Clip arrives via Stevie Van Zandt’s TeachRock organization, which provides materials to classrooms
A panel of hip-hop innovators — DMC, Melle Mel, DJ Khaled, and the Black Eyed Peas’ Taboo — reflect on the genre’s roots in a new video posted by TeachRock, the nonprofit educational resource Stevie Van Zandt has launched to bring music history lessons to classrooms. Khaled discusses how seeing Run-DMC perform “Peter Piper” live was a formative moment for him, while DMC talks about reading the liner notes of a record he liked and wondering who Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel were.
“To this day, ‘The Message’ is still the most important record,” Mel says in the clip. “A young lady did a version of ‘The Message’ right now, and that’s one of the biggest records in the world today. As far as records go, I’m gonna live forever.” He also highlights how instead of thinking about the things that defined hip-hop, people should consider “how hip-hop redefined everything else.” Similarly, Taboo talks about how the world at large influenced the Black Eyed Peas.
The video is part of a lesson plan that TeachRock is distributing to more than 60,000 educators. The organization will announce more “professors” for the expanding Roots of Hip-Hop curriculum in the future.
Van Zandt launched TeachRock a decade ago with a founders board that includes Bono, Jackson Browne, Martin Scorsese, and Bruce Springsteen. It provides free educational materials to teachers, students, and families. “This Artist Council is the culmination of the outreach we’ve engaged in since establishing the Rock and Soul Forever Foundation and its TeachRock.org program over 10 years ago,” Van Zandt said in a statement.
The artist council currently includes the four hip-hop artists featured in today’s video, as well as Erykah Badu, Common, Sheryl Crow, Peter Gabriel, Norah Jones, Skip Marley, Margo Price, Rapsody, Gina Schock, and Marty Stuart.