrested for trespassing on the second day of a sit-in. Each of us – as well as the hundreds of students, staff, and faculty who participated and supported the sit-in – believed the work we were doing to be as necessary as it was unwelcome. We planned underground, out of sight of those who might seek to foil our action, and we created a community within the university community—inside it, but away from it. That planning began with track 13 from the album, a poem set to music and call to action entitled “See the Stripes.” Invoking Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten, I write in the prefatory note to Owning My Masters, “This introduction is a bad document identifying the fugitive as a citizen.”

Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions comes from a place of practical action as well as “deep theory” to examine the potency of rhetorics of rap.¹⁹ Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions, and the work I’ve attempted to do since, begs the questions: What if “dope scholars” named a special mode of scholarly engagement (addiction, perhaps) or the structure that is philosophically and metaphysically at the basis of (and perpetuation) of our (hip hop/academic) culture? And what I mean by “dope” is simply those scholars in the generation after, but undoubtedly indebted to and inspired by, scholars like Tricia Rose, Adam Krims, Imani Perry,  Joseph G. Schloss, Kyra Gaunt, Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, who, as hip hop aspirants, strive to be what it is we study.  The methods of “traditional” successful hip hop scholars have been tirelessly used to work to uncover an implicit structure (a way of doing [hip hop] scholarship) that was, perhaps, thought to be one technological extension among others, one legal struggle, or one form of cultural aberration (among others). They were (and now are) expected to take place within a restricted economy.

For all we know now, could the work of these creative intellectuals be to be dope?

¹⁸Sleepwalking, Vol. 1 (2017), Sleepwalking 2 (2018), The Royale – a mixtape for a production of the play in Charlottesville for which I did sound design (2019), i used to love to dream (2020), iv: talking to ghosts (2022), and V: ILLICIT (2023).

¹⁹ In an episode of “Left of Black with James B. Peterson,” Mark Anthony Neal describes Peterson’s work as a “deep theorist” of hip hop. 30 March 2015. YouTube. Web. Accessed 05 October 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwYQES8Gyko