In Charlotte, Hip-Hop Scholarship Isn't Just For The Ivory Tower

Hip-hop music and the academy may seem like strange bedfellows, but universities around the United States have been embracing aspects of the form for decades now. From the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard, to UCLA’s Hip Hop Initiative, to Cornell’s Hip Hop Collective, what was once a source of derision or dismissal (or simply total ignorance) for most academic elites has grown to become a subject of serious, widely respected scholarship.

While that evolution undeniably signals progress, it still matters how hip-hop shows up when it’s invited into these historically unfamiliar spaces. It’s in that spirit that Ashley Tate, Assistant Professor of Dance at UNC Charlotte, has put together “To the Beat Y’all”: A Hip-Hop Symposium — an attempt to merge the sometimes abstract studies of the academy with the work being done on the ground by artists in cities like Charlotte. “I don't see it as one of those things where hip-hop needs the academy necessarily,” she says. “I feel like the academy can learn a lot from hip-hop and what it does for people.”

The three-day conference (October 17^th-19^th) will feature nationally recognized voices like podcaster Manny Faces and cultural diplomat Aysha Upchurch, in addition to performances from local artists, panels featuring hip-hop activists in the Queen City, and exhibitions with area visual artists and photographers like Makayla Binter, Tori Silinski, and Surf Mitchell. 

A little over a week before the event, I sat down with Ashley to talk about her work as a hip-hop dance professor, her experiences with hip-hop in the academy, and how she thinks “To The Beat Y’all” can help build stronger artist coalitions in Charlotte going forward.

Disclaimer: The author will serve as a panel moderator at “To The Beat Y’all.” This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 

Hip-hop academics is a source of interest for a lot of people. I think for some, it's still a fairly novel concept — not only that hip-hop can be in the academy, but that there are people who have careers to teach hip-hop in a space like a university. How did you begin to develop a research interest in hip-hop? And how did you know that the academy was a place that you wanted to pursue it?

That process was pretty organic and natural for me. Hip-hop culture is something that was always very much a part of my family. I had been teaching hip-hop since I was, like, 16 or 17 years old, and my work in academia began as an adjunct instructor back home in St. Louis. But primarily at that time I was teaching choreography. It wasn't until [I had] my dance company in St. Louis that I started working in the social change and social activism space, kind of blending these worlds. At the time, it was very separate. 

I think it's one of those things where I knew that hip-hop was really the space where I felt most at home, where folks felt most natural. It was activating all this self-affirmation and self-agency in me. I wanted to explore what that means: what is happening in hip-hop dance, what is going on in the cypher, what is happening in the community, in the classroom, outside the classroom, that is changing people? What is it doing for them, and how does it resonate in other areas of their life?

Now I'm super focused on hip-hop pedagogy and how it connects to civic engagement and community engagement. I don't see it as one of those things where hip-hop needs the academy necessarily. I feel like the academy can learn a lot from hip-hop and what it does for people. 

That brings up a challenge that you probably encounter as a hip-hop dance professor doing this kind of work. I think when people think of hip-hop dance, often they have this anachronistic picture of, you know, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo or they have this stereotype of — not to start shit — but like the Raygun style of overemphasized b-boying and b-girling. As a dance scholar working in this field, what do people not understand about hip-hop dance in its contemporary context?

I think it's one of those things where people look at it and they're like, “Oh, it's, it's fun.” I'm always weird about that word, because I'm not sure [about] the intention behind it. I think a lot of people don't understand that there is technique and there is a structure. It's just rooted in style and aesthetics more than it is in shape and line in hip-hop dance.

When people are talking about feeling free in their bodies, learning what improvisation and storytelling does for you, call and response, and groundedness… I'm just thinking of all the African diasporic aesthetics that are at play and what they actually promote when you're connecting it to embodied transformation as a person, as a human. I want people to be educated on how embodied memory works, how embodied transformation works, how what's happening when we're in a circle isn't by chance. This is all very psychological and sociological. I'm not saying that people are going to automatically be hip-hop dancers because they understand these things. Fostering an appreciation and curiosity and knowledge are those things that help us understand each other.

