The 2000s to 2010s: CUSH, Academics and the future of hip-hop

Hip-hop’s presence in the 2000s and the 2010s was decidedly larger than that of the previous two decades. The golden age of the 1990s, with its diversity of sound and establishment of legendary artists, had accelerated the consumption of hip-hop culture across the country. No longer was radio its primary distributor; featured in everything from breakfast commercials and cartoons to fashion trends and movie deals, hip-hop culture, and its artists, were quickly breaking into mainstream culture.

Mainstream Columbia began embracing hip-hop as well. Over the past 20 years, scores of hip-hop performers have touched down on Columbia’s campus, ranging from golden age stars like Snoop Dogg and Ghostface Killah to relatively recent artists like Kanye West and Talib Kweli. In 2001, Raw Elementz, Columbia’s oldest hip-hop dance crew, was founded. Spectator archives contain 370 mentions of hip-hop between the years 2000 and 2009 compared to 159 mentions during the 1990s and only five during the 1980s. Clearly, Columbia students were eager to embrace the culture and some were ready to engage with it directly, both in and out of the classroom.

Anthony “Ace” Patterson, CC ’11, was one such student. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Patterson was first introduced to hip-hop through his late aunt, who bought him a Snoop Dogg cassette tape when he was young. He quickly gained an affinity for Snoop’s West Coast swagger.

“I’m from the East Coast, so to have your favorite rapper be [a] West Coast artist back in the day got you in plenty of playground fights,” Patterson recalled. “I’m from the inner cities of Bridgeport … so rap is just all around. I also grew up in a Jamaican household. And it was only as I got older, [that] I learned that hip-hop was started by Jamaicans.”

Patterson’s affinity for hip-hop grew throughout his childhood, and by 15, he was selling mixtapes and performing at variety shows under the name Ace Tha Pyro. When he entered Columbua’s freshman class in 2007, he continued to pursue rapping, performing at shows across campus and traveling back home to record mixtapes with his friends. Within his first years at Columbia, he also met several people who became his musical collaborators: Mpho Brown, CC ʼ12 and a rapper from Lesotho, and producer Jon Tanners, CC ‘11. They would spend their free time planning shows, celebrating each other’s successes, and freestyle rapping together.

“[Tanners] would make us beats to perform off, and it was like, ‘Yo, what if we just did something together and actually create a group where we can do what we’re already doing,’ because we [couldn’t] be the only ones that [loved] hip-hop,” Patterson said. “There was, frankly, just a gap in the ecosystem.”

Thus, the Columbia University Society of Hip-Hop was born. Founded in 2009 by Patterson and Brown, the club was originally based in the Intercultural Resource Center, as it was not formally incorporated under the Activities Board at Columbia. Patterson and Brown were roommates in the IRC and would use the lounge and any other space they could find to host freestyle rap sessions, called cyphers, for both rappers and hip-hop fans.

“That’s the only free space we had because you had to book all of the other [spaces], but you had to be a real group in order to book,” Patterson said. “My homie Stephan, he lived in the Pike house, you know? And so we would go to the Pike basement and we [would] just freestyle. That for us was a CUSH session.”

A packed IRC lounge hosts an explosive cypher
Courtesy of the CUSH Board

As CUSH grew in size and popularity, it quickly became apparent that the club would need to formalize its meetings. To continue with its sponsorship through the IRC, CUSH would need to include educational programming as well. One of the club’s first members, Jerelyn Rodriguez, CC ’11, played a large role in this process, leveraging her executive board experience in campus cultural organizations like the Caribbean Student Club and Grupo Quisqueyano, a Dominican student’s group.

“I kind of leaned in and took an executive committee role, and so we tried to pursue funding through the student group association and formalize it as a club,” Rodriguez said. “We established an executive body, I led the meetings, [Brown] and [Patterson] were co-leaders of the group. Once we became more formalized, we basically had cyphers every other Thursday, and then we had talks about hip-hop in [the weeks] between.”

Some conversations focused on the intricacies within hip-hop culture itself, with topics ranging from female representation in hip-hop to the cultural intermingling that occurred between Asian and Black cultures through the music. Many conversations centered around the role of hip-hop at Columbia, which often led to talks about diversity at Columbia more broadly.

CUSH began working with different groups across campus, including the Black Students’ Organization. Members were acutely aware of how different CUSH felt from the rest of Columbia’s culture, in part due to the makeup of the group.

“It was like the hub for the people of color at Columbia, and we had a lot of people from the [surrounding] community come to those meetings,” Rodriguez explained. “It was like a student club, but it was open to the public. And so it was really cool to have a diverse group of people of different income levels.”

