Official Release of Hip-Hop Professor's Acclaimed Album Celebrated with Rotunda Listening Party

A.D. Carson arrived at the University of Virginia in 2017 as a freshly minted Ph.D., accepting the pioneering challenge of an appointment as an assistant professor in a blossoming field of academic study.

A young scholar and an accomplished rapper, Carson is helping to establish a new Venn diagram of interdisciplinary research where hip-hop and academia overlap. Carson publishes works that center hip-hop as methodology, starting with “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions,” the rap album he wrote, performed and produced for his dissertation for his Clemson University Ph.D. in rhetorics, communication and information design.

The same dissertation album that led to his hiring by UVA as the Department of Music’s first assistant professor of hip-hop and the Global South was recently mastered, peer-reviewed and released by University of Michigan Press. Carson and the University of Virginia hosted a free listening event in the Dome Room of the Rotunda on Feb. 15 commemorating the release of “Owning My Masters (Mastered)" 

The newly mastered album features 34 tracks, an E-book with lyrics, new prose and video introductions and 13 original videos, collages and a website featuring an interactive chronological timeline annotated with media, photos and bibliographic resources.

“As an artist, I didn’t write that album to learn how to rap, and the album wasn’t evaluated as a dissertation based on my ability to rap. There are multiple contexts that it’s being received in,” said Carson, now in his second year as a tenured faculty member in UVA’s Department of Music. “I’m operating in this space where you’re speaking to multiple audiences across multiple purposes, where you’re having to demonstrate a kind of appeal as opposed to expertise to those multiple audiences.”

Carson likens the mastered album to the transformation of a Ph.D. graduate’s dissertation into their first book project, with the annotated materials accompanying the enhanced audio and expanded work providing contemporary context for a musical project that explores issues like police brutality, the histories of the United States and how they affect the present, and enslavement and its afterlives. At the same time, Carson views his work as offering a bridge to different, distinct audiences.

“My work has always been about creating public historical documents or public textual documents by way of music,” Carson said. “I'm working deliberately for the people who are rap nerds outside of academia and the people who are rhetoric nerds who are in academia and all of the people who overlap in between.”

Opportunities to innovate and lead

The study of hip-hop at the University of Virginia pre-dates Carson, as he is quick to point out. Kyra Gaunt was a professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Music from 1996 to 2002 and taught hip-hop focused courses. Gaunt published a foundational book on the subject in 2006, titled “The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip Hop.” Carson’s appointment is believed to be the first university tenure-track position strictly dedicated for a “professor of hip-hop” at an American university.

But an increasing number of schools are following UVA’s lead in embracing rap music as an academically rigorous field of study, supporting their embraces of the culture with full-time, tenure-track positions and institutional support.

Carson’s new academic colleagues at other universities include popular artists such as Lupe Fiasco, who was introduced by Johns Hopkins University in January as a visiting professor in the Baltimore school’s four-year hip-hop program debuting this year.

But according to Carson, plenty of opportunities remain for UVA to continue to innovate and lead the way.

“What has been happening at the University of Virginia will continue to be a prototype and an aspiration for places like Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute, Harvard, Yale and Ohio State. Publishing mixtapes and granting tenure for rap albums is only part of that story,” said Carson, whose forthcoming book, Being Dope: Hip-Hop & Theory through Mixtape Memoir, is scheduled for publication later this year by Oxford University Press.

Carson’s contacts and connections in academia and the music community have also opened doors for Department of Music students. Rah Hite, a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Music’s Composition and Computer Technologies Program, said Carson frequently invites graduate students to accompany him to participate in academic panel discussions.

At the Rotunda's album release event, for example, Hite participated in a roundtable discussion along with some of Carson’s album collaborators  and academic colleagues.

“[Carson] has done a lot of the work in terms of community outreach to other hip-hop, and other black music professionals in music academia. So, when you have an idea and you're ready to make a connection, he knows immediately who you can reach out to,” said Hite, an accomplished DJ and jazz musician. “I’ve already had collaborations outside of the University because of him.”

Carson said the historical significance of the Rotunda played a role in his decision to host the listening party in the Dome Room.

"Because of what we know about Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about academia, race and the place of Black people and Black art, the Dome Room is the most appropriate place for the listening event," Carson said before the event. “'Owning My Masters' attempts to disrupt the kinds of ideas he espoused that are still prominent in the country and on campuses worldwide, so listening in this room with my collaborators and the communities here is symbolic, but it’s also a way to subvert what folks think is 'academic.'

"I wonder how many rap album listening parties have ever happened there.”