Public Enemy and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Public Enemy live

HipHopLaw.com favorite Chuck D and Public Enemy will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.  When Chuck D provided the keynote address to the "Hip Hop and the American Constitution" course in April 2012, offered collaboratively by Drexel Law and WVU Law, he spent the first portion of his address sharing with our law school students and invited guests, the induction speech he had written for 2012's R&R HOF inductees, The Beastie Boys.  Now Chuck and PE will have the opportunity to craft their own acceptance speech for their own HOF induction.

Public Enemy's Hall of Fame induction is important for many reasons:  First, PE will be only the fourth hip hop group inducted into the R&R HOF (following on the heels of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, RUN-DMC, and the Beastie's), but PE will become the first overtly political and socially conscious hip hop group to be inducted and recognized for the movement that they inspired.

Second, PE was not just controversial at launch, but they unabashadely critiqued (a) the criminal justice system in the United States (in "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and "Can't Truss It," amongst many others); (b) continuing and festering racism in America (in "Fight the Power" and "By the Time I Get to Arizona," amongst many others); and (c) police brutality and inner city neglect (in "Get the F Outta Dodge" and "9-1-1 is a Joke," amongst many others).  Public Enemy inspired listeners to write, protest, rap, and actively engage in fighting against injustice and promoting education and intelligent criticism.

Third, PE, certainly Chuck and Professor Griff,  viewed themselves as educators AND entertainers, not simply entertainers.  With a strident message to deliver, Chuck, Griff and PE were relentless in their lyrics and their delivery.  For this, PE was annihilated by critics when they emerged in the early 1990s.  Still, PE knew that their target audience was not the establishment nor their critics, rather young people that needed to be educated in a way different than was being delivered by most U.S. public schools. "Messages" delivered below:



In rewatching Can't Truss It, one is reminded just how controversial and edgy PE was when they came out in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  The choice for induction in the R&R HOF is certainly deserved as this groundbreaking group paved the way for so many others to follow.  Congratulations to Chuck D and Public Enemy on their selection for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Happy Holidays from DMX

DMX recently stopped by New York City's Power 105, and gave a stirring rendition of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.  His new album, Undisputed, is in stores now. 

Video Courtesy of Power 105.


-- Nick J. Sciullo

"Hip Hop as a Necessary Tool in the Classroom"

Professor Rajul Punjabi

Following on the heels of the first ever "Hip Hop and the American Constitution" course offered at a U.S. law school, Professor Rajul Punjabi now writes that using hip hop in the college classroom has become a "necessary tool."  According to Punjabi:

"I can do my best to break a literary concept down to my class, but it doesn't resonate until I contextualize it in an accessible way. And in 2012, I'm confident to say that hip hop as a genre and culture is an integral tool to make almost any text accessible.  Now of course, it's easy to defend my claim in an English-based curriculum. I employ Jay-Z for his abundant usage of metaphor, allusion, and hyperbole to teach figures of speech. Tupac works when we're looking at socioeconomic backgrounds in literature. Lauryn Hill? Indispensable during a lesson on imagery and narration. And don't get me started on our close-reading of the word "swagger" nee "swag" (Shakespeare vs. Soulja Boy). It was a long, loud, two hours but no English instructor worth her salt likes a quiet classroom anyway."

CFP: Radical Teacher No. 97 - Hip-Hop and Critical Pedagogy

Hip-Hop and Critical Pedagogy

ON-LINE Special Issue of Radical Teacher, No. 97

Call for Submissions

All submissions due no later than February 15, 2013

With this special issue we propose to construct a frame for understanding the place of Hip Hop in classrooms—from K-12 public schools and other youth-based community spaces to college and university courses. With the increasing popularity of what some are calling Hip Hop Studies, it becomes essential to think critically about a range of methodological approaches, innovative instructional strategies and the overall challenges (practical,

political and ethical) of teaching Hip Hop.  Central to our concerns is a focus on critical literacy, defined by Ira Shor as “learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one's experience as

historically constructed within specific power relations."  With this special issue of Radical Teacher we plan to consider the function of Hip Hop as a nexus of pedagogical innovation and critical literacy.

We seek contributions from a range of practitioners who are exploring the use of Hip Hop music and related elements of Hip Hop culture in the classroom.  Our definitions (of “Hip Hop,” of “classroom,” and so on) are, necessarily, flexible: our interest is in publishing a diverse range of writings that will help us all think about happens when Hip Hop becomes academic.  In this light we welcome submissions from educators, activists,

and scholars whose experiences have provided interesting data on this subject.  Possible formats include conventional research papers and essays, interviews, annotated lesson plans, syllabi and bibliographies, anthologies of student work, and visual art.  