I think as hip-hop academics we have to deal with that perception of our work. For me, it's the word “cool.” Like, you know, “that's really cool!” I always want to know, “What do you really mean by that?” I think hip-hop academics have a fraught relationship to “coolness,” embracing the idea on one hand and combating that perception that this work isn't serious on the other. How have you had to navigate the space of the academy, trying to show that the relevancy of the work doesn't outweigh the seriousness of it, and the seriousness also doesn't outweigh the relevancy? 

I think it starts with language, right? I want people to have fun, yes, but I think it's also about flipping it. It's also about joy. Fun is, to me, a very temporary word, and I think joy has depth, so I'm always encouraging them to watch, to really survey their language and what they're really trying to say. I'm really blessed at UNC Charlotte that I don’t have, or at least I haven't experienced, pushback on anything I'm doing. Everybody seems to be interested in my work or at least interested in where it's going. 

I think it's because there have been people on campus — not necessarily in dance, but in other areas — who have taught hip-hop courses or at least planted seeds here and there. Like Mark [Sanders] in Philosophy. I think I'm kind of part of that lineage now, which is great. There’s also Professor Tamara Williams, who's in my department, who has grown the African diasporic strand of study in the Dance department. The infrastructure was there for me to come in and now grow the hip-hop side of things. I think I’m lucky. 

That’s a powerful thing. I think that those ethics of trying to engage research from an embodied perspective and foregrounding practice in the academic work that you do, these things really show up in the lineup of the symposium. The way that it's constructed is not like a traditional research conference, and it's distinct from other hip-hop conferences. Can you talk about the intentionality that you put into the symposium layout? 

I wanted to create a brave space for people to move, to feel, and to understand what drives me to love hip-hop. So the movement piece is Friday night, and I don't want people to feel like they have to claim to be a dancer (even though I think everybody is a dancer). I want people to feel comfortable moving first and get in their bodies in order to be ready to receive all this other amazing knowledge. Saturday is a lot more research heavy, but I'm still having music interlaced throughout the day. This is an amalgamation of these different hip-hop conferences I've been to and have been really inspired by, as well as things that worked for me as an attendee. Sunday, because usually that's people's rest day, has the discussions and panels. I chose to put panels on that day to feel a lot more interactive and conversation-based. 

I wanted music and dance to always be present throughout the whole weekend. I didn't want it to feel separate. So that's why we're having a show Saturday night, because I wanted everything at play. It’s not just dance. It's not just music. We have poetry, and we have a DJ too. I wanted all of these elements to always be at play and working in tandem together to enhance the other. 

One of the reasons why I've been very eager to help out with the symposium is your commitment to making sure that it’s very responsive to the way that hip-hop is being practiced in our city. Our institutions struggle, especially in Charlotte more so than the Triangle, to be active in the city. So I'm curious. Why is that an important thing to you, and how have you tried to make sure that this conference is responsive to artists who are actually practicing on the ground here? 

When I first moved here, I was invited by AJ Glasco, who was, at the time, the adjunct hip-hop instructor at UNC Charlotte. He was organizing a hip-hop cypher for the Charlotte International Arts Festival. I remember being like, “Is this a whole hip-hop show that gets to have space and be part of a city festival?” I had never really experienced that, ever. I was really intrigued. And so that is kind of what kicked it off for me, realizing that there were people already doing such amazing work. 

To be honest, there was, number one, a selfish reason. I just wanted to be in the same space with all these people. Because I am a professor and in the trenches of doing all this work at the school, I'm not able to get out and be around all these people all the time. It’s our responsibility as a university to connect as much as we can with the community that's down the street. I just feel like I'm at a place where I have this platform as a professor, and I need to use it responsibly. And so why not use this faculty research grant that I got to connect to the community that's right here?

Of course, there's way more people that are doing the work than the people that are at part of the symposium as panelists. But that opens us up to do this hopefully every two years. It'll have a different focus each time, so that we can keep on exposing our communities to each other, because we're all doing the same work. I know we all love hip-hop, and it looks different for all of us. At the root of it, it's about how it makes us feel as part of a community. This symposium’s overall goal is to promote that in real time.

The “To the Beat Y’all!” Hip-Hop Symposium will be running from Friday, October 17^th through Sunday, October 19^th. Check out their Instagram page for more information and get tickets here. 

Tyler Bunzey is an educator and music journalist who's covered queer pop, R&B, and more for places like CLTure and QC Nerve. He runs the Cultural Studies major program for Johnson C. Smith University. He can be found on Twitter/X at @t_bunzey.