UCLA announces `Hip Hop Initiative'
LOS ANGELES >> Two years ago at the California African American Museum in downtown Los Angeles, three titans of East Coast rap converged for a roundtable: influential “Paid in Full” rapper Rakim; Public Enemy's cofounder Chuck D; and indie rap royalty Talib Kweli.
Called “Sweat the Technique: The Politics and Poetics of Hip-Hop,” the event attracted a standingroom-only crowd in South Los Angeles. Little did they know that the roundtable — which was supposed to be the first in a monthslong L.A. Philharmonic series called Power to the People! — would lay the groundwork for UCLA's just-announced “Hip Hop Initiative,” or that Chuck D would serve as its inaugural artist in residence.
“The room was sweating. It was on fire,” recalls says H. Samy Alim, UCLA professor of anthropology and director of the university's new initiative. He said the event set the template for “what we can do when we all come together to showcase hiphop's power and strength.”
Touting itself as “the leading center for Hip Hop
Studies globally,” the initiative aims to amplify and multiply the conversation on hip-hop culture across artistic disciplines “by way of artist residencies, community engagement programs, a book series, lecture series, an oral history and digital archive project, postdoctoral fellowships and more,” according to the initiative's announcement.
The initiative will expand the Hip Hop Studies Series of books published by University of California Press and edited by Alim and Jeff Chang, best known for his essential book on rap, “Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.” It will also build on the university's decades-inthe-making archive, accelerating the researching and documentation of hip-hop in the Los Angeles area.
UCLA has long forged paths in the scholarship of American music. Alumni of its famed school of music include Kamasi Washington, Randy Newman, Carol Burnett, John Fahey and La Monte Young, and its faculty has included Herbie Hancock, Kenny Burrell, Patrice Rushen and the late Barbara Morrison, among many others.