UVA Professor Dr. A.D. Carson On Hip-Hop & Academia For The People

HipHopWired got to interview Dr. A.D. Carson, the renowned University of Virginia professor and author who is building bridges between Hip-Hop culture and academia.

Hip-Hop has always been about education in various forms. It’s become a fixture on college campuses due in part to pioneering work done at The University of Virginia by Dr. Kyra Gaunt, and the establishment of the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard University by Marcyliena Morgan in 2002. These days, artists such as 9th Wonder and Lupe Fiasco are among those teaching courses and seminars on Hip-Hop at institutions such as M.I.T., and adding to that legacy of work at UVA is A.D. Carson, Associate Professor of Hip Hop and the Global South.

Dr. Carson’s robust body of work began with his groundbreaking dissertation at Clemson University, a 34-track album entitled Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes and Revolutions. Since then, the Decatur, Illinois native has earned numerous achievements including having the first peer-reviewed rap album for publication by an academic press, i used to love to dream with the University of Michigan in 2020. His music is imbued with a vigorous dexterity and matter-of-fact perspective shining a light on multiple issues facing Black people and other people of color in America and abroad throughout history, demonstrating the true educational power of Hip-Hop culture. Dr. Carson has been a featured contributor to Rolling Stone, as well as having been interviewed by NPR, The Undefeated, and many other outlets.

We had the chance to interview Dr. Carson recently about his work. This interview has been edited for clarity.

HHW: The conceptualization behind Owning My Masters – what was the impetus behind making that decision?

Dr. A.D. Carson: It’s probably important that when I left Illinois to go get a PhD, I knew that it would be Hip-Hop related. The time that I left Illinois was around the time that Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. I imagine that many people can like, look back on that, and then think “Wow, that was like 10-12 years ago.” But as that’s happening, I’m moving from Illinois to South Carolina. And Clemson is football country. I didn’t know all of the stuff about John Calhoun being Thomas Clemson’s father-in-law. I didn’t know that Clemson was a plantation. I get there and they’ve got a plantation house in the middle of campus. And then you walk out in front of the plantation house, you look to your left, and you can see the like the tiger eyes in the endzone. And it’s like, “Oh, they’re producing NFL football players and millions of dollars of revenue. And I don’t know if folks know that this place is a plantation.”

Anytime I tried to say something about that, or about what was going on in the world, then there was this loud chorus of people who were like kind of politely saying “You shouldn’t say that.” Or like, very violently saying, “You need to go back to Illinois.” I don’t think that I would have even made the album if it wasn’t for people not just trying to tell me what I can’t say, but also telling me how to say whatever it is that I do get to say. Because as much as people claim to love Hip-Hop, as much as people claim to love the culture, I don’t think that people have like very high cultural literacy or cultural fluency. 

And so that’s a way that you might be able to say the thing directly to folks’ faces while they smile and nod and be like, it’s so great that you did this, but like you’re saying directly to them, “I’m not f—–g with this.” the decision like had everything to do with being in Clemson at that time, and I don’t know that it would have even had the kind of like potency or resonance if I was in Chicago, or in LA or in New York because I imagine that like those are the kinds of places where the politics they express are like a little more receptive. At Clemson, they were trying to shut it down even at a university where you’re supposed to be able to have academic freedom. I’m saying it was a social response, not an academic response, And with the folks in Clemson’s administration on down to the undergraduate students, it was consistent. This is also like the ascent of Donald Trump. So as you’re trying to trace what’s going on in the world, it’s really easy to move from central Illinois to South Carolina and think “Oh, these people are living in the past.” And that was what I thought for a good portion of the time that I was there. But then Trump gets elected. And it’s like “The whole time they didn’t live in the past, they were in the future.” 

So Owning My Masters was a way of trying to document that. The early songs that I’m recording are from my first week, being in town, all the way up through all of that stuff happening. The album moves chronologically. It just seems more despairing over the duration of it. It’s because that’s like literally what was happening. And maybe it’s not desperation, much more like defiance. But that was because people were asking, “So this music that you do, or this stuff that you’re studying, like, are you saying this stuff in front of everybody?” And I’m like, “Why wouldn’t I say it in front of everybody?” That means that they need to hear it as much as anybody. It’s really important that the people who are perpetuating the stuff and acting like we’ve progressed, those are the people who need to hear these messages, which also means that they need to have they need to be invited into ways of hearing that they’re actually going to tune into.

HipHopWired: In terms of comprehension, and having Hip-Hop be a way in academia to navigate, confront, and ultimately provide some answers, if not all to some of these questions within your role as Associate Professor of Hip-Hop at UVA, are there any set guidelines or curriculum that you use to those interested in navigating the same path?

Carson: I have to say, when I defended the dissertation I talked on the phone with Mickey Facts and Lupe Fiasco because they were working on what they call a “rapper guild”. I asked, “What are you trying to do, be affiliated with a university?” Part of it was to create the conditions for people who were really interested in emceeing to be better at emceeing and to have that connected to these volumes of scholarship that would be able to bear on it. And it might not be about rap, it could be about linguistics, or it could be about history, or it could be about other kinds of stuff like I was reading as a doctoral student, because, of course, I didn’t go to Clemson to learn how to rap.  I think it’s important to say that because folks get that twisted as well, like no I didn’t start rapping when I got to Clemson. Rap was just a way to detail he findings in the research. 

