GAYLE WORLAND | Wisconsin State Journal |
The students in Anthony Cao’s new Hip Hop Studies course at Madison West High School, perhaps the first of its kind for high school students, spent the first weeks of the new semester studying the history of hip-hop and performing their own verses, as shown here, to illustrate what they’d learned. Choral teacher Cao designed the course in part to draw in students who have an interest in music, but who generally don’t participate in more traditional high school offerings such as band, orchestra and chorus.
Junior Kenny Lyons sings in concert choir, plays bass in the school jazz combo and wins leads in school musicals.
But in Madison West High School’s Hip Hop Studies class, he is an exception: Most of the students enrolled in this course have never before taken a school class in music, even though they live and breathe the stuff.
“I love hip-hop,” said Alex Garcia, a sophomore who outside of school plays guitar, bass and piano and produces rap music on his own. “It’s an everyday part of my life. I just want to learn more about the background of hip-hop and how it started.”
The brand new course, which began in January and is a semester-long music elective, is designed “to get kids thinking about the most popular form of music since they’ve been born,” said West High school vocal music teacher Anthony Cao, who came up with the idea last year while on sabbatical and pursuing a master’s degree in music education at UW-Madison.
“All of these high school students were born in the mid-90s, and it’s been top of the charts since then,” he said. The goal “is to start to broaden their perspective on where hip-hop comes from and what kind of role it plays in their lives.”
So each weekday morning at 8:13 a.m., students drop their backpacks on the risers in Cao’s choir room and come to the center of the room in a cypher, or circle, for a freestyle rap. The first two weeks of the course also included time in the library researching hip-hop history, doing writing exercises and comparing the genres known as hip-hop and rap. Later, they’ll move into music production with the help of a $448 grant from the Foundation for Madison Public Schools to help pay for electronic equipment and computer software.
“Let’s keep this clean and school-appropriate,” Cao cautioned his students as they recently read aloud their rhymes composed as homework on loose-leaf paper or laptops. When a few students balked at performing, Cao let them take a pass — but this time only, he said.
“You’ll find that nerves never go away. You just get better at dealing with it,” he told them.
Cao, 32, grew up listening to rap himself and in college played in an R&B/neo-soul/hip hop band. Today, besides performing classical music he and his wife, Leslie, have a weekly gig at the Ivory Room each Saturday night, fielding audience requests.
Along with the more traditional offerings of high school band, orchestra and chorus, West also offers classes in guitar, and in the fall semester Cao teaches a course in pop music history. But though hip-hop is widely studied at the college level, Cao has yet to find another music educator teaching it in a high school as a graded, for-credit course.
“Hip-hop is making its way into other high school curricula slowly, especially in social studies or in English. Or as a tool to help memorize something in science — you know, you can make a periodic table rap.
“But first and foremost, hip-hop is music,” he said. “It’s in music education in particular where I feel like teachers have been lagging the furthest behind to stay current with what’s relevant to students.”
Julia Koza, chair of music education at UW-Madison and an advisor to Cao when he was creating the course, calls the class “thoughtfully conceived, inclusive, culturally relevant and creative.”
“I think school music needs to be dynamic and deeply connected to the music that’s heard and loved outside of school, and varied to reflect the variety of styles present locally and globally,” she said. “His class is a great example.”
Cao hopes his students will perform their work during West’s Fine Arts Week this spring. About 40 students auditioned for a spot in the course; of the 30 who got in, 22 are male, some with professional aspirations in hip-hop.
“I think it’s important to reach out to a population that has been traditionally underserved by school music programs,” he said. “And as hip-hop has become the most powerful genre of popular music, it really speaks to almost all students in some form — because they’re surrounded by it: on the radio, in advertisements, on TV.”
In class, the students listen to one another’s performances enrapt, providing a beat when asked by drumming on a classroom white board or by “beatboxing,” a form of vocal percussion. When the students work in small groups, they cheer on one another’s efforts.
Still, the composition aspect is a new challenge for Aurealia Jackson, a senior who also sings in concert choir. “This is different for me, because I sing but I don’t write what I sing,” she said. “Here, you have to come up with your own concept. It’s your own art.”
Corey Copeland, a junior for whom Cao’s class is his first in the music department at West, said he’s already found intersections between his creative writing class and the hip-hop course.
“You hear a lot of bad things about rap — but here we do the more positive things about hip-hop,” Copeland said. “They teach us about how hip-hop got started and how it got corrupted along the line. I know a lot of people might be skeptical of this, but I always say a light bulb won’t shine if you don’t give it a socket.”
Themes in hip-hop often echo the themes he studied in American literature, said junior Ross Perkel, another student in Cao’s class.
“I come from a pretty upper-middle-class, white, conservative family. My parents are not the biggest proponents of hip-hop,” he said. “I feel like it’s something really important, it’s all around us in our culture today.
“I’m not going to say it should be required learning for every kid, but I do think that it’s important for every kid to be able to talk intelligently about what’s going on in the world.”
