Tricia Rose: the hip-hop culture's reigning Ph. Diva - author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America

Tricia Rose got her first taste of rap music at age 15 while hanging out on the Co-op City basketball courts in The Bronx. "I immediately fell in love with the verbal dexterity," she recalls. At that time, Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow were the kings of rap. "I loved the electricity of sampling and the bass frequencies," Rose says. "You just couldn't get around the beauty of that."

Today Rose, an assistant professor of history and Africana studies at New York University, continues to revel in the beauty of rap and hip-hop. In 1990 she even chose the popular genre as the subject of an unorthodox Ph.D. project. The result: last year's groundbreaking book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan University Press of New England, $14.95). An intriguing blend of popular culture and meticulous scholarship, the 237-page book takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, culture, themes and styles of rap, and the controversial issues that surround it.

The 32-year-old Harlem-born Rose earned her doctorate in the American Civilization program at Brown University. She had considered writing the book as early as 1986. "I would go to the music library and look up what was happening with rap, and I was fascinated by what was going on," she remembers. "Rap was so commercially popular, and yet this incredibly local thing was being absorbed and reshaped in a dominant social environment."

Rose, a graduate of Manhattan's exclusive Dalton School and Yale University, had intended to become a lawyer, but a professional friend encouraged her to pursue a Ph.D. "I thought if I could write about this phenomenon and get it funded, I'd do it," she says.

Aware that her unusual project would raise eyebrows in the halls of academia, the hip-hop enthusiast applied to five universities, including Yale and NYU. "I wasn't really sure where I could do this work," she admits. "But I was up-front and said I wanted to work on rap music, because I didn't want to get into a program and then have to defend it." Brown turned out to be the most receptive to her proposal.

Rose spent countless hours in the library and interviewed numerous record-industry executives, lawyers, producers and, of course, the rappers themselves, including MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Salt 'N' Pepa and Kool Moe Dee. It wasn't easy getting the artists to talk. "I went to lots of parties and made zillions of phone calls to convince people to talk to some lowly grad student with no political clout," says Rose. She was struck by the industry's profound sexism: "It was the most sexist arena I've ever had to negotiate. Women who have to work in that field do so under extreme pressure." Women rappers in particular, Rose found, were often frustrated by their lack of financial and creative control.

Her research is not finished. She's now working on a series of essays about how Black women have been portrayed in popular culture. And she continues to champion her passion. "Rap is incredibly compelling to an entire generation of people," she says, "and regardless of whether we like the way it sounds, as a society we have to come to terms with why it has meaning for so many people."

COPYRIGHT 1995 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group