<Back

Featured Art Group / Exco: HIPHOP

By Sarah Mirk

“I don’t think my neighbors like me too much,” Paul Bateman ’07 said as two giant Harris speakers blared beats to a mostly empty auditorium this Monday. Bateman has been DJing since last April and now provides the two turntables for Monday night Hip-Hop Elementz.

Grinnell’s hip-hop group formed at the beginning of the second semester last year, initiated by several students and the now-departed German language assistant’s love of the music. The group started hosting weekly hip-hop get-togethers, calling the informal gatherings “Elementz.” At first, Elementz members played hip-hop off of CDs and hung out and listened to it. This semester, aspiring DJs are welcome to scratch on Bateman’s turntables and, soon, there will be a college-provided set. “It’ll be a little bit of everything, usually all at once,” Bateman said. “Usually someone will dance, and someone will scratch. Someone will beatbox, and someone will rap.”

Delwin Pinkins ’06 grew up with hip-hop. “My father had turntables back then, because he would listen to the eight-track in the Cadillac.” Then, his parents banned hip-hop’s offensive song lyrics from his house. The ban put him on hiatus from hip-hop and rap until the eighth grade, when he met some kids who would hang out and rap.

“They just challenged me, put me on the microphone and just told me, ‘Come up with something,’” Pinkins said. “I just started coming up with things in my life, problems in my life, and from then I just started freestyling, just doing my thing.”

This year, Pinkins wants the hip-hop club to branch out to more Grinnellians in order to raise awareness about what he considers a misconception surrounding hip-hop.

“The hip-hop they don’t like is the commercialized hip-hop, the commercialized rap,” he said. “A lot of people just listen to the beat, not the words.”

Branching out includes starting a website, a graffiti wall in Harris for artists and even meeting with Russell K. Osgood to invite him to attend Elementz as an honorary guest (Osgood cancelled at the last minute).

This Monday, while some of the group toyed with beats on the turntables or sat nodding their heads along to the beat, Rico Howard ’09 leaned against the stage, typing on his laptop. Howard started making beats on his computer as a sophomore in high school and now fills his iTunes playlists with songs of his own creation.

“I should be doing my homework when I’m doing this but, you know,” he said, clicking on a track called “Nostalgia.” “Creativity comes out of nowhere. Since I can’t use the garbage can outside to make noise, I use this.” “Nostalgia” began piping from the computer speakers with a few slow notes from a piano, the sound of finger-snapping coming in on the beat and causing Kali Otto-Gentry ’09 to laugh: “You love the snaps.”

Neither Howard nor Otto-Gentry were nervous about moving to Iowa, where good hip-hop can be scarce. They both remembered meeting the hip-hop group when they prospied on campus and, besides, hip-hop is “a privilege to spread,” said Howard.

<Back