Before he became an assistant professor at Clemson, Kumanyika was in the Hip-Hop group “The Spooks,” which had several gold and platinum records in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The resulting music has a production value good enough to rival anything on the charts today.Īt Clemson, Carson discovered that one of his professors, Chenjerai Kumanyika, just happened to be a former Hip-Hop musician with a Ph.D. Wallace and Marcus Fitzgerald, to help produce it. He enlisted two childhood friends from Illinois, Blake E. 30, 2017.Ĭarson recorded the album in a small studio he put together in his apartment near campus, using Adobe recording software made available to all Clemson students. Carson talks about the history of rap music in his home studio near campus, Jan. “Both my senior and master’s theses were on music that I’d been making, so at this point I figure, you don’t get to the one-yard line – to use a metaphor that Clemson will understand – and then put the ball down.”Ĭlemson University doctoral candidate A.D. “I had people ask, ‘Are you doing this just to be provocative? Is this a gimmick?’ My response is ‘absolutely not.’ This is my way of being in the world,” said Carson, who speaks with effortless eloquence and cuts a cool and dignified figure in a ball cap, T-shirt and dark grey sweater with a “Reading is Sexy” badge pinned to it. Using a music album for a dissertation, as opposed to the usual written document, has never been done at Clemson before, but Carson says it was the only way he could do it. 24 in the Watt Family Innovation Center auditorium. The songs have garnered tens of thousands of views on YouTube, more than 50,000 streams and downloads on SoundCloud, and hundreds of thousands of hits on Facebook -– all before Carson defends them as a whole to his doctoral committee Feb. The album, “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes and Revolutions” uses Hip-Hop to explore such ideas as identity, justice, economics, citizenship and language. Instead, he produced a 34-song rap album that already has the internet buzzing. So, when it came to writing a dissertation, he couldn’t simply write a traditional one. Carson is many things – poet, activist, and rap artist to name a few –- but “typical Ph.D.
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