The club continued to attract hip-hop fans and artists in droves. By the end of 2011, hundreds of people were packing the IRC lounges, eager to contribute to discussions or jump into cyphers alongside local Bronx and Harlem rappers. The result was a bona fide hip-hop training ground for young artists and hip-hop aficionados.

The musicians that came out of CUSH were unlike any that Columbia had produced in recent years. With competitive spirits and a communal love of hip hop culture, CUSH’s rappers stuck close to the learning traditions, like freestyling, that proved successful for their idols. The wider campus community began to take notice—two years after its founding, three CUSH rappers, one of them Patterson himself, alongside the brass band Lucky Chops, won Bacchanal’s Battle of the Bands and opened the show for none other than Snoop Dogg.

As students immersed themselves in hip-hop discussions and performances through the club, a new avenue for engaging with the genre emerged—a small music elective course, taught by professor Ellie Hisama, aimed to introduce students to an entirely new way of approaching the genre.

Hisama grew up in southern Illinois listening to hip-hop and classical music and acquired her doctorate in music theory in 1996 from The City University of New York. Before arriving at Columbia in 2006, she taught a graduate-level seminar called Popular Music and the Politics of Culture that included a hip-hop segment.

“I decided this is really a course that would be appealing to undergraduate students,” Hisama said. “So I created this course “Listening to Hip-Hop”, which I’ve taught five times since 2007. It’s about sounds and context and the people who make the sounds. [But] the idea behind the class is to have a course which is based in music.”

Hisama teaches hip-hop from musical, historical, and sociocultural perspectives. Students approach the class from different levels of musical literacy and learn to listen for the formal elements of music, such as meter and musical form, through classic hip-hop songs like Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise.” Additionally, the class leans into discussions surrounding the cultural and even business contexts of the songs heard by students in class. For example, one discussion focused on the cultural and business aspects of sampling, a technique in which producers take samples of other songs and remix them into components of their beats.

Hisama credits her ability to start teaching the class to her tenured position, which gave her the institutional backing to push the envelope. Even before achieving tenure at Columbia, she recalled receiving pushback from her supervisor for including popular music segments in her music classes. Hip-hop academia specifically has had its fair share of criticism from self-appointed institutional gatekeepers—a fact that she and her students are acutely aware of.

“I used to start the class with this Wall Street Journal piece where this guy, he’s just outraged that people take hip-hop seriously and would teach it at universities,” she explained. “I start with that [to emphasize that] hip-hop has made it through the doors of Columbia in this course, and you are here.”

The class’ launch came at the perfect moment for hip-hop fans at Columbia. Many CUSH members had the opportunity to take Hisama’s class over the years, and some say that it has augmented their engagement with the music.

“We were talking about hip-hop informally [at CUSH meetings],” Rodriguez explained, “and then in class, we got to study the theory, and literally how hip-hop music is formed. And the history behind it and the business side of it. So it was a really cool moment for us.”

Hisama certainly appreciates the participation of CUSH members as well. She has had Patterson as a guest speaker in her class, who explained the intricacies of freestyle improvisation to her students. She has also had student rappers organize freestyle cyphers to discuss readings and has drawn on the knowledge of student producers to help explain the royalty system in streaming services.

Between CUSH and Hisama’s class, it appears that hip-hop has a strong future on Columbia’s undergraduate campus. Current CUSH board members Payton Johnson, CC ʼ21, Nick Rubertone, CC ʼ21, and Ty Stinson, CC ʼ21, are developing various programs that span post-graduation, including an archiving project in conjunction with Professor Hisama and the Rare Books and Manuscript Library. CUSH members have also worked with WKCR to produce the hip-hop radio show “Notes from the Underground,” airing alongside the current reigning hip-hop show Offbeat, hosted by Damon Clark, CC ʼ19, and Kiki Feliz, TC ‘19. They will continue working with Patterson, who is currently a Billboard-charting rapper and YouTube global program manager for their Creator & Artist Development team, to continue the CUSH lineage.

As for the future of hip-hop in education, Hisama has high hopes. She has worked with a number of professors and students over the years who have demonstrated a keen interest in elevating the status of hip-hop from solely popular music to an art form worthy of academic study.

Kevin Holt, GSAS ‘11 and a past student of Hisama’s graduate seminar, contributed an essay on crunk music to the Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop, while another of her past students, Kathryn Radishofski, GSAS ‘18 and a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology, is currently writing a dissertation on Biggie Smalls graffiti memorials in Brooklyn. Hisama herself has published numerous papers on hip-hop, including a number of her and her students’ works in the book “Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies.” However, she does hope that hip-hop scholars will proceed with caution.

