Kabir schools other MCs, little kids
By CHRIS FARAONE | August 26, 2008
FOR THE SHORTIES: Kabir has carved a niche that few of his rap peers would be equipped to join him in. |
In eighth grade, I decided that school and hip-hop should exist separately. It was spring semester, and my sexy music teacher tapped me to perform “a rap” at an Earth Day assembly. Like a pathetic horny adolescent, I obliged, not only to rap rhymes that were likely written by a 62-year-old EPA bureaucrat named Walter, but also to be dressed in her vision of what hip-hop looked like — a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses — and to strike a b-boy pose as a finale. (Or, as she put it: “Do that thing like you’re hugging yourself.”) As I walked off stage, I detoured embarrassed for ashamed and suicidal.
Real classy: Math rap not especially dirty
On the low, we were so impressed by the integrity of some Rhythm Rhyme Results tracks that we felt like losers for bumping them. Really — how many sexual partners can you entice rolling down the street blaring lines like “When you’re adding two numbers and the signs are both the same/You add the absolute values and the sign doesn’t change”? To make ourselves feel cool about enjoying educational hip-hop, we picked our favorite classroom cuts with potential sexual or drug-dealing innuendos. TRACK | “(Pump Up the) Volume”
CHOICE LYRIC | “Now everybody feeling this/Because you know it’s not a myth/That we’re leaving flat shapes behind/Now we got cubes and cones and cylinders on the mind full-time” TRACK | “Circumference (It Just Makes Sense)”
CHOICE LYRIC | “You know that every circle whether it’s big or it’s little/Has one single point that’s right in the middle” TRACK | “Inversion”
CHOICE LYRIC | “If you have an integer put a one below/To find the multiplicative inverse you know bring the bottom number up and put the top one below” TRACK | “Meters, Liters, and Grams”
CHOICE LYRIC | The whole song |
Not till my move to Boston 12 years later did I re-evaluate hip-hop’s classroom value. I’m not referring to academics who negotiate the socio-political significance of G-Unit murder anthems — I still deplore that. No, I mean the incorporation of beats, rhymes, and attitude into grade-school curricula. Educators around here teach a remarkable number of rap-inspired programs, from Boston Youth Hip-Hop Shop after-school sessions to the 4Peace Summer Arts Workshop at the Grover Cleveland Community Center in Dorchester. Even more impressive is the number of Boston rappers who daylight as educators: Jake the Snake as a classroom aide in Dorchester; Lyrical, er, Dr. Pete Plourde as a professor at Lasell College; Kabir Sen, who’s running neck-and-neck with that dude from Summer School for Coolest Teacher Ever honors.In the field of Boston’s hip-hop educators, Kabir is the anomaly whose roles as teacher and musician are not mutually exclusive; he’s the same dude at his desk that he is on stage (minus the Hefeweizen). The son of Nobel laureate and Harvard economics professor Amartya Sen, Kabir met the mic during Boston’s underground renaissance; those who frequented Western Front battles and sweaty Middle East shows circa 2002 will recall his riding the independent wave beyond the Bean alongside cats like Mr. Lif and Esoteric. But though he still drops sporadic enlightened albums (three so far, with another on the way), Kabir has carved a niche that few of his rap peers would be equipped to join him in. (Some might even be legally prohibited.)
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