Word up(lift)
Harvard professor Cornel West has captivated the academic world.
Now he's using rap to widen his "classroom."
By Harry Allen and Craigh Barboza
WHEN Cornel West arrived at Harvard's Lowell Lecture Hall in September for the first meeting of Introduction to Afro-American Studies, the room was, as one freshman described it, "a mob scene." Hundreds of students eager to take notes were sitting in the aisles, standing in the balcony and camped out on the floor. Normally, when a class is overcrowded, the university holds a lottery, then randomly drops students. In this rare case, the class was moved to a new location, just across from Harvard Yard, in the lower church of St. Paul Parish (the only nearby space available to accommodate 587
students). As it turns out, St. Paul's is an apt setting for a class with West, 48, one of only 18 "university professors" at Harvard; it's a distinction that allows him to teach in any school at the nation's most prestigious institution. Those fortunate enough to take his course say West - who earlier this year became one of the few academics ever to launch a musical career Ñ has an uncanny ability to make the subject matter come alive. He doesn't merely review text; he personalizes it with a preacher's dramatic flair, something West acquired from spending years in a Baptist church.
"His presence is somewhat awe-inspiring," says freshman Matt Salvatierra. "Sometimes I feel like we are in a gospel church and we should all stand up and shout, 'Amen!' "
West, who has been married three times, has never
been one to do things by the book. He's worked hard through the years to
make his presence felt across a variety of fields, interests and
societies. He is a widely read author of 15 titles - including
The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought and Race Matters, his
1993 best seller - and a serious thinker, deeply committed to the
issues of the day. In some respects, it's been said, he recalls
philosophers Sidney Hook, John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr, except that
West appears frequently on C-SPAN and is often descended upon like some
kind of cool-genius cult figure at his more than 100 annual lectures. "I'm
a teacher," West says of his multidimensionality, "meaning I try to
communicate with insight and passion what I have to offer, however
fallible."
At first, with his gap-toothed smile, midrange Afro and black-rimmed glasses, West strikes one as a groomed mad scientist. He is nearly 6 feet tall and usually dresses in perfectly tailored three-piece suits. He smokes cigarillos and drinks snifters of Courvoisier. His latest work, which he is promoting in Manhattan, is sure to introduce him to an even younger audience.
In September, West decided to take his reputation even farther beyond the confines of his profession and released a new CD, Sketches of My Culture. The album is a potent mixture of soul, politics and rapid-fire rap-inspired rhetoric about the African-American struggle. "One of the aims of the CD is to make it hip to be politically engaged," West recently said during a lecture tour on which he is playing selected tracks from Sketches.
The one-of-a-kind professor is naturally a fan of the
black musical tradition. This past summer, he joined rap moguls Russell
Simmons and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs at the Hip-Hop Summit, where he spoke as
a panelist. But he's not naive. West doesn't expect his album to do Eminem
numbers. There are no craftily sampled party tracks to get it crunk on
BET's 106 & Park, nor any attempts to coin DMX-style street anthems.
In fact, it contains very little evidence that West listens to hip-hop.
Instead, the CD -with cuts such as Stolen King , which traverses the vicious legacy of white supremacy - is closer to spoken-word. It is neither old school nor new school, but a completely new class of music: Ivy.
"We did the album to put something on the plate," says executive producer and older brother Clifton West. "We wanted to give people some red beans and rice, instead of cotton candy, as a means of nourishment and healing."
Still, some are pulling muscles in an effort to understand why a trained philosopher would step out of his privileged Ivy League surroundings to record a style of music so similar to one that many associate with do-rags, housing projects and GEDs.
West isn't exactly a rap
scholar. He was born in Tulsa and raised in Sacramento during the glory
days of Motown and the Black Panther Party. His father was an Air Force
administrator; his mother, a schoolteacher. After graduating magna cum
laude from Harvard (in only three years), he earned master's and doctoral
degrees from Princeton. He progressed rapidly from teaching at Union
Theological Seminary to guiding one of the nation's pre-eminent
African-American studies departments, from 1988 to 1994, at Princeton.
Today, he is "among the most influential, if not the most influential,
academic intellectual in America," says Mark David Wood, author of Cornel
West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism.
West's body of work, Wood says, "speaks to just about everything you can imagine, from important historical figures to existentialist questions to very technical questions of economics and taxes. The list is virtually without
end." Part of what West enjoyed about recording Sketches was the chance to connect with people in ways not possible in front of a blackboard: "When you go in the studio, you've got to be succinct. And lay bare your soul so people can feel you Ñ not just hear you. And that's a challenge. If you can get people to feel a certain way, then it has a Socratic effect. It unsettles them, so they think differently. And that's what we're after."
Harry Allen last wrote
about educator Ruth Simmons for USA WEEKEND. Craigh Barboza is a senior
editor at the magazine.
Required listening
: One goal of the rap-inspired CD West recorded is "to make it hip
to be politically engaged."
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