Among other topics, we can imagine submissions treating:

Hip Hop and social justice teaching

Hip Hop K-12 instruction

Hip Hop at the University and Liberal Arts College

Hip Hop research strategies and agendas

Hip Hop and critical literacy practices

Hip Hop as global consciousness

Hip Hop and the politics of race

Hip Hop, Gender, and Sexuality

Hip Hop Studies and Traditional Fields of Study

Hip Hop Studies Methodologies

Hip Hop and Youth Organizing

Hip Hop and Africanist Aesthetics

Hip Hop and political organizing

Hip Hop, Police Brutality, and the Carceral State

Hip Hop and the Occupy Movement

Hip Hop and alternative media practices

Please send submissions and inquiries to: radicalteachhiphop@gmail.com

Guest Editors: Christopher M. Tinson, Ph.D., Hampshire College and Carlos Rec McBride, M.Ed., University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Radical Teacher is a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal grounded in radical left politics. We publish articles that focus on education written by educational workers at all levels, in traditional and nontraditional institutions.

RIP Russell Means

Activist, actor, musician, agitator, politician and former American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means passed today from esophageal cancer, at the age of 72.  He died at his ranch located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota,  where he was born in 1939.  Means was a fierce advocate of American Indian rights and led dozens of protests and uprisings throughout his life ranging from seizing the Mayflower II in Plymouth, Mass on Thanksgiving day in 1970 (protesting discriminatory treatment of American Indians), to orchestrating a 1971 prayer vigil atop the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota (dramatizing Lakota claims to the Black Hills), to organizing cross-country caravans in 1972 to Washington, D.C. (protesting a century of broken treaties by the U.S. government), to leading a boycott of Cleveland Indian games in the 1990s (protesting the use of Chief Wahoo as a racist, caricatured mascot/logo).

Russell Means is most recognized for two well known portrayals, though very divergent:  First, he led a 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of more than 350 Lakota men, women and children, often referred to as the last major conflict of the American Indian wars, where protestors demanded strict adherence by the federal government to all Indian treaties.  Second, he starred as Chingachgook in Michael Mann's 1992 epic "The Last of the Mohicans" alongside Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe.

Means used his notoriety to advocate on behalf of equality on behalf of American Indians until his untimely death.

The War on Drugs as an Epic Fail

SpearIt, a law professor at Saint Louis University, has recently penned an op-ed in connection with the state of Washington's ballot initiative on legalizing marijuana.  Hip-hop is replete with references to the abject failure of the War on Drugs and the costly destruction visited on urban communities by law enforcement engaged in this war.  The op-ed is entitled "Legalize Marijuana for Racial Justice Reasons," and appears in the Seattle Times.

From the Seattle Times:  "The war on drugs has been a colossal and costly failure, paid for largely with the blood of minority youth. In fact, the history of American drug law is one long story of discrimination against ethnic minorities, including the demonizing of Mexicans in the Southwest for marijuana use."

CFP: Hip Hop Literacies at OSU

The Ohio State University

February 15-16, 2013

The 2013 Hiphop Literacies conference features keynotes, performances and workshops by leading scholars, educators, and artists and focuses on pedagogies for social change in its attempt to target innovative, critical and activist work that uses Hiphop and popular culture including a wide range of media across geographic and virtual space, diverse populations, and methods for stimulating freedom movement.  We are especially interested in student-centered curriculum, integrating media, arts, community-based projects, progressive learning and teaching that are participatory, inquiry-based and interdisciplinary addressing social issues such as impoverishment, mass incarceration, community re-entry, sexism, human rights, language diversity, literacy, education, and social inequality.  Our goal is to continue to locate and instigate unified critical movement on behalf of critical scholars, researchers, students, teachers, artists, community members and policy makers.

The deadline is October, 30, 2012. 

Check out the webpage here. 


-- Nick J. Sciullo

Tupac Conference in Atlanta

On Friday and Saturday, September 28-29, 2012, the Atlantic University Center Robert W. Woodruff library is hosting the "Tupac Amaru Shakur Collection Conference: Hip Hop, Education and Expanding the Archival Imagination."

The conference program, available here, includes exciting and robust conversations regarding the impact of Tupac Shakur specifically, and hip hop generally, on culture, law and politics.

From the Conference website:  "The Archives Research Center of the AUC Woodruff Library hourses the Tupac Amaru Shakur Collection, a rich resource for understanding the life and work of one of hip hop's brightest stars.  The Collection was deposited in the Archives in 2009, thourhg a partnership with the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation and Afeni Shakur-Davis, mother of Tupac Shakur, to make his papers available to scholars.

