Long as I Live

Boom-Bap, Spirituals, and the Future of English Education

“Hip Hop, carved defiantly in the soil of postmodernity, is a telling footprint of their beauty.”
—David E. Kirkland (2008, p. 74)

Over the past two decades, the field of cultural studies has converged with English education and the growing field of youth studies (Best, 2007; Furlong, 2013). One vital strand in that convergence is the study of popular culture, and especially Hip Hop. The field of Hip Hop Based Education (HHBE) (Hill, 2009) centers the five core elements of Hip Hop—emceeing, breakdancing, graffiti, DJing, and knowledge—as pedagogical tools within a culturally responsive, multimodal teaching framework. More recently, Hip Hop education scholars have included Hip Hop aesthetics, sensibilities, mindsets, and epistemologies as crucial to understanding the ways Hip Hop-identifying youth make sense of themselves and the world. Scholars such as H. Samy Alim (2006, 2007) and Elaine Richardson (2007) have theorized about the critical language practices of Hip Hop as powerful multimodal literacies rooted in Black Language traditions.

Some scholars, like Ernest Morrell & Jeff Duncan-Andrade (2002, 2004), have examined rap lyrics as bridges to canonical literature, framing Hip Hop as a gateway to traditional English curricula. Others, like David Kirkland (2008, 2013), have pushed further, arguing that Hip Hop is not a bridge, but a literary tradition in its own right, one that calls us toward a New English Education. Kirkland, whose voice is sampled in this track, draws on postmodern Blackness to frame Hip Hop as a mode of expression that is defiant, beautiful, and profoundly pedagogical.

The seminal text in the field of Hip Hop Based Education remains Marc Lamont Hill’s (2009) Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life. As an ethnographic study of a “Hip-Hop Lit” course that he designed in Philadelphia, Hill connected theory, research, and practice while linking Hip Hop to classroom pedagogy. The class was designed as a literature course in which students engaged in critical analysis of rap lyrics using literary criticism. However, the class ultimately became a storytelling community that highlighted the “complex negotiations of student identity” (p. 12). Hill described it as a healing space in which teachers and students functioned as “wounded healers,” a concept attributed to Carl Jung (2014) but which also reminds of Shawn Ginwright’s (2010) research about activism, Black youth, and radical healing.

Scholars such as Patrick Camangian (2008), Maisha Winn (see Fisher, 2005, 2007), and Korina Jocson (2008) have explored spoken word and the poetry slam as extensions of Hip Hop culture. The slam is defined by participatory literacy practices, similar to those that emerge in community spaces like barber shops, churches, cyphers, and grassroots arts organizations. These are spaces where Black and Latinx youth engage in a wide range of third-space (Gutiérrez, 2008) literacy practices. The compositions included in the Praisesongs section of this webtext feature the words of youth poets who wrote and performed in an extracurricular school-based participatory literacy community.

Composing as Praxis: The Beat, The Breath, and The Body

With “Long as I Live,” I wanted to create an audio literature review as a sonic collage that honored the scholars and ideas shaping the field of Hip Hop pedagogy. As I engaged in digital crate digging, sourcing samples from YouTube panel discussions and interviews, I began to hear the sounds of boom-bap, a style popularized during the golden era of 1990s Hip Hop. Boom-bap is characterized by swung rhythms, dusty breaks, and organic drum kits. The beat structure and rhythm of this track nod to the production style of J Dilla, whose album Donuts (2006) influenced my own compositional methods. Dilla’s off-the-grid sensibilities shaped how I heard time, memory, and improvisation not just as musical ideas but as embodied research practices that I could apply to my own compositions.

The breath materializes through the vocal hook, which is derived from a Black spiritual, one of the ancestral forms of Hip Hop. That sample is chopped and pitched into ambiguity, its gender unrecognizable, signaling the production techniques of artists like Kanye West and Burial. The chorus becomes a haunting refrain / a signal / a trace of something no longer living / a ghost in the machine. Another unique layer of this composition is that some of the interview clips were recorded in 2014 during a research trip I made with my high school students to New York City. We interviewed scholars like Chris Emdin, Pedro Noguera, and David Kirkland, asking them how Hip Hop intersected with teaching, learning, and social justice. We published those interviews on YouTube, and now, years later, sampled them back into this project for my dissertation study. This track functions as a recursive archive / a remix of our own inquiry / where beat, breath, and body converge / in an act of time travel / within a soundscape of student, teacher, and researcher voices folded together.

Toward a New English Education

As this track ends and another begins, we arrive at what David Kirkland (2008) called the frontier of the New English Education. This is not merely a shift in pedagogy or curriculum. It is a rupture in the fabric of singular, Eurocentric academic norms—traditions that flatten language, limit embodied expression, and truncate the radical possibilities of multimodal literacy research. The New English Education insists on multiple literacies, translanguaging practices, and critical media pedagogies. It calls for culturally sustaining practices that center the lived experiences of Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth. It challenges us to rethink what counts as knowledge and to ask: who gets to say what counts as knowledge? The New English Education calls us to listen differently. This track does not end with a final refrain. It loops, repeats, and breaks open into possibility, reverberating across classrooms that are not still with silence but filled with the dynamic sounds of joy.