What life lessons can you learn from rap music?
To George the Poet, rap music isn’t just music but a crib sheet for life. If rappers take control of what they are rapping about then listening to music becomes an education in itself.
“Rap’s not music. It’s a broadcasting service. We decide what we talk about,” he says, urging rappers to take back control of their music from the labels making money out of it.
Watch George the Poet perform Gangland
Watch George the Poet perform Gangland
A poem from Have You Heard George's Podcast? Music and sound design by Benbrick.
In 主播大秀 Radio 4's Welcome to the World of George the Poet, a recent live show with some high-profile friends at the 主播大秀’s Radio Theatre, George discusses how rap made him the man he is today – an award-winning spoken word artist who studied politics, psychology and sociology at King’s College, Cambridge.
“I saw black music as an institution. A school. A news channel. A wealth creation machine for people whose potential had been suffocated by social exclusion,” he says.
It was this “social exclusion… combined with the academic intensity” of studying sociology that drove his development as a poet. “My career has developed into the PhD I never got around to,” he adds.
So, what life lessons can you learn from rap music?
1. Ambition
There’s nothing like growing up seeing what you’d rather not become to make you ambitious, according to DJ Target, the 1Xtra DJ and founding member of UK grime collective Roll Deep, who grew up in Tower Hamlets, the poorest borough in the country.
“You’d go to the shop for your Nan and come back and see needles on the stairs. And you’d make a mental note, ‘I never want to be involved with that,’” he says. “You’d see the drunk guys, uncles, or whatever, outside the off-licence or outside the bookies. You didn’t want to be like that, so there was a bunch of mental notes that we probably didn’t even know we were taking that were like the blueprint of what not to be.”
2. Entrepreneurship and financial education
With schools failing to supply lessons in financial acumen, DJ Target says he trod his own entrepreneurial path after discovering music – doing parties, making tapes, creating pirate radio stations and pressing records. Later, he wrote Grime Kids, which charts the creation of the groundbreaking music genre that gave voice to a generation, because “how we got here hadn’t been documented by one of us” – plus he was fed up with grime getting blamed for everything. “We were learning on the job,” he adds.
With the word “money” being used more than ever in the history of hip hop and grime, students would benefit from financial education, according to Dr Becky Inkster, a neuroscientist who founded Hip Hop Psych to dissect hip hop lyrics and analyse the mechanisms of mental health problems with psychiatrist Dr Akeem Sule.
3. Resilience
Konan, one half of the rap duo Krept & Konan, watched his stepdad die at the hands of an attacker who had followed him home. Rather than collapse and succumb to post-traumatic stress disorder, Dr Sule says Konan re-framed what happened, cognitively, going on to rap about it. Quoting Sir Michael Rutter – “the Puff Daddy of resilience research” – Dr Sule says Konan shows how resilience is an interactive concept: where negative circumstances lead to a positive outcome.
Rap can be very therapeutic for young people trying to tell their stories and express themselves.
4. Self-expression
Temi Mwale has been fighting against youth violence ever since her childhood friend Marvin Henry was murdered. She thinks rap is rife with insight for those who lack awareness about the issues affecting marginalised young people.
Rap can be very therapeutic for young people trying to tell their stories and express themselves, and should be on the curriculum. “Allowing young people to study rap within the mainstream education system – not only would it make it more relevant and accessible to them but it would show them a route and a pathway to enable them to make change,” Temi adds.
And how did George鈥檚 guests think education could be made more relevant to young people?
Sonita Alleyne OBE, the new Master of Jesus College, Cambridge (not to mention the first woman to hold that position and the first black person to lead any Oxbridge college) thinks education needs to give kids a “sense of agency and project managing your own life”. Only then will the system help to power through different sorts of role models who will inspire other people to follow them, she adds.
Unlike her father, Holly Branson loved school. But she recognises young people today need different skills than they get from an outdated system. She wants to help kids gain speaking skills and learn to work in a team. She also wants to redefine success so kids can work out what their passions are. “There are so many other skills and life skills that need to be taught in schools.”