The Collection includes Shakur's handwritten manuscripts, including song lyrics, track listings, video and album treatments, short stories and poetry.  Other materials include manuscripts written by members of the Outlawz, media and publicity materials, correspondence and legal documents.

The Tupac Amaru Shakur Conference was designed to combine AUC Woodruff Library's mission to facilitate scholarly research and the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation's mission to encourage hip hop curriculum." 

Several contributors to "Hip Hop Law.com" will participate as speakers at this first annual event.

Hip Hop and the ABA

The September 2012 edition of the ABA Journal reports favorably on the "Hip Hop and the American Constitution" course offered last spring semester collaboratively between Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law and the West Virginia University College of Law.  In an article entitled "Hip-Hop at Law," reporter L.J. Jackson writes:

Public Enemy (in Hamburg, Germany 2000)

"Back in 1989, when Chuck D and Flavor Flav exhorted Public Enemy fans to 'Fight the Power,' it’s likely that they never envisioned their anti-establishment anthem would be deconstructed and analyzed as part of an innovative law school curriculum. But the lyrics and discographies of Public Enemy and other hip-hop artists are indeed the subjects of a recent law school seminar and a forthcoming anthology studying the intersection of the Constitution and hip-hop.  Law professors Donald Tibbs and andré cummings are working on a textbook based on the class they co-taught this spring called 'Hip-Hop and the American Constitution.' The lecture series brought an eclectic mix of law professors, formerly incarcerated people and rap artists to the classroom to discuss hip-hop’s legal implications. 'It initially was a hope and dream' to teach the class, says Tibbs of Drexel University, who conceived the idea and pitched it to cummings of West Virginia University."

The entire article can be read here:  Hip-Hop at Law


(photo courtesy of MikaV, Creative Commons License)

Brazilian Delegates Participating in the US State Department's Program on Cultural Affairs Will Discuss Hip Hop Activism and the Law

Professor Pamela Bridgewater

Hip Hop’s influence on pop culture, legal culture, and political organizing is a global phenomena.  From will.i.am’s remix of a campaign speech by President Barak Obama to issues related to Occupy Wall Street, Hurricane Katrina, Jena 6, the Trayvon Martin case, Stop and Search Resistance Movement in NYC – activists, organizers, lawyers, policymakers are either impacted by, closely connected to or identify as members of the hip hop nation.

Professor Pamela D. Bridgewater, in association with the US State Department’s Program on Cultural Affairs and fhi360, will make a presentation to a delegation of Brazilian hip hop artists and social justice activists on Friday, August 31, 2012.  In her presentation, Professor Bridgewater will address the relationships between law, activism and hip hop in the US domestic contexts such as the Roots and Reality Social Justice Project she founded as well as international grassroots human rights movements like the recent youth led movement known as the Arab Spring.  

 Program information below:

Global Hip Hop, Activism and the Law

Professor Pamela Bridgewater

Friday August 31, 2012 2:00 - 3:15

American University Washington College of Law Room 601

4801 Massachusetts Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20016

Contact Persons:

Evan L. Schmitt, Program Officer, Center for Global Connections, 202.884.8895

Nicolas Mansour, WCL Faculty Assistant, 202.274.4121

Insane Clown Posse and the FBI

In 2011, the FBI released a report describing fans of the Insane Clown Posse (known as Juggalos) as "a loosely organized hybrid gang . . . rapidly expanding into many U.S. communities."  The report goes on to detail crimes committed by Juggalos as "sporadic, disorganized, individualistic and often involve simple assault, personal drug use and possession, petty theft and vandalism."  Further, according to the FBI "a small number of Juggalos are forming more organized subsets and engaging in more ganglike criminal activity, like felony assaults, thefts, robberies and drug sale."

Members of the Insane Clown Posse are taking issue with the FBI and its report.  "Saying they've gotten complaints from fans about police harassment" the group members have "hired counsel to pursue a possible lawsuit against the FBI for classifying its fan base as an emerging gang.  The Insane Clown Posse announced that it was seeking fan reports of incidents of harassment promising that such incidents will be "reviewed by our legal team--at no charge to you."

(photo courtesy of wikimedia commons)

New Article: Jay-Z's 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps

Caleb Mason (Southwestern Law School) recently published Jay-Z's 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps in the Saint Louis University Law Journal (Vol. 56, No. 2, 2012).  The article has received mentions in the Huffington Post, SOHH.com, The Grio, BET, Gawker.com, Music Law Seminar, TheRoot.com, AboveTheLaw.com, and the Wall Street Journal blog.  The YouTube video of Jay-Z's song:




The article has also inspired a Canadian response authored by Emir Crowne.  From the abstract from Mason's original article:

This is a line-by-line analysis of the second verse of 99 Problems by Jay-Z, from the perspective of a criminal procedure professor.  It’s intended as a resource for law students and teachers, and for anyone who’s interested in what pop culture gets right about criminal justice, and what it gets wrong.

