Brandeis students rejoice! The yearly slog through the course catalogue has just become slightly less painful. This fall, Boston-area DJ Wayne Marshall will be teaching a course titled, "Digital Pop: From hip-hop to mash-up." Those music students who hunger for more than just theory courses or classical composition should be chomping at the bit for a chance to examine the influence of the digital age on modern music and trace its history. Marshall, a 29-year old Cambridge native,is an ethnomusicologist, currently working on his dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, exploring the historical intersections of modern hip-hop and reggae music. A man in high demand in the Boston area, he was recently featured in the Boston Globe, who named him one of the top DJs in the city. Eager and excited to teach at Brandeis, Marshall (WM) answered a few questions for JustArts (JA):

JA: Not many teachers here moonlight as DJs, nor do many DJs teach college level courses. How did you come to teach at Brandeis?

WM: I've been DJing and making beats for about as long as I've been engaged in graduate level studies, and I've found that these somewhat unusual activities for an academic have deeply informed my studies of hip-hop, reggae and popular music more generally -at least as deeply as my studies have, in turn, inevitably shaped my approach to DJing and beat-making. DJing also gives me a way toshare some of my ideas in a rather different-and perhaps more accessible or engaging-manner than traditional forms of publication. In terms of coming to Brandeis, there was a position here seeking someone "whose teaching and research interests are contemporary cultural and performance studies, with particular emphasis in African, African-American, Caribbean and/or global black diasporic music," and that seemed to describe me eerily well. I'm delighted that the Music and AAAS departments agreed.


JA: What is your musical background? What influenced you to become interested in this kind of music?

WM: I grew up in the Boston area, listening to the same music as my Cambridge peers, which-in the mid-80's and early 90's-was largely rap and a little reggae -and some rock as well. So in a sense you could say it was good old peer pressure that influenced me. It's simply what was in my soundscape. I had fancied myself an MC since the age of 13 or so and loved listening intently to the beats underlying hip-hop vocals, especially those that featured recognizable samples from my parents' music. It wasn't until later, however-my senior year in college-that I realized I could bring together my love for music and my intellectual interests in race and social justice through the discipline of ethnomusicology. By that time, I had been playing guitar and bass in blues and rock bands and still rapping on occasion. I started making beats on computers shortly after college, when a high school student introduced me to a program called Fruity Loops -I was teaching at Cambridge Rindge and Latin at the time. I've been hooked on software-based musical production and performance ever since.

JA: Music aside, is there a larger cultural message that you're trying to convey through this course? What do you hope to achieve?

WM: Absolutely, and always! Although we'll be focusing a lot on musical issues in "Digital Pop" (Mus 160a)-on forms, styles, genres, and what makes them coherent and innovative-we'll also be discussing these things in historical, social and cultural context, attempting to understand what makes such musical figures meaningful to particular people at a particular time and place, whether we're talking about hip-hop in the Bronx, techno in Detroit or Berlin, dubstep in London or kwaito in South Africa. Among other things, we'll be considering the way certain stories about music are told, as well as how we might engage in musical storytelling ourselves as producers and DJs. To some extent, the course will offer an Afrodiasporic perspective on electronic popular music, as well as a popular perspective on electronic music and a focus on what makes the digital age different and exciting. Similarly, my course in the Spring on "Global Hip-hop" will take the music seriously once again while trying to make sense of how hip-hop animates so much discussion and action around the world. I attempt to intertwine my theoretical interests in race, nation and the imagination of community with questions of sound, form and cultural practice in all my endeavors, from scholarship to DJing.

JA: What do you say to people who complain that teaching such art forms robs them of their spontaneity and sets boundaries?

WM: It's commonly asserted that any attempt to put something under the microscope runs the risk of killing the joys and wonders of it, but I've found in my own experience studying and making music that the opposite is true: the closer I listen and the more I appreciate about the craft of making a hip-hop beat, a dancehall riddim or a techno track, the more wonderful and interesting it seems. For all the spontaneous character that seems to give popular music its liveliness, there is a lot going on behind the scenes to make it sound that way, and I think the makers of the music deserve to be held up to the same degree of inquiry and appreciation as any other artists or craftspeople. In order to avoid the kind of labeling that creates stark -and usually false- boundaries when teaching about these subjects, I think it's important to study the boundaries themselves: who sets them? Why? How? It's not simply academics -or marketers- who use such labels, but artists and audiences as well, and we can learn a lot about popular music and culture by looking-and listening!-to how people use such forms and practices to draw and redraw the lines of community.