1979
provides me with an appropriate heuristic for doing so. The year of
Bowie's song, 1979 is also the year Sugar Hill released "Rapper's Delight,"
the first commercially successful rap song. A song created without a DJ
(it was recorded by Sugar Hill records' house band which appropriated
the music of Chic's "Le Freak" as the band rapped lyrics about teenage troubles
and angst), "Rapper's Delight" generically suggests that 1979 can teach me (and
my students) something about writing, about DJing, and about cultural critique.
"What you hear is not a test," the Sugar Hill Gang raps. No, not a test, but
an experiment for composition pedagogy. To perform the experiment, I divide
my performance into mixes and spin four records whose labels read: composition studies, theory, cultural studies, and technologythe areas of discourse I feel most important today to English Studies and the teaching of writing.
To perform as a DJ, I spin from each area one of these records from 1979.
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