Drake weston road flows rapgenius
Drake weston road flows rapgenius trial#
After much trial and error with developing their various literacies and confidences, I decided to give them the opening chapter of ‘Sleepovers’, an ‘easy-read’ by J Wilson. Last year, I taught a year 7 ‘nurture’ group, who included a broad range of special educational needs. So, with all that eulogising in mind, you may want to know how I have attempted to implement sample culture into my teaching practice. Something relevant to their own lives and resonant with their own experiences. I want my students to feel part of a history of language and literature and feel empowered enough to take what has come and shape it into something new. In my case, I invite students into a literary discourse. To be an educator is to invite students into a scholastic or cultural heritage. Well, simply put, the relationship between students and education should, I think, be akin to the relationship between hiphop songs and the samples they consist of. Rich? Symbiotic? Electrifying? Osmosis? Organic? All of the above? And furthermore, what has this got to do with education? Before your head implodes, my question at this point is: How would you describe this relationship? Whilst other artists were taking De La Soul’s original source material and continuing to make fresh new newness out of it. Going forward, ‘The Magic Number’ has in turn been sampled by various other artists, taking the old (made out of the even older) and turning it into the new.
Arguably, it celebrates the fact by continuing to refer to its roots, with respect. All music (all culture in fact) finds itself as part of a heritage, but hiphop, rather than ignoring or denying this, embraces it actively. ‘The Magic number’ is clearly part of a musical heritage that pre-dates and succeeds itself, giving the culture a timelessness and depth. Not so interesting in itself, but what is worth noting is that the same record is sampled in a string of other hiphop songs spanning the mid-80s all the way to 2012, including Eric B and Rakim, EPMD, Wu-Tang, Kanye West, and, golden child of the moment himself, Mr Kendrick Lamar. A drum break from the song makes up one of the main loops in the De La Soul record. Now, one of the central samples in ‘The Magic Number’ is a 1967 funk record entitled ‘Different Strokes’ by Syl Johnson. This, in essence, is what hiphop is: the refurbishment of the old into something new alluding to various, existing cultural heritages whilst simultaneously creating a fresh new culture. Now, when you listen to the song, you might not fully and explicitly appreciate each distinct sample, but the song has an undeniable richness that comes from its fusion of borrowed sounds. This one song contains six distinct samples, ranging a selection of records, of various genres, spanning four decades. Let’s focus on the hit single, ‘The Magic Number’, for a second. Why? because that is the total number of samples used in the production of the album. The answer, is not, as you may expect, 3, but, in fact 67.
Which I presented alongside an original 12″ vinyl pressing of the 1989 classic De La Soul debut, ‘Three Feet High and Rising’. Below is a rundown of the presentation, broken down, slide by slide, including examples of actual practice in the classroom. As part of the workshop, I presented on a hugely important element of hiphop culture that, I believe, has much to offer to educational practice and pedagogic theory: (drumroll please…)
On Saturday 5th October 2013, I formed part of a collective of educators leading a workshop on Hiphop in Education, at this year’s NUT London Conference.