"He Old and Only Got 2,000 Views": New Tensions Around Youth and Community Artist Collaborations

• In Event: Learning From Contact Zones in Public Education: Struggles and Possibilities of Critical Participatory Action Research

Abstract

Objectives. This paper generates from two years of work facilitating an urban arts space where African American and Latinx youth learn (mostly) hip-hop arts such a beat making and writing raps alongside community artists in a mid-size postindustrial city. Specifically, this paper focuses on a concentrated month-long artist-in-residence series within this larger frame. In this series, youth conducted research on local artists, spent time in a skill share learning from them, and then facilitated a concert with the artist for other youth in the community. With this background, the paper sidesteps some of the straightforward learning that happens in these settings and instead focuses on what seems to get in the way of artistic/community collaboration among youth and adult artists. The paper engages with tensions around different and evolving aesthetic priorities of hip-hop cultures in the 21st century and related hip-hop based community learning.

Theoretical Framework. This paper draws broadly from hip-hop based education scholarship (Author, 2013; Author, 2009) and more specifically from work that theorizes the textual relationship among youth and hip-hop lived texts (Dimitriadis, 2001; Love, 2014). Following this work, the paper theorizes hip-hop (artists, songs, data, narratives) as lived texts that are subject to unpredictable yet meaningful transactions from youth and other readers.

Modes of Inquiry. Qualitative data generation techniques for this inquiry included participant-observation, focus group interviews, semi-structured interviews, and conversational interviews with youth and community artists. The study also produced and analyzed youth-generated texts (e.g., songs, raps, recordings) alongside the above data sources.

Findings. The findings of this paper wrestle with two different kinds of tensions that emerged during youth and community artist collaborations. The first of these centers on data, or what kind of information/metrics youth render as meaningful as they research community artists and make subsequent judgments about them and their arts. These metrics included numbers of youtube likes, views, comments, and others germane to the present moment of digital music access. The paper attends to the ways that these metrics and related judgments factor into collaboration in the community space. Second, the paper focuses on different aesthetic priorities and commitments across hip-hop generational cultures (e.g., affinities for trap beats vs. boom-bap beats) and how these may undermine collaboration among youth and community artists.

Significance. This paper answers the call for more critical attention toward the obstacles, barriers, and tensions around hip-hop education and community work (Author, 2013; Paris & Alim, 2014).

Author

• Emery Marc Petchauer, Michigan State University