It’s that non-specific melody wafting through scratchy speakers on an elevator or that indistinct bumping bass blasting from a passing car. For those who listen, music is a lifeline, a steady pulse keeping constant time with everyday highs and lows, something to actively seek and passionately make.
In the name of bridging the gap between those who hear and those who listen, Hip Hop Congress presents the fourth annual Hip Hop Appreciation Week. This year’s theme is multiculturalism.
“Hip hop is poetry in many aspects,” said Diaris Alexander, director of the UCLA chapter of Hip Hop Congress.
“A lot of people who know about hip hop only know about the mainstream stuff, but hip hop is really broader than that. It’s really an international thing.”
Alexander, a third-year psychology student, said the goal of this year’s appreciation week is to highlight the global impact hip hop has had on branches of world music. The weeklong festival began Tuesday with live graffiti art in Bruin Plaza at noon and “R&B Night” in Kerckhoff Coffee House and will run through Friday night.
The week is set to feature performances by the internationally renowned Panamanian duo Los Rakas, Del Tha Funky Homosapien of the Hieroglyphics, Brother Ali and Amanda Diva.
Musical performances are not the only thing on the schedule. Alexander aims to expose all elements of hip hop culture, from graffiti art to dance, to its social significance.
“It was my idea to get the whole program to try and introduce as many people into many elements of programming that they weren’t previously attending,” Alexander said. “My goal was to really make sure that we had a real presence on campus, because in the past, it’s just been the main show.”
The exhibit “Ongoing Love Affair: Fashion and Hip Hop” will be on display in the Kerckhoff Art Gallery during the week. A film screening and panel discussion of the documentary “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes” will be held in the Northwest Auditorium on Friday night, after a tribute in Bruin Plaza that afternoon to the late producer and rapper J Dilla, who died in 2006 after a bout with lupus.
“Thursday’s tribute to (J Dilla) will also double as means to raise awareness about the disease that took him from the hip hop community,” Alexander said.
On schedule for today is an afternoon performance by Los Rakas, set to bring their bilingual dancehall, reggae, hip hop fusion to Bruin Plaza. Tonight, however, will feature the first-ever collaboration between Hip Hop Appreciation Week and Eclectic Open Mic Night.
Most Tuesday nights in Kerckhoff Coffee House feature young performers eagerly testing their musical skill in front of lounging peers amid the lazy, lingering smells of coffee beans and lattes. Tonight’s collaboration, dubbed Eclectic Remix, is changing not just the day, but the location and the overall format in honor of Hip Hop Appreciation Week, throwing dance and spoken word into the mix.
“The coffee house isn’t very conducive to spoken-word artists,” said Christina Lenon, director of Eclectic Open Mic Night. “It’s not really a good venue for poets and people who really have something to say and who really need an attentive audience. We wanted to have something in the Kerckhoff Grand Salon for that purpose.”
Student enthusiasm for Hip Hop Appreciation week largely comes from the opportunity to perform in an amateur setting with no restrictions and in the chance to separate the commercial from the musical.
“(Early) hip hop artists wrote powerful lyrics of change and the problems in their communities, and they had a lot of meaning,” said Nicholas Shirkey, a second-year physiological sciences student.
“I think hip hop today has kind of sold itself out. Appreciation Week sounds great because of (its) focus, and because it sounds like it really goes back to the roots of hip hop: the hip-hop lifestyle that began with graffiti, the rap battles, the MCs laying down beats and the break dancing,” he said.
Shirkey also said that mainstream artists today tend to focus on rapping and beats, but hip hop “used to be a whole package” and that he liked that the week revisited old-school hip hop as well as the worldwide hip-hop movement.
Whether hip hop is to be featured under the glowing lights in the Kerckhoff Grand Salon, amid beats and bustling students in Bruin Plaza, hanging on the stark white walls of the Kerckhoff Art Gallery or projected onto the silver screen of the Northwest Auditorium, the Hip Hop Congress aims to show a wide audience the value of hip-hop music, culture and expression.
“I know there are a lot of people who don’t like hip hop because of some of the negative connotations,” said Sirah One, a guest MC set to perform in Kerchkhoff Grand Salon tonight.
“But I listen to folk music. I came from folk music. I listen to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, and I think that hip hop really is folk music. It’s the music of the people.”