“I really hope that people [won’t] make it that ‘I have the right to say whatever I want about this music’ without regard to the people who originated the music and the people who are sustaining the music,” she said.

Senior staff writer Nigel Telman can be contacted at nigel.telman@columbiaspectator.com. Follow him on Twitter @NigelTelman.

Hip-hop: the story so far

The story of hip-hop’s official “birth” has become the stuff of legends: On Aug. 11, 1973, the Bronx’s Jamaican-born Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, hosted a back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgewick Ave. Serving snacks and drinks catered by his parents, Herc spun funk and soul jams in a darkened rec room basement. What transpired that night has been widely cited as a pinnacle moment in the history of hip-hop.

There, Kool Herc, along with a number of hip-hop’s very first emcees, introduced some of the earliest styles of breakbeat DJing, record-scratching, and rhythmic rhyming that would come to characterize hip-hop music for years to come. Less than a decade later, “Rapper’s Delight” by New Jersey rap trio the Sugarhill Gang reached the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 40, sending shockwaves through the music industry and beginning the slow but steady rise of hip-hop’s prominence in the wider—and whiter—American consciousness.

The ’80s would prove hip-hop’s mettle in cultural crossover appeal, notably through punk rock band Blondie’s “Rapture” and the barrier-breaking collaboration between Run-DMC and Aerosmith in “Walk This Way.” The ’90s ushered in the golden age of hip-hop, birthing legends such as Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, Lauryn Hill, and Outkast onto the American music scene and showcasing the variety, ingenuity, and persistence of a genre and a people with something to say for themselves.

By the 2000s, hip-hop’s dominance as an art form was undeniable. The decade saw an even wider array of mainstream rappers and the beginnings of today’s most well-recognized artists, from Lil Wayne to Drake to Nicki Minaj and Kendrick Lamar. The 2010s would see even more innovation and mainstream acceptance, culminating in Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize for his groundbreaking album “DAMN.”

All of this success stemmed from the musical innovations of New York City’s Black youth and a small back-to-school party in a Bronx housing project—only a train and a bus ride away from Columbia’s campus.

The growth of hip-hop, from underground party music to a bona fide art form, speaks largely to the persistence and the ingenuity of Black youth from the Bronx. The genre’s climb into the mainstream was a slow and punishing one. Its emergence was marred by relatively little media coverage, a racialized disregard for the music coming out of the ghettos at the height of the crack epidemic, and even attempts at censorship by the U.S. government.

However, while hip-hop was comparatively left out of mainstream music outlets like KISS-FM, it was consistently buoyed by the American youth; Black youth across the country continued to innovate the sound despite setback after setback. Meanwhile, young people of all backgrounds drove the demand that would eventually translate into label creations, record deals, and increased media coverage for hip-hop artists.

Columbia University, with its historical ties to the larger hip-hop community in New York City, witnessed this phenomenon . Even as both hip-hop and the campus’ music culture evolved, the university would serve as an example of the tenuous relationship between the hip-hop community and American culture. From underground outliers to dominating force to studied art form, this is hip-hop’s story at Columbia.

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The 1980s to the 1990s: WKCR, CTV, and the embrace of underground hip-hop

Though student-led underground music organizations like Hi-Fi Snock Uptown, Rare Candy, and the Bacchanal committee have steadily raised their profiles, their success in opening student ears to different sounds is relatively recent. Since the 1980s, the Columbia community’s musical sensibilities have steered away from the progressive and toward the comfortable.

Alumni like Jonathan Gill, CC ’86, and Ovid Santoro, GS ’86, noted that while the rest of the city was delving into new and unexplored sounds in its underground clubs, the music scene on campus was decidedly restrained.

“It was basically a lot of white kids who liked things the way they’d always had them … and didn’t really have the inclination to go search for new stuff,” Santoro said.

“They were [into] the stuff that was on the radio,” Gill added.

Hip-hop was the newest thing to hit the wider New York music scene since punk rock developed around Lower Manhattan. Before hip-hop pioneers got their music onto Columbia’s campus, they had explored the five boroughs, stopping to spin records at small venues like the Police Athletic League and bigger nightclubs like Disco Fever, the Latin Quarter, and Twilight Zone.

