by Jessica Del Curto
Daily Lobo
Finnie Coleman is the type of professor whose booming voice echoes throughout Mitchell Hall.
About 20 students in his Intro to Hip-Hop Culture class learned how loud his voice can be after not doing well on a quiz about slavery and abolition on Tuesday.
Coleman, who is also the director of African American Studies, was angry with his class because to understand hip-hop, students must first understand the foundations of slavery, and the way mainstream America views its history, he said.
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Rocky Gottwald, a senior whose minor is African American Studies, said it was appropriate for Coleman to call the students out when they did poorly on the quiz.
"You don't really get challenged like that by professors so often or so directly and passionately," he said. "He's trying to build a program around the subject, hip-hop and its universal applications to society right now."
The class starts with slavery in the 1800s and works its way up through the Harlem renaissance, the black power movement of the late '60s, present day and future.
The class will examine how hip-hop was born out of these time periods, Coleman said.
"We use hip-hop to enter into conversation about race, about gender, about class," he said.
Coleman said the biggest misconception of the class is it is an easy grade, or that it will be based around the lyrics of rappers at the top of the charts.
"A lot of people drop the course after a week or so because they thought they'd be sitting around talking about Juvenile or Lil' Bow Wow," he said. "And that's not what we're doing."
He said even though they will look at all types of rap artists, the focus of the English 315 class is to teach students the origins of the culture.
"I wasn't expecting to start off in slavery, but it's a pretty reasonable place to start to understand the current African-American situation," Gottwald said.
Coleman, who has a military background, said he finds it hard to be a fan of mainstream rap because it has strayed so far from its original conception.
"I'm not a fan in the sense of fan worship," he said. "I have an understanding that the culture is more than hip-hop music. I'm an ardent supporter of hip-hop."
He said the music seen and heard on radio and TV only contributes to America's appetite for violence and sex in the media.
"Pop culture, gangsta rap, booty rap, that satisfies the need for pop-hop," he said.
But if people go to the underground or study the history of the culture, he said, they will find positive messages.
The hip-hop scholar is a professor who uses modern-day slang to illustrate the difference between obscure phrases like syntactic and paradigmatic.
When he explains a difficult concept, he'll pause, turn to the class and ask, "You trackin' with me?"
Coleman, who came to UNM this year, first taught a hip-hop course at Texas A&M University in 2000. Although it wasn't the first college course of its kind, he said it was the first to gain as much media attention as it did, and he said this is partly to do with the conservative school the material was being taught at.
At the time, it was common to have two or three reporters in the classroom.
Although the majority were supportive of his class, he said there were a few angry letters from parents who said they would never give another dime to Texas A&M.
"People who said, 'Our students need to be learning Milton, Poe and Hawthorne. They don't have time to be learning about this rap music,'" Coleman said.
Coleman is writing a book on hip-hop called Invisible Rhythms. The research for the book leads to his lectures. He teaches students about the four elements of hip-hop: graffiti art, turntablism, breakdancing and MCing.
He also explores a fifth element, hip-hop knowledge, which was started by DJ Afrika Bambaataa and his followers, the Zulu Nation, in the '70s and '80s.
He said so many young kids follow hip-hop trends, such as baggy clothes, but they can't say where the trends originate. They don't know that the style came from the train yards in Brooklyn, or the prisons in south central Los Angles, he said.
He said the point of the book and the class is to use the past and present to determine if hip-hop will rebound in the future.
"In mainstream America, you see very few vestiges of true hip-hop culture. You see pop-hop. You see what's left over from the war," he said. "And that's what I'm trying to get them to see - that this is a different kind of fight now."
