Passion is something that you have in your life
that understands you more than sometimes humans.
That can be your best friend.
And I think music was that for me.
I am a DJ, college professor, music
producer, and I'm a Harvard fellow.
He's worked with Nas, Destiny's Child, Drake,
Jay Z and beyond that he's a civil
rights activist and he's the perfect
artist for our residency.
9th Wonder really provided a model for how you can bring a
musical tradition that doesn't have its
origins in an institutional setting like
this and how you can contextualize it
and tell the history and tell the story
of that genre.
A lot of kids from this generation look at hip-hop as not
something that needs to be learned, it
needs to be partied to, like you need to
understand really some of the people
that you're listening to before what you're
listening to becomes a big misconception of
not only that particular person but
maybe the demographic or the ethnicity
of that particular person.
Art has this really special ability to speak to
people and it has an ability to give
whole communities of people a
significant place. One of the things that
9th wonder spoke endlessly about was
building community, during the music feedback
sessions he had one student show
something and then he had another
student, he's asking, "Do you two know each other?"
And across the board it was no we've never met before. You need to be
talking to each other and iron sharpens
iron and we need to have a community.
Some artists have had the knack to make
music that speaks to me, for me, about me
without even knowing me and I think
that's the kind of relationship I have
with music to know who I am, what I
like, what my feelings are, and to have a
piece of medium that hits that spot.
Everywhere I go I try to learn from
people because you know you you are
forever a student. Now me listening to
all the conversations and I say, "what
year are you?" I'm asking classification and
they're saying I'm first-year, third-year,
which tells me they do have a different
way of looking at their academics and
looking at life. This has definitely been
a master class of learning for myself.