Its Bigger Than Hip Hop What Rap Music Tells Us Public Policy
what up y’all
my name is dope knife well my real name
is kendrick mack
i uh i’m the son of a diplomat and i
grew up and went to school overseas
afterwards i
moved to savannah georgia where i
attended the savannah college of art and
design
and i became a rapper after that and
that’s what i’ve been doing ever since
let’s try that a different way though
i’m a
mc known as dope knife when i pan a rap
but when i was born yo my mama named me
kendrick mac
went to school overseas my father was a
diplomat moved to savannah georgia
that’s when the brother went to scat
i just gave you my little brief bio but
i gave it to you in two forms
spoken formal way and then a wrapped way
um you know i’m willing to bet
that the wrapped version of my bio
probably is gonna stick with you at
least in some form or another
more so than me just standing there and
reading to you some
facts about my life um this is all
stemming from
you know what i like to think of as
being the power of the wrapped word
and the sort of poignancy that a wrapped
word
can have in terms of making people
retain information
or just having things stick with people
and having them have more
impact and more meaning with people i
want to stress
rap because hip-hop is a
broader thing hip-hop is a culture it’s
a lifestyle it’s a way of life
and rap is just one of the elements
within the broader culture of hip-hop so
i’m talking about
rap specifically right now a rapper can
mention a name brand and that can raise
a company’s bottom line
a rapper can even speak a whole new
business into existence
or give an obscure reference to a movie
that causes somebody to go and look that
movie up
and find out where that reference is
from a rapper can get kids in the comic
books
like it did for me rap you
there’s there’s rap just has the power
to peak people’s interest
and the power to stick with people in
ways that
i don’t think fully have been explored
outside of just the realm of
entertainment
in fact it was through rap that i was
able to learn
english as a kid i grew up
primarily as far as my childhood i was
in africa
west africa to be exact and for at least
the first four or five years of my life
i spoke
west african creole and
one of the uh first things that that
started
on my regiment to learn english was i
would listen to the dougie fresh
1989 song that he did for the
ghostbusters movie spirit
it went something like spirit some
people hear it some people fear it
spirit some people just won’t go near it
shows on me
and the skies are blue the ghostbusters
are back and now brand new
is a combination of the repetition of
the words
um associating meaning with those words
it being in a rhythm that stuck in my
head
so that i would keep repeating them over
and over again even when i wasn’t
necessarily consciously doing so
obviously rap wasn’t the
the only key in this
scenario you know there was school there
was tutoring
but i can’t downplay the impact that
hip-hop had and
it actually being presented to me in
that way by my older brother is
hey listen to this here’s here’s some
epmd
check this out here’s the fat boys check
this out you know i mean here’s some run
dmc
listen to this listening to those songs
over and over again
it just helped me retain the language
retain the language better and get a
better grasp on how to speak it and how
to play with it
think about it the way that you would
think about how a pop song will have
lyrics that gets stuck in your head over
time and
you can repeat them in a moment’s notice
you know damn near every word um it’s
this
same sort of thing that’s going on in
fact a
2013 study found that kids
retain science information better when
they rap dance or drew it
this is because obviously when
information is presented to you in a
more engaging way
you retain it better it sticks with you
you remember things more there’s an
example
in uganda with a artist politician named
bobby wine
who raps at his political rallies and
through using you know his rhetoric
in that sense he’s able to activate
millions
of young people in uganda to being
politically active
so why not embrace this concept and
apply rapping to things other than just
entertainment and instead of uh strictly
having rap be in the field of
instructing people to throw their hands
in the air and wave them like they just
don’t care
or to go and buy the latest shoe
that’s come out what if it was embraced
more
in public organizing and political
speech
i know it’s extremely easy for me to
just say
hey take the curriculum and wrap it
cause
you know it’s obviously not that easy
and
i’m just a rap dude i’m not an educator
i can only imagine with the amount of
things that educators across the country
already have on their plate
being hey why don’t you take your lesson
plan and make some dope bars out of it
isn’t necessarily
the priority that that they’re having
now how do you find that right balance
of making it cool and engaging
and not off-putting to young people and
kids
i don’t necessarily know that i’m
equipped to give a how-to
on how to do that but i do know that
most of us learn our
abcs by way of a song i think it can
it can be done in fact if you go on
youtube and you do a search for
educational rap or rap history or rap
math any subject you can find some
pretty well-made
well-produced engaging educational
rap content where people just utilize
the medium
the form of communication of rap
rhythmically speaking
over beats in rhyme i think people
find that it can open up a whole new
dimension to how
children and young people pick up
the information that we want them to
have i just want to see this get used
in classrooms more and you know i want
to see more
uh politicians and activists embrace
this technique of communication
in their day-to-day activities more um
so in closing if you don’t remember
anything i said yo with this talk you
didn’t know what you was facing
i’m talking about how raps a good way
you’re communicating you do it right you
got the power to go move the nation
and stick inside their head and have
their brains like contemplating i’m
saying
take history apply it to that you can
even find the format when it’s science
to math
so the youth won’t grow up lost and be
denying the facts but i’ma bring it to
an end so i’ll write us a rap
like that matt thank you