Marcyliena Morgan: How has Harvard Cultivated Hiphop?

What does hiphop culture—rap music, break dancing, and graffiti—have to do with Harvard? In this episode, Monrad professor of social sciences Marcyliena Morgan explains that hiphop began with the children of people who marched in the civil-rights movement: teenagers taking apart their parents’ jazz recordings and expressing their distress with a world that hadn’t changed for them, despite their parents’ efforts. They made a new urban poetry of social dislocation, set to music. Now the movement is pushing change in the broader culture, and a Harvard archive seeks to document its beginnings and significance.

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Ask a Harvard Professor is hosted by Jonathan Shaw and produced by Lydia Carmichael Rosenberg. Our theme music was composed by Louis Weeks.