By Maggie Nelson
On Friday, Oct. 17 on OSU campus, Oregon State University’s College of Liberal Arts and the Los Angeles-based Grammy Museum will be harmonizing together for the first time at a hip-hop music festival and academic symposium. The symposium will begin at 9 a.m. and run until 5:15 p.m. It will highlight the manner in which hip-hop influences and interacts within international culture and history. Loren Kajikawa, a member of the musicology and ethnomusicology department at the University of Oregon will give a keynote address to open the event, which will be followed by two panel discussions on hip-hop’s cultural impact. Several workshops led by OSU instructors and artists will also be held. These will include classes on beat-making, music technology, and graffiti.
An intimate dialogue will be held between hip-hop pioneer MC Lyte and Bob Santanelli, executive director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. They will be discussing a number of topics, while addressing the question posed by Dana Reason, OSU’s hip-hop director, “How does hip-hop live?”
Dana explains how the symposium as a whole will address the aforementioned question and further examines how hip-hop lives a culturally transcendental existence, “Today hip-hop is a porous intercultural phenomenon. There are rappers in both small villages and urban centers – just like there are listeners wherever people can gather together or a set of headphones or speakers are found.”
To wrap things up, Mare, a Zapotec hip-hop artist from Oaxaca, Mexico will perform. Houston, Texas artist Lil Flip; Portland’s own, Illmaculate; local U of O B-boys hip-hop dancers, and Los Angeles hip-hop producer, Mike Gao will also be performing at the evening concert, starting at 7:15 p.m.
These events are free to OSU students. As for non-OSU students, purchase your tickets online at http://bit.ly/1DRD1eh for $15 or at the door for $20 each.
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