Original song I wrote for my father whom I met as an adult 4 years before he passed. He'd lived 15 mins from where I grew up all my life and I never knew him. Since I am very close to my father's people in Indianapolis. He was one of 13 brothers and sisters. When we met he'd not seen his surviving siblings for over 20 years. #perspective

Trk 04 Black Can Be Me written by Kyra Gaunt and Tomás Doncker

Editors Travis Gosa and Erik Nielson join contributor Kyra Gaunt to discuss the newly released book The Hip Hop & Obama Reader (OUP, 2015). Topics include the intersection of a digital democracy and political hip-hop,  the criminalization of black/brown rappers in the age of Obama, the 2015 amicus brief of rap scholars to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Petitioner Taylor Bell, where prosecutors are admitting rap lyrics as "autobiographical" evidence in prosecutions and sentencing, and we discuss the racial oppression towards POTUS and FLOTUS and particularly Michelle Obama's use of hip-hop as resistance.

Why Twerking in a Graveyard and Michelle Obama's Use of Hip-hop is Political Resistance

This semester I am teaching a hip-hop course. It's  Gen Ed course focusing on learning by doing. The first class we had a freestyle cypher. I intend to use kinetic orality, sound studies, and performance studies to immerse ourselves in knowing hip-hop in new ways. From the film Wild Style to learning about producers the ultimate aim is to use the structure of power "gender performance and stratification" to rethink how we relate to hip-hop and to at the same time learn the musical aesthetics and practice of hip-hop Djing and emceeing. Maybe some b-boy moves but mostly though girls' embodied play. Handclapping, foot-stompin, thigh slapping and more.

Check me out in TED Series Small thing, BIg idea on the jump rope to learn about the connections between girls' games and hip-hop. https://www.facebook.com/SmallThingBigIdea/videos/1333488640130494/?hc_ref=ARSukWZt2QbBrkCrtKGbKHD-O9xieyvJvcmtN5QjYZF722hwkaGKmvTvLbi1w7xxZsw&fref=gs&dti=1714923798729292&hc_location=group

AMUS 226/AWSS 299 - Day 2 Introducing the 5th Element

What do I mean by the "B-word"? Is is "b*tch"? Is it the impact on girls and women in black musical experience? Or is it bigger? Like "Bias" towards or against one sex or another, one group or another? Like patriarchy, racism, or heteronormativity? It's all of the above. It's about gender performance from the stage to the boardroom to the bedroom particularly in black musical life and experience AND BEYOND.

The title of my podcast is a riff on the hip-hop recording "The Unlocking" by spoken-word artist Ursula Rucker. Featured as the 16th and final track on The Roots first commercial CD "Do You Want More??!??!" in 1995. In my hip-hop class in the fall of 1996, I dubbed Ursula's The Unlocking “the ultimate sexual gangsta rap”. The paradox of a 1995 track being labeled the ultimate sexual gangsta rap was that it was written and voiced by woman. A woman whose words eerily narrated having a “train” or a gang rape run on her body. A gang rape set up by her ex-boyfriend. In her ideological war of words, The Roots' production squad The Grand Negaz, craft sounds that reflected a gang of men shrieking as they faced the crosshairs of her persona's fully loaded glock. They demanded entrance into her mouth, between her thighs, and demanded her silence. So it was only fitting she demand respect from such men with a poem, asking “What’s my name?” as we, the audience, heard her gun cock ending the track and the album...with one exception I will be writing about soon. 

I wrote a transcription of The Unlocking which has found its way to the Internet from 1996. It's the one of Genius.com with the parenthetical mentions of the gun cocking and the phone ringing in the studio.   

If as on/in Wikipedia, "[white male] gatekeepers control access to benefits that they do not own" in crowdsourced information technology (Corra and Willer 2002), this podcast attempts to unlock the ideologies that "gatekeep" the effects of race, gender, patriarchy, and white superiority socialization; those structures of power that try to keep girls and women of color “in their place” and “out of site/sight” in online spaces and offline, too. This podcast is about my evolution, my classroom, my “ministry” against misogynoir, my new jack or mary jane pedagogy. I amplify voices, creativity, compassion, and curiosity. I am Unlocking the B-word through song, scholarship, and social media! 

About me: As a social media scholar, singer-songwriter, and an ethnomusicologist, I study the unintended consequences of music, technology, and social networking sites from YouTube to Wikipedia with particular interest in marginalized girls. In this podcast, I use strong objectivity, a feminist standpoint that begins with black, female perspectives or the perspectives of the most vulnerable first to unlock the intersections of racial and gender oppression online and off.

Unlocking the B-Word

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