By Eric Allen
Lassandra Smith never expected to find her work on YouTube. And although the Fox News broadcast never mentioned her name, it featured a music video she had produced on co-op last winter. It was called “The Week In Rap.”
Smith had no clue that Fox News had reported on the video, and neither did her bosses. Smith, a middler music industry major, worked in New York at Flocabulary, the 5-year-old brainchild of Blake Harrison and Alex Rappaport, on co-op last semester.
Fox’s report was a tip-off, she said, that her company, and its service, were picking up steam.
Flocabulary began with Harrison’s idea for an SAT vocabulary rap while he was still in high school, according to the website, Flocabulary.com. When he met Rappaport after graduating college, the two teamed up to make Harrison’s idea a reality. The website launched in 2004 and has since produced albums, books and the web-based video, “The Week in Rap.”
Sept. 19, 2008 marked the first episode of the weekly news rap, which featured lyrics like: “This lady Palin is kind of unique – you’d be too/if your favorite food was moose stew” and, “Meanwhile, in China, the milk isn’t tasty/it’s tainted, and it’s killing their babies.”
Harrison and Rappaport write the wry lyrics.
“They would make up the song,” Smith said. “The rest was up to me.”
Smith said she was in charge of visual effects, like integrating short video clips with pans of still images to accompany the one-to-two minute raps. New raps come out every Friday on TheWeekInRap.com.
“Before, I only did film scoring,” said Smith. “Now, I know what both sides are like.”
Like Smith, Flocabulary’s customers are learning new skills. Students can sing along to raps in language arts, social studies, math and science. The students who have tried Flocabulary’s products have responded well to the hip-hop-and-education combination, Rappaport said.
“Human beings, in general, love music,” Rappaport said. “By using music [with education], we are essentially waking up people’s brains. There’s a first-person voice in rap that can speak directly to a student. It’s culturally relevant.”
Besides being a popular music genre among Flocabulary’s teenage demographic, Rappaport said hip-hop is especially well-suited for educational purposes.
“The great thing about hip-hop is that it contains more words than any other genre,” Rappaport said. “It’s like strings of mnemonic devices.”
Historically, hip-hop has integrated well with education, said Murray Forman, associate professor of communication studies at Northeastern.
“It has always had the capacity to communicate,” Forman said. “In 1982, Grandmaster Flash released ‘The Message.’ It communicated education and information so clearly. There’s something about the oral style, the character of the narrative lyrical construction.”
Lyrics like, “Got a bum education, double-digit inflation/can’t take the train to the job, there’s a strike/at the station” characterize the song’s raw perspective on life in the ghetto.
Forman said that while hip-hop can be an effective teaching tool, it can also become lifeless under certain circumstances.
“I think it can be really lame if it’s in the hands of people who don’t understand it,” he said. “They better be true to hip-hop, otherwise the spirit of it would be faulty.”
Flocabulary has been featured on networks like NBC, CNN and ABC, according to their website, and won first prize in the Columbia Business School’s Outrageous Business Plan in 2006.
Forman said, however, that Flocabulary was not the first organization to mix hip-hop with education. The Arizona-based Funkamentalz applies instructional lyrics to popular rap songs, and Rhythm, Rhyme, Results in Cambridge offers downloadable MP3s of original raps in various academic subjects.
Despite the success of companies like these, Forman said there are some naysayers.
“A lot of people are predisposed to hate on rap,” he said. “They focus on violence, misogyny and other things.”
But companies like Flocabulary help to reinforce the positive effects rap can have, Forman said.
And the success of Flocabulary is not limited to urban areas.
“It’s not music that’s only in the south Bronx; it’s everywhere,” said Rappaport, noting a positive national response to the company. “We hear from teachers saying the kids love it.”
Rappaport says there are plans to syndicate “The Week in Rap” on television and add more rappers to Flocabulary’s repertoire.
“Hip-hop is a global phenomenon,” Rappaport said. “We want to bring more voices to it.”
