Interview conducted on July 30, 2020 in Prospect Park

0:00 - I open with the intro to Boogie Down Productions’ “My Philosophy” (1988), where KRS-One says, “In about four seconds, a teacher will begin to speak… let us begin.” The instrumental continues under the first few minutes of the track.

0:41 - After Martin briefly explains his music education philosophy, he moves into a discussion of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (1945). This song fits very well over the beat from “My Philosophy.” I loop in Woody singing the title phrase every eight bars and intersperse Martin’s words between them.

2:09 - Before the interview, I had observed a couple of Martin’s classes, and watched him teach a group of drummers to play son clave over “Down by the Riverside.” In addition to drumming and singing, Martin had the students write their own lyrics: “I ain’t gonna study [blank] no more.” In our interview, Martin tells me why he likes the song: its anti-war message, its history in the Black church and in the Civil Rights movement. For that part, I use Mavis Staples’s churchy-sounding organ-backed recording from 1996.

3:11 - Martin talks about how “Down by the Riverside” has a funky aspect too, and that he learned it from Ellis Marsalis in New Orleans. He scat-sings a New Orleans beat to illustrate. I sync his scatting to the groove of the New-Orleans-style 2008 recording by the Blind Boys of Alabama.

4:02 - Martin tells me that his students have twerked in class to “Down by the Riverside.” When I express surprise, he tells me they will twerk to anything. By way of illustration, he talks about teaching “Stand By Me” to his band class. I bring in the original 1961 Ben E. King recording for this part. You would not think that “Stand By Me” would be a song you could twerk to, but Martin’s students play him “Twerk 4 Me” by KaMillion (2018), which they like better. This track is not easy to find on “official” channels, presumably because KaMillion didn’t clear the copyright. I expected to find her version funny, and it is, but it’s also surprisingly uplifting, it’s celebratory and playful in tone.

5:40 - Next, Martin expands on the importance of having students write their own verses to songs, to support their critical and personal engagement with music. He wants to empower young people by helping them come to voice, as bell hooks says. Martin’s example of coming to voice is Nina Simone’s recording of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” (1967). While Nina Simone didn’t write the song, she certainly does bring her voice to it, as she does in all of her recordings. I lay in The Reflex Re-Edit (2019) for its DJ-friendliness. I also bring in a clip of bell hooks talking about coming to voice from the film Gender Traps (Badalament, 2011).

8:37 - For Martin’s discussion of hip-hop as Black resistance music, I use “Fight The Power” by Public Enemy (1989). I chose this simply because it’s the first song that pops into my head when I hear the phrase “Black resistance music.” Martin compares hip-hop to jazz, in that both forms are about making something out of nothing, about paying homage to artists from before, and about connecting. There are resonances between the Public Enemy aesthetic and Martin’s jazz-centric politics, and they jump out at you through their juxtaposition of his speaking over their dense sample collage of James Brown et al. When Martin talks about disc jockeying, there’s literal turntable scratching in the track underneath. This was largely unintentional, and it shows the power of the remix as a research methodology.

10:07 - Martin gives an example of non-Black artists using hip-hop for political ends, the French-Chilean emcee and activist Ana Tijoux. I lay in the instrumental of her song “1977” (2010) throughout a discussion of Martin’s liberatory music education philosophy.

13:00 - There is a major problem of asking students to come to voice, which is that they will not always say things you like or agree with. Martin compares the effortlessness of teaching the woke kids from the challenge of working with his angry young white students who have aligned with the alt-right. He sings a bit of Janelle Monáe’s Black Lives Matter anthem “Hell You Talmbout” (2015), so of course I have to edit that in.

14:58 - The discussion of problematic speech segues naturally into a discussion of rap songs that use the n-word. For this section I use the instrumental to “Sucka N***a” by A Tribe Called Quest (1993), a song that critiques casual use of the word in its title. This song makes me extremely uncomfortable, but it’s enough of a 90s rap classic that Toni Blackman references it specifically in her own first interview (though more for its sample of a Freddy Hubbard standard than for its lyrics.) Even though Tribe is critical of the word, they still loop it as the song’s hook. There’s something crucial in the way that hip-hop has repurposed the ugliest word in the English language that I can’t yet articulate. This is something I’ll be revisiting in future interviews.

16:35 - Martin tells the story of inadvertently hurting a student’s feelings by using the word “ratchet” in a way that she felt implicitly included her, and how he resolved the situation. I searched Google for the word “ratchet” and used the most musical result, “Do tha Ratchet” (Chopped & Screwed) by Lava House & Lil Boosie (2019). Here again, the song makes irreverent use of a word that can be hateful in other contexts. Martin used it with a positive intent, referring to Chris Emdin’s term “ratchetdemic,” but the student responded badly to any use of “ratchet” from a white person. Martin is critical of teacher training, that it so rarely addresses this kind of situation: “There’s not even a conversation about that conversation.”

18:02 - I close the track with the echoing line, “that’s it… an education” from Freddie Gibbs and Madlib’s “Education” (feat. Yasiin Bey & Black Thought) (2019).