For the record, Tricia Rose’s 1994 book Black Noise is still the ur-text for Hip Hop scholarship.  I’m teaching it again this semester for my senior seminar on music and technology in the Black rhetorical tradition.  So many gems up in there, and such brilliant analysis and thoughtful argumentation throughout, but every time I read it or teach it, I keep coming back to this one statement.  It’s one that I’ve used in Digital Griots as a sample that I want looped throughout my own conversation instead of a mere quote, so sampling yet again, I’m posting it here to encourage us all to think about what Hip Hop teaches us about composition:

what is the significance of flow, layering, and rupture as demonstrated on the body and in Hip Hop’s lyrical, music, and visual works?  Interpreting these concepts theoretically, one can argue that they create and sustain rhythmic motion, continuity, and circularity via flow; accumulate, reinforce, and embellish this continuity through layering; and manage threats to these narratives by building in ruptures that highlight the continuity as it momentarily challenges it.  These effects at the level of style and aesthetics suggest affirmative ways in which profound social dislocation and rupture can be managed and perhaps contested in the cultural arena.  Let us imagine these Hip Hop principles as a blueprint for social resistance and affirmation:  create sustaining narratives, accumulate them, layer, embellish, and transform them  However, be also prepared for rupture, find pleasure in it, in fact, plan on social rupture.  When these ruptures occur, use them in creative ways that will prepare you for a future in which survival will demand a sudden shift in ground tactics (39).

The question I want to pose from the lines I sample from Rose is this:  if you had to build a writing course or a writing curriculum from this one statement, what would that course look like?  What would you have your students read?  What would you have them write?  How would you evaluate their writing?  What would your overall goals for that course or that major/minor/graduate program be?