Though these DJs entered New York’s wider music scene relatively early and introduced the NY club scene to the burgeoning music of the Bronx, getting radio play and TV screen time was challenging. Radio hosts either did not appreciate the potential of hip-hop or disregarded it, and the first music television channel, MTV, didn’t launch until 1981. It wasn’t until 1985 that Run-DMC would get the first hip hop music video aired. However, early hip-hop artists were resourceful—they were some of the same people who rerouted electricity from street lights to power their DJ equipment for block parties.

Meanwhile, the reach of college radio was sitting, relatively untapped, on Columbia’s campus. Two broadcasting clubs—WKCR and Columbia Television—pushed for a greater presence of hip-hop on campus; it was these organizations that hungered for music outside of the radio mainstream.

Santoro was one of the first Columbia students to develop relationships through WKCR with the early rappers of the 1980s. Immediately upon arriving in the city, Santoro was enamored with New York’s underground music scene; he enrolled at Columbia in the summer of 1983 and by September he was interning under WKCR’s new music director Brooke Wentz, BC ’82, Business ’88. Santoro quickly assumed the role of publicity director while hosting his own show during the station’s “Transfigured Night” time slot. The two of them, along with the 1984 station manager Julie Grau, BC ’85; her successor, Gill; and Columbia concert organizer and WKCR DJ Jim Lynch, CC ’85, were among those helping to promote hip-hop and other “outlier” music genres during the ’80s.

“Then, as now, we [at WKCR] were interested in playing things that weren’t going to get airplay. And hip-hop music had no place on the radio [back then],” Gill explained. “Columbia ended up funding the hip-hop revolution, basically not really knowing what was going on.”

Santoro hosted “Transfigured Night,” on Thursdays from 1 to 4 a.m. Between these hours, he and his friends at the station, including Gill, felt free to play what they wanted. Using a technique called “simultaneous broadcasting,” in which a DJ could play multiple records at a time and splice them together, they would mash up different types of music, including hip-hop records.

Particularly between 1983 and 1985, Santoro and Gill began to spin hip-hop records with more frequency. Santoro would get breakbeat records from small music shops in Harlem; some of his favorite artists included the Treacherous Three and the Fearless Four.

“I loved those records, because they had such beautiful beats,” Santoro recalled. “Then I’d play other shit over it like William Burroughs… Very few people were playing that on the radio.”

Around the same time, Santoro, Gill, and Lynch were active in Columbia’s student-run TV station. On the third floor of Lerner Hall and above WKCR, Columbia Television (CTV) began its operation in 1983, at a time when cable television was still in its relative infancy.

At the time, video content was sparse for small cable companies like Warner Cable (now Time Warner Cable), which turned to community-created shows to support their business. The environment was ripe for enterprising students to develop Columbia-related content. Using equipment donated by alumni from the Journalism School—many of whom worked for ABC, NBC, and CBS—students like Santoro, Gill, and Lynch were able to develop their own programming and air it locally.

“We had a Thursday night [slot] from 9 to 10 p.m. on Manhattan Cable TV [called ‘Alternate Currents’],” Santoro recalled. “I had to go up… by Baker Field to their head [office] and deliver my tapes every week. And I’d bring up the master tape and they’d play it and then they’d replay it because they just didn’t have enough programming.”

Lyor Cohen and Run-DMC in the CTV studio.
Photo by Lori Traikos / Courtesy of Santoro

Between “Transfigured Night” and “Alternate Currents,” Santoro, Gill, and Lynch had hours of potential broadcast time at their disposal. Fortunately, Santoro was not just spinning hip-hop records—he was also meeting hip-hop artists. Santoro traversed New York City’s nightlife, cycling between uptown’s Disco Fever and downtown’s Roxy and Danceteria. It was through these explorations of the city that he met some of the original pioneers of hip-hop: Grandmaster Caz and Jerry D. Lewis of the Cold Crush Brothers. Even before Santoro met Caz, Caz was familiar with Columbia’s campus; his father worked for the University from 1970 to 1972 at the Poinciana, an apartment building on 120th and Amsterdam.

“[Columbia’s campus] was like my playground when I was young,” Grandmaster Caz recalled.

Santoro’s other collaborators included Lyor Cohen, then an artist manager at Rush Productions whom Santoro had met at the University of Miami in 1978, and Run-DMC, whom Cohen managed during the mid 1980s. Santoro and Lynch would bring them, along with the Cold Crush Brothers, to the studio to hang out, spin records, and rehearse. These groups were aired on “Alternate Currents” alongside the Fearless Four, Treacherous Three, and the Beastie Boys. Santoro and Lynch would plan shows with the rappers as well—Lynch organized the musical entertainment for the anti-apartheid protest of 1985, featuring the Cold Crush Brothers and Run-DMC.

