Pedagogy and Performance in Black Popular Culture

Abstract

Rap artists, in the wake of rap's popular crossover success in the early 1980s, explicitly defined rap as a pedagogical idiom. Lyrics became more complex while epithets of poet and artist proliferated. All of this came as a parallel phenomenon to the emergence of a discourse about rap and its his tories and traditions—a discourse that would have seemed anomalous early on. Drawing on theory and research in performance studies, this arti cle critiques efforts to place rap into ready-made historical trajectories (e.g., Afrocentric or postmodern ones), and focuses on the discourse that rap artists themselves created or performed about rap music and its history at this critical juncture. In redefining notions of "the popular," rap estab lished itself as a kind of alternative curriculum, raising key questions about who needs to be educating whom, and why.