Review: i used to love to dream, by A.D. Carson

Abstract

Several years ago, I was on the steering committee for one of those long-range strategic visioning initiatives at my university. The kick-off event featured our university president in public conversation with Mary Sue Coleman, former president of the University of Michigan. After forty minutes of discussing campus planning, new funding models, and the future of global land-grant universities, they closed with a joke, “We’re now going to talk about football” (the joke being that both Virginia Tech and U of M have rich football traditions). Yet in thinking about universities of the future and considering what mid-twenty-first century higher education might look like, discussions of popular cultural elements like football should not be dismissed as jokes. To many residents of Virginia, and I’m sure Michigan as well, the maroon and orange “VT” logo, or the maize and blue “M,” seen throughout the state each Saturday in the fall, is the most ubiquitous reference to our schools. For state populaces to continue to support their public universities, for shrinking pipelines of state funding to keep from drying up, we must be mindful of such prominent symbols, evoking powerful commitments to Hokie or Big Blue nation. Naturally, these considerations need to move beyond football. Not everyone loves sports (particularly academics). But aside from high-profile athletics, what other areas of popular culture might universities think to invest in? On the day of that kick-off event, I thought of examples like production studios—is it possible that in thirty years the VT logo could call to mind a track-record for exemplary films and short-run television series? I now realize that as a scholar of hip hop, I should have been thinking closer to home.A.D. Carson’s i used to love to dream, the first peer-reviewed rap album from an academic publisher, exemplifies the kind of forward-thinking public engagement I had in mind. It makes sense that hip hop, which straddles the line between popular culture and cultural critique, would lead this charge. Despite its frequent anti-educational leanings, hip hop has found a home in the academy, evidenced by its integration into curricula in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as by a handful of distinguished fellowships/professorships, university archive collections, and hip-hop studies journals. Carson is assistant professor of hip hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia, where he runs the Rap Lab. He’s part of a new generation of scholar-practitioners, poised to transform the relationship between critical academics and popular appeal. In publishing i used to love to dream, the University of Michigan Press has taken a bold step in supporting these new horizons of scholarly work.i used to love to dream (open-access and available for free through the UMP website) is the third in a series of mixtap/e/ssays released by Carson. Like the two previous pieces in his sleepwalking series, the work is steeped in sentiments of location—specifically, the spaces between Carson’s Decatur, Illinois upbringing (where he’s from) and his current position of rising academic celebrity (where he’s at). Carson’s UVA appointment is both prestigious and path-breaking. Fittingly, he has been recognized through numerous media pieces about him and speaking invitations. Yet, as Carson writes in his liner-note introduction, i used to love to dream is an effort to describe and work through the “loneliness & alienation” that accompanies him on his pathway to what folks call “success.”Many songs end with audio clips from a 1940s-era documentary on Decatur called Playtown, USA—calling to mind the famous Middletown studies of the early twentieth century by Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrel Lynd. Carson’s subaltern, Black perspective on “crack, USA” (his name for Playtown) compares with Luke Eric Lassiter’s The Other Side of Middletown.1 But where Lassiter’s award-winning presentation of Black Middletown (i.e. Muncie, Indiana) recognizes the collaborative efforts of more than a dozen co-authors/contributors, i used to love to dream, despite its various production, mixing, mastering, and photography credits, feels like Carson alone with his anxieties, indifferences, and convictions (note: the short film that accompanies the album on the UMP website highlights his collaborators).I was casually familiar with Carson’s past work, but, as his most outstanding release to date and something I was invited to review, i used to love to dream offered me an occasion to deeply listen to this remarkable artist-academic’s craft. Fairly or unfairly, a critique lodged against many young artists working in the academy is that they lack the talent needed to thrive in the art world on their own. An academic career is thus viewed as the adjacent, safer path. From Carson’s cadence, stance, and formidable wit on “framing pain,” which opens the album, to his closing track, “asterisk,” with its translucent Deiontrae Lawrence-produced beat, there should be no debate that “Aydee the Great” is a first-rate lyricist. Indeed, the more I listen to his lyrics (helped by a 78-page liner-note/lyric book), the more impressed I become. To me, the more fascinating questions about this AD/UMP collaboration surround its target audience.Many popular musics wade through the tension between aspirational growth and speaking to core listenerships. i used to love to dream will undoubtedly reach multiple overlapping audiences. I won’t bother much with the old school traditionalists who scoff at the idea of a rap album as peer-reviewed scholarship. They’re not an audience. They’re a dwindling bunch. Yet there are those self-fashioned hip academics, who will be easily impressed by Carson’s mixtap/e/ssays as much for what it is—a celebrated, introspective piece of hip hop scholar-artistry, with a strong social justice orientation—as for how good it is. There’s another, more discriminating, class of academics with firmer commitments against anti-Black racism who recognize the transformative power of Black aesthetic expression to create generative and unquantifiable meanings. These are the folks who appreciate that Aydee has greater ambition than being just another cog in the machine—I place myself most squarely with this group. Finally, in my formulation, there are the downer-than-thou true hip hop heads, wary of the cozy partnership between hip hop and academia, and quick to pounce on any suggestion of selling out or relying on clichés. Where a well-placed Mobb Deep citation or metaphor about “‘making dollars out of sense” may connect with a greater range of listeners, to this group such maneuvers signal that Carson is whom they suspect—someone more interested in catering to the NPR intellectuals than to the real heads.One hip hop producer friend, who had never heard of A.D. until I mentioned him, dismissed the album’s fourth track as “a centrally placed spoken-word piece.” “just in case,” which Carson explains was composed as a letter to his mother, in the event of his untimely death while in the custody of police, is for me i used to love to dream’s most powerful moment. The track features a haunting piano and includes the sounds of tree frogs—signifying nighttime wilderness, where there are no witnesses. Carson’s expanding instructions to his mother, on what not to believe, effectively tap into a deep fear held by many African Americans when encountering law enforcement. My friend dismissed “just in case” for what it is—a spoken-word piece on a rap album that he suspects might dilute what hip hop stands for—hardly bothering to consider whether it is any good or not. Following “just in case,” the album’s mood lifts, crescendoing with my other standout track, “ready,” produced by and featuring Marcus “Truth” Fitzgerald. In a project marked by profound reflection and ambivalence, “ready,” with its nostalgic piano sample, is unambiguously hopeful. Truth’s opening verse is startlingly refreshing—not so much for its brilliance, rather because it’s the one place on the album where we can hear A.D. as not alone.i used to love to dream is an historic recording and piece of popular music scholarship. It is also a major addition to the catalogue of great hip hop music. Accordingly, A.D. Carson should be celebrated for the integrity and character of his work. But as this latest project establishes, he walks the path of a pioneer, defined by its loneliness, and will often be judged foremost for what he is doing rather than for how well he does it.