Are Jay-Z and Kanye West Revolutionary?

Much has been said and written about Jay-Z and Kanye's "Watch the Throne" record.  With the 2012 release of the video "No Church in the Wild," Jay and Kanye straightforwardly invite the comparison between themselves and revolutionary historical figures.  In fact, Jay-Z has stated on the record that because he is a black man in America that has become wealthy despite racism and discrimination, that fact alone makes him a revolutionary.  Yet, with all of the bling glorification that permeates "Watch the Throne," the question remains, can you fully embrace riches and excess and still lead a revolution?

Writer Cord Jefferson takes up that question in his provocative article "What's 50 Grand to a Revolutionary Like Me?: Watch the Throne and the New Black Power."  Within, Jefferson writes: "If you're wondering what Jay and West have done, exactly, to deserve the title of neo-black power icons, the answer appears to be both straightforward and confusing: They've gotten rich. Today's black power, today's black revolution, seems to be indistinguishable from, say, Donald Trump's power, the power that comes from being able to possess a lot of stuff. You needn't take my or Global Grind's word for it; just listen to Watch the Throne for a whole host of revelations about what its creators deem worthy of celebrating. The album's second single, "Otis," finds Jay-Z proclaiming, "New watch alert!" in reference to Hublot, a Swiss watchmaker whose wares go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Later on the same song, West boasts about his "other, other Benz." On Watch the Throne's biggest hit, "Niggas in Paris," which Jay-Z and West have been performing several times a night on their current European Watch the Throne tour, Jay says he's totally forgotten the worth of $50,000."

Hip Hop, Mass Incarceration and the Shoe Wars

The "shoe wars" have escalated in urban America to the point that Adidas recently believed that marketing the shoes pictured here (immediate left) was a good idea.  Jason Whitlock recently responded with a thoughtful article tracing the shoe wars back to Air Jordans, Reagan's War on Drugs and mass incarceration.

Whitlock writes:  "The outraged, well-intentioned critics of Adidas’ initial decision to launch the 'JS Roundhouse Mids' are upset about the wrong thing. They think the shackled shoes are connected to America’s despicable history of African-American slavery. They’re wrong. The shoes are an attempt to capitalize off America’s despicable drug war and subsequent mass incarceration of minority men of color."

Whitlock connects the shoe wars with Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow," identifying the massive incarceration increases in the United States in the last thirty years based primarily on a failed drug war, and recognizes that when you have a massive prison underclass, it becomes a potential profit stream at which marketing efforts can be aimed.  In this way, the shoe wars have escalated to the point that placing shackles on basketball shoes seems like a smart marketing ploy to misguided shoe designers sitting in Adidas' development meetings.

Indeed, the National Basketball Association has sought and continues to seek to profit from urban, hip hop and prison culture, while at the same time distancing itself (see NBA Dress Code as Pre-text for Racial Discrimination) from that very culture that it hopes to exploit for gain.

SALT/LatCrit Junior Faculty Development Workshop

This announcement may be of interest to law school junior faculty and lawyers interested in entering the academy (as well as senior faculty with expertise and interests to share):

LatCrit, Inc. and the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) are pleased to invite you to the Tenth Annual Junior Faculty Development Workshop (FDW), immediately preceding the SALT Teaching Conference. The conference will be held at the University of Maryland, Francis King Carey School of Law in Baltimore, MD.

This annual workshop is designed for critical, progressive, and social justice oriented pretenure professors, including clinicians and legal writing professors, as well as those who may be contemplating a teaching career. The FDW is designed to familiarize critical, progressive, and social justice oriented junior faculty with LatCrit and SALT principles and values and support them in the scholarship, teaching, and service aspects of professional success.

Sessions at this year's workshop will focus on entering the academy, connecting critical theory and social justice lawyering in the classroom, and developing a flourishing social justice scholarly and teaching agenda.  In addition, the workshop will offer a limited number of opportunities for FDW attendees to present mock job talks.  And this year, as part of the community building dinner, the FDW will offer an open mic night!

Registration for the FDW (which will take place in conjunction with the SALT Teaching Conference) will open on August 15.  You can obtain more information and register here.  For more information about the mock job talk opportunity, please email Professor Jonathan Glater or Professor Christopher Hines.  To sign up for the open mic night, email Professor Jaime Lee.