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INTERVIEW: TRICIA ROSE ON HIP-HOP.
When Tricia Rose, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University, applied to American Studies graduate programs in 1986, she stipulated that she would write her dissertation on hip-hop culture at a time when the idea was much less than fashionable. Her bold strategy worked; Brown University's American Civilization Program accepted, and a Rose began her career as a cultural critic, focusing on African-American popular culture.
Recently, she opened the first panel at the Youth Music and Youth Culture by Andrew Ross, Associate Professor of English at Princeton. One of its aims was to bridge the gap between academic cultural studies and music journalism. Rose's presentation focused on the structural elements and defining characteristics of hip-hop culture. This paper, as well as Rose's position as the first speaker at a nontraditional conference, exemplified her work to date: rigorous, fascinating, accessible, and ground breaking. Rose's distinctive analyses of hip-hop culture, which have appeared in Camera Obscura, The Journal of Negro Education, and Popular Music and Society, distinguish her immediately; she avidly consumes the culture about which she theorizes which gives her work its inclusive edge and depth of involvement. This commitment and pleasure shows; Rose's work provides a refreshing change from the distanced observations the characterize much academic production. By examining the culture created, for, and about black men and women from an African-American, feminist standpoint, Rose provides a unique (and sorely lacking) perspective from which to engage popular culture and speaks directly to a community often neglected by society - academic or otherwise.
Like the female rappers whose work she discusses in "Never Trust a Big Butt and a Smile," Rose has gained access to traditionally male-dominated worlds - academia, cultural studies, and African-American popular culture. Her work pens and widens the public forum available to young, black women. Peppering her articles with snippets of interviews, Rose includes in her work the voices, needs, and desires of her subjects. She conducts her scholarship on many levels which circulate within and reach beyond the walls of the academy to engage the communities with whom her work deals. At the Princeton conference, Rose eloquently backed Deee-Lite's claims about the fall of disco to classist, heteroexist, and racist forces within the music industry...