“I think it brought up a little awareness [to] hip hop and a little bit of awareness of us … to a different audience,” Grandmaster Caz said of the concert.

The Cold Crush Brothers rock the mic at the anti-apartheid protest.
Photo by Divonne Jarecki / Spectator Archives

Santoro, Cohen, and Run-DMC by Hamilton Hall during the anti-apartheid protest.
Photo by Lori Traikos / Courtesy of Santoro

By 1985, hip-hop started to gain a real foothold not just on Columbia’s campus, but across the city. Rap songs started showing up more frequently on mainstream radio stations, and Run-DMC dropped two albums, “King of Rock” and “Raising Hell,” which would become the first hip-hop records to receive platinum certification.

After their time in the WKCR and CTV studios, many of Santoro’s collaborators remained in the world of music. Grau went on to co-found her own publishing company, Spiegel & Grau, under Penguin Random House, which has published numerous hip-hop-related books including Jay-Z’s “Decoded.” Wentz now operates her own music licensing company, Seven Seas Music, while Cohen works as YouTube’s global head of music. Though they have all made their mark on the music industry in various ways, they view their role in hip-hop’s early rise more as supporters than as trendsetters.

“[Santoro] had a passion for music; I had a passion for exploration,” Cohen said. “I’m not convinced we did anything in particular,”

In the decade that followed, hip-hop would build on the momentum of the early-to mid-80s. The late ’80s into the ’90s has been referred to by hip-hop fans and scholars alike as the golden age. In this period, the sound diversified significantly, with East and West Coast rappers finding their own lanes in the rapidly evolving industry. Hip-hop’s commercial appeal was gaining traction as well, with Def Jam Recordings gaining massive popularity and a slew of hip-hop artists joining new and established record labels.

The ’90s also saw the beginning of hip-hop culture’s access to other mediums, with rap stars such as Will Smith, also known as the Fresh Prince, slowly becoming fixtures inAmerican television programming. However, radio was still the primary agent through which hip-hop artists could connect with their growing market, and WKCR was still there to lend a hand.

In 1986 WKCR introduced a dedicated hip-hop show titled “We Could Do This Show,” hosted by renowned hip-hop DJs Clark Kent and Richie Rich. Their show ran until 1988, and though it was relatively unknown at the time, it was soon followed by one of the most revered underground hip-hop radio shows of the time.

Hosted by Adrian “Stretch Armstrong” Bartos, CC ’94, and Roberto “Bobbito” Garcia, “The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show” ran from 1990 to 1998 during the “Transfigured Night” time slot. It heavily featured many of the ‘90s’ legendary artists before they were signed to major labels. From Jean Grae and Big L to Nas and Jay-Z, many of hip-hop’s most culturally significant figures came to the studio to grace the mic with unreleased verses and off-the-dome freestyles.

Though Stretch and Bobbito were relatively unconcerned with Columbia’s musical culture, they made their mark on the city at large. The show became a proving ground for local hip-hop artists, and record labels were taking notice—Wu Tang Clan member Ol’ Dirty Bastard was signed to Elektra Records by an A&R agent who heard him on the show. Others, like the Fugees, used the show to gain increased credibility among their fanbase. Their 2015 documentary, “Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives,” further explores their individual stories and their impact on hip-hop music and culture.

As for its impact at Columbia, WKCR now has two dedicated hip-hop shows: “Notes from the Underground,” hosted by Angelo Hernandez-Sias, CC ’20, and “Offbeat,” hosted by Damon Clark, CC ‘19, and Kiki Feliz, TC ‘19. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Offbeat is not currently on the air.

Between Santoro’s “Transfigured Night” show and “Alternate Currents” in the ’80s, and “The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show” in the ’90s, early hip-hop artists and Columbia students were able to create a centralized hub of activity for hip-hop culture and broadcast it to a large audience. This was crucial at a time when media exposure for emerging Black music was comparatively sparse.

However, as hip-hop music and culture grew in popularity, so too did its ambitions. No longer complacent with being resigned to the underground, hip-hop music would soon begin to assert itself in the mainstream culture.

Correction: A previous version of the article stated that the Wu Tang Clan was signed to a record label as a result of their appearance on the Stretch and Bobbito show. In actuality, it was Ol’ Dirty Bastard, a member of the Wu Tang Clan, who was signed. Spectator regrets the error.

Senior staff writer Nigel Telman can be contacted at nigel.telman@columbiaspectator.com. Follow him on Twitter @NigelTelman.