Miriam: Why hip-hop? Why not rave music?

Neil:

Why hip-hop? Hip-hop is it right now! I don’t know if you realize, everything out there, whether it be video, audio, print media, ads in magazines – the dancing! Hip-hop is the craze right now. Why not use that as a way to engage these kids positively, because we know they love it. There’s a lot of good things about hip-hop too. We don’t see it as much now in the commercialized, glossed-over view of hip-hop we see now.

If you actually were given the opportunity to learn about the roots of hip-hop and where it came from, this is a movement that came out for the very purpose of giving a voice to the voiceless, and giving these kids in Bronx, in New York, and all over the World – I mean, another thing about hip-hop is that it transcends race and ethnicity and culture. I don’t necessarily think you have to be black or Latino to love hip-hop. I think that the power of hip-hop is that it reaches a lot of different people at a lot of different stages in their lives.

What better way for an educator to bring their students together, than by using hip-hop, because it is so pervasive. You know what I mean? Everyone can relate to it; everyone does see it, because it’s just everywhere!

That’s the purpose of our programming, to get them beyond what they see and encourage them to express themselves and identify with the culture in a way that’s healthy for them.