In the classes that I teach now, with undergraduates and graduate students in my brand, the graduate students I work with are the ones who are most likely to teach and become professors. I mentioned Lupe and Mickey Factz, because I think to a certain degree, both of them have been interested and engaged in some kinds of teaching appointments in their engagements at other universities or independently. So, in my writing rap class, I’m teaching techniques. Literally, what do you rely on to start a rap?  And then, what techniques are you going to use to get from bar one to bar 16? At the same time, there’s some of the mundane like simile and metaphor to the more complicated ways that people might use structured rhyme schemes. But also in that class, I’m alternating between teaching those techniques and listening to people who have been doing this for a long time. So that’s the whole archive of rap music going back to the 70s, as well as reading about the context for those things being made. So it’s not trying to get like a grand narrative of the “capital T” history of Hip-Hop but the histories of Hip-Hop.

HHW: In terms of dealing with academia and trying to have this conversation through the culture and the machinations of Hip-Hop, has there been any kind of pushback that you’ve experienced on a social level, not necessarily administrative, in terms of trying to sanitize the work that you do?

Carson: I think that there’s been pressure – I don’t know if you’re familiar with the professor watch list that exists, basically unmasking radical professors?

HHW: I’m familiar with that, yes.

Carson: So that kind of thing – but what they call radical is the fact that I make music. (Laughs) They don’t even understand the content of the music, but on their websites, they’ve got screenshots of lyrics.  I realized that this is a very real thing in these cases, where people are having their lyrics used against them in court. And people are explaining what the lyrics mean, like police officers. That definitely means the system is like gamed against you, because like the people who arrested me, and in the system that’s trying to use my lyrics, also illegally against me, to convict me, are having people who work for them, tell the jury what the lyrics mean? This is also why getting tenure is important, because then you have at least the supposed protections of job security and academic freedom

I did write one album where one of my colleagues was like “Yeah, it’s been good knowing you”, thinking I’d get fired. And my response to that was like, “if this is the kind of thing that gets me fired, then they’re not serious about what the professor of Hip-Hop, not in the way that I choose to do the work.” I’m not pulling punches, because how do they know what I shouldn’t be saying and how I should be saying it? They trusted me enough to put me in the position. Trust me to do my work, I’ll trust the people whom I trust in that regard. And then that means that I have to have mentorship, collaborators, and people whose opinions I trust. In a real way, some of this is supposed to make you uncomfortable, right? I mean, I’m not making this up. I am not creating controversy, when I talk about the fact that Black folks are being erased from history, and having our lives taken from us for that. People don’t believe that rappers deserve to be treated as human beings. I’m not making that s–t up.

HHW: In terms of being a notable figure, creating In this space within academia to have these conversations through the media and the culture of hip hop, and then confronting newer problems like AI and technology, has it posed any obstacles for you?

Carson: A part of it is – maybe the fancy word to say is legibility, but it’s like, “How do you get the message out?” I’ve talked to people at NPR, or writing for Rolling Stone or whoever else but that’s not really my target demographic. That’s not gonna get to the people at home in Decatur. So it’s, “How do I most effectively speak to black communities?”And this might also mean t places like The Breakfast Club, Sway in the Morning, or Black media where you don’t have to explain the concerns before you launch into ways we might think about them. But that means that you have to get past the hurdle of folks believing that because you work at a university, the thing that you’re doing is not for them or directed toward things that they might be interested in. 

The thing about AI thinking about that – I’m not worried about somebody cloning Tupac’s voice or cloning Drake’s voice or Kendrick (Lamar’s) or Jay Z, because all of these people with their estates have the power to be able to be like, cease and desist with the s—s immediately. They can fight that because they got money, but what about like the dude like one of my cousins or anybody that you know from your hometown, who is incredibly gifted, but nobody knows them? And then they put their work online on SoundCloud, or Spotify or Bandcamp, something like that. And then one of these companies gets it. What I think we should be thinking about more is what happened to regular people in blues clubs, and juke joints across the country, whenever white folks were able to export Black music or cordon it off to these particular kinds of places, including academia, where working-class Black folks didn’t have any kind of access. So that’s not a problem where I need to say “Hey, white folks, make sure that whenever you decide to exploit us, that you have like some kind of ethics when you do it.” 

This is why I appreciate you talking to me, because who are the people in HipHop media who talk to the people who are dealing heavily with Hip-Hop regularly to bring these issues to the fore, rather than only the things that are being puppeted by these media machines that are pushing out particular kinds of stories. The conversations about how rappers are being utilized in this particular election cycle is something that we absolutely need to be talking about, right? But who’s gonna host that conversation, Ari Melber? If we’re dependent on NBC, to like, talk about how Hip-Hop intersects with politics, then I think that we f——d up. I’m just saying it’s important to get the word out and to challenge us to think differently about all of these things that are going on. And part of my doing that is of course, making the music and teaching the classes, but the other component is commentary.