This English Professor Explicates the Hip-Hop Lexicon

Evelyn Nien-Ming Chi’en is always listening. Holding her breath, trying to catch that curious resonance that makes a moment complete.“I was up in the Adirondacks recently, and there was this lake that had this air between the slice of ice on top of it and the water. And it was, like, insane acoustics,” she said between sips of steamed soy milk at a cafe near her home in Greenwich Village. “Like crackling, but also low notes, like ‘wooo.’ It was like hip-hop’s surround sound craziness would to me have that acoustic richness.”For the past several months, Ms. Ch’ien has been working to assemble a hip-hop orchestra that might make similarly impressive noise. Picture an emcee paired with a full ensemble of classical musicians, mixing their music in the concert halls of Europe and America. The venture has had her shuttling between Berlin, New York, and Paris over the past several months. Though the orchestra is still in its gestation period, it already bears her conceptual imprint: Graft popular culture onto high culture and revel in the results.At the University of Hartford, where she is currently on sabbatical from her position as an assistant professor of English, Ms. Ch’ien has made her reputation by challenging her students to compose and perform raps on themes of postcolonial literature.“Robert Frost wasn’t doing it for my kids,” she said, explaining her reason for having a recording studio built into her office in Connecticut. “They used to transcribe Robert Frost to music. Like, I’m doing the same thing, it’s just not. But it’s very 21st century. So they call it innovative, but it’s like the oldest thing around.”At 34, Ms. Ch’ien is young for a tenure-track academic, and there is something reminiscent of a college kid about her, beyond her blue jeans and a declared taste for Kanye West and Nas. She peppers her conversation with the “like”s and “you know”s disdained by English purists. She says the desire to travel to Nepal almost prevented her from completing her undergraduate degree.Recently, screechy guitar sounds wafted down the hallway leading to Ms. Ch’ien’s apartment. After a few rings of the bell, the volume diminished and the front door swung open, revealing a diminutive woman with a heart-shaped face and a bouncy demeanor.“That’s Smyrk,” the professor explained. “A Hartford band. I don’t know what they’re called now, I knew them when I was up in Hartford. This man’s voice is incredible.”Her spare living room contained little more than a couch, some short hand-carved wooden stools from Africa, and two suitcases. The visitor’s eye was drawn immediately to what must be considered the space’s hearth: a Macintosh G4 perched on a pile of glass bricks.Ms. Ch’ien approached the laptop and offered to show off raps she produced with her students at the University of Hartford. One was called “We Kill Everything We See,” another “Ribbon of Hope.” After hitting play, her face was transformed by admiration as she listened to her students juggle phrases like “meet your monarchy/worldwide monopoly/monotonously putting these countries in order” and “you can dam us, but the flood comes now” over an ominous hip-hop beat. Once you get started, she said, it’s not hard to emcee.“One time I tried to wake up my whole class, so I just rapped the entire lecture. And they were like freaked out, right? They were just like, ‘What the hell?’ But it got their attention.”“Once you get going,” she said, “you start thinking about stuff. And you’re like bouncing off the walls.”Ms. Ch’ien does not generally have to freestyle to be heard. Last year, Harvard University Press published her first book, “Weird English,” an exploration of literature that mixes foreign languages with English. Examining the stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Junot Diaz, Arundhati Roy, and others, Ms. Ch’ien shows that novelists breathe new life into the English language when they stir in their aristocratic Russian sensibilities, the Dominican street talk of Washington Heights, and the anarchic spelling habits of India.The deconstructionist lingo of “Weird English” is about as far from rap as one can get, but Ms. Ch’ien sees the gap as eminently bridgeable. Growing up in Birmingham, Ala. and Memphis and Chattanooga, Tenn., as the daughter of Chinese exiles to America (via Taiwan), the young Ms. Ch’ien learned early to get comfortable speaking different languages – Mandarin, Shanghainese, and Southern-American English. Later, as an undergrad, she mastered standard American English.“Somebody told me at Harvard that I sounded sort of stupid. I was quiet for six months, and then I started speaking with a Yankee accent,” she said matter-of-factly.“Everyone I know who’s moved north of the Mason Dixon line can whip out a Southern accent like you’d never know, but we hide it up here ’cause we get called stupid.”It was an instance of linguistic colonialism she could live with.

This English Professor Explicates the Hip-Hop Lexicon

This English Professor Explicates the Hip-Hop Lexicon

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