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Learning Goals

• You’ll examine how artists can use hip hop to explore personally meaningful statements, and how the structure of the music can support those ideas. 
• You’ll explore the evolution of hip hop, how artists build on and respond to the work of others in exciting ways, and how it inspires artists from other genres. 
• You’ll make connections between art and ideas outside of art, like societal and interpersonal issues, and explore how to use art to express yourself. 

What to Expect

This concert is approximately 25 minutes long and features Javier Starks performing on stage with a DJ (named DJ 2-Tone Jones), keyboardist (named Federico Pena), drummer (named Brendan Mills), and bass guitar player (named Johnathan Smalls). Javier wears a white t-shirt with “Model Voter” printed in black letters. Throughout the concert, the video zooms in and out on Javier and the other performers, who are wearing face masks. 

Accessibility: 

• Click the CC button on the video player to view captions. 
• Click on the arrow on the right side of the player to access the video with ASL interpretation. 
• Learn more tips to make your viewing experience sensory-friendly.

Here are the songs performed in this video, along with tips for what you can listen for during each song.  

• “Glasperlude 2” (00:20) – This song is about what it means to be an emcee (MC) and why Javier refers to himself as an emcee “squared.” Listen for...how the song’s lyrics loop back to the prerecorded vocal sample (“Emcee squared, emcee equals...”) so that Javier is giving different answers to what being an emcee means to him. 

• “In Your Eyes” (02:03) – This love song is an example of how hip hop isn’t limited to music that may sound “tough” or “hard,” but instead, can include a wide range of emotional expressions, like gentleness and tenderness. Listen for...how Javier switches up his flow (a rapper’s vocal style) by mixing rapping with singing. 

• “Questions” (05:22) – This song is a series of big-picture, challenging questions that Javier collected while traveling the world, which helped him gain more social empathy (a type of emotional superpower that builds bridges of understanding between different groups and cultures). Listen for...your turn to rap the song’s chorus (which repeats the phrase, “It’s the questions, it’s the questions, baby”). What types of questions do you wonder about? 

• “I’m Good” (10:50) – Javier reflects on the struggles that he and his mother have faced while he was growing up, including him falling into dangerous activities and her dealing with cancer. Listen for...honest lyrics about how hard it can be to pursue dreams that don’t match what your loved ones want for you (“I know things could’ve turned out better...”) and the pressure to act tough in the face of challenges (“I play the tough guy but deep inside the feeling it kills...”). 

• “Runnin” (15:08) – In this song, Javier reflects on distinctions between chasing your dreams and running away from your fears to avoid feeling cornered by regrets—we can choose what motivates us. Listen for...words of advice to encourage and empower yourself against self-doubt and others’ criticisms. 

• “K-Lo-K” (20:21) – Javier speaks about his connection to his neighborhood and community, using Spanish slang for a title that roughly translates to “What’s up?” or “What’s happening?” Listen for...the way the electronic instrument (the turntables) interacts with the live instruments (keyboard, guitar, drum set), and watch the way the DJ manipulates the turntables to change playback in real time. 

Hip Hop Culture

Want to explore an in-depth coverage of hip hop culture? Visit our resource, Hip Hop: A Culture of Vision and Voice, for more history, context, and key vocabulary about the six elements of hip hop:  

• Breaking: The Dance Style of Hip Hop 
• DJing: The Artist at the Turntable 
• MCs: Masters of Rhythm, Rhyme, and Flow 
• Writing: Graffiti and Hip Hop Culture 
• Knowledge: A Philosophy of Hip Hop 
• Hip Hop Theater and Literary Arts 

An Emcee Equals... 

In hip hop’s early years, its music scene focused on the emcee (MC), the disc jockey (DJ), and the dance floor. The MC—short for “master of ceremonies”—functions as the lyrical storyteller. The MC might make all the needed announcements during a live show; but the job of an MC then and now is as a cultural commentator that activates an audience’s experience with their energy, wordplay, wit, and elevation of cultural topics and ideas. Through hip hop, the MC creates the narrative space for celebrating achievements and voicing concerns within the community, showcasing the musical opportunity to share news as well as politically engaged perspectives of the world (think of artists like Rapsody and Kendrick Lamar). Rappers emerged as a somewhat distinct group as rap gained commercial success. They were the voices and personas that created and sold the records. In some ways, the talents and responsibilities of rappers overlap with MCs, and an MC might also rap. The interaction with the audience is the big difference. 

Creating Poetic Flow

An MC or rapper’s “flow” is crucial to their performance. The flow is the combination of rhyme and rhythm to create the rap’s desired effect: fluid and soothing to communicate romance, for example (like Javier’s “In Your Eyes”); staccato and harsh to signal anger and conflict. Increasingly, students of hip hop culture recognize the best MCs as accomplished formal poets. They rap complex rhyme schemes, mostly built on a rock-solid four-beat rhythm, or meter. But again, a good MC surprises audiences with syncopation and other off-the-beat techniques. Hip hop fans reserve special respect for MCs with freestyle skills—the ability to improvise fresh rhymes while standing in the heat of the spotlight. 

Javier Starks positions himself as a conscious MC who is very intentional in his music-making approaches, including the artists from which he draws inspiration. There are several layers of musical dialogue at play within his music. For example, Robert Glasper made a song called “Dillalude 2,” whose title is an homage to influential music producer James Yancey (also known as Jay Dee and Jay Dilla); Javier’s song “Glasperlude 2” follows the same pattern and plays off of Robert’s last name, paying respect to both Glasper and Yancey. Javier’s song “Questions” is in dialogue with Common’s song “The Questions,” for which Jay Dilla was one of the writers and producers. These connections tell a layered story of artists inspiring other artists through musical sounds and cultural messaging, which leads to chains of music continuously inspiring music. 

Spinning the Turntables

DJing is the artistic handling of beats, breaks, and music; and the DJ’s sound system is a laboratory for making music magic. You could think of the DJ as the performance’s conductor. While a conductor guides how live musicians should play a piece, the DJ controls a pre-recorded sound’s details, such as how fast or slow, and loud or soft, a track plays. Twin turntables (sometimes referred to as “ones and twos,” like in the phrase “DJ 2-Tone Jones on the ones and twos”) are standard, allowing the DJ to switch easily between songs, or spin and manipulate records in tandem to create effects or unique musical combinations. The turntables are wired to a receiver, amplifier, and speakers. The DJ may use headphones to cue up the next song or song segment as the current music plays. Then the DJ uses a mixer or fader to make transitions from one turntable to the other. Today’s DJs often incorporate digitized and computerized components as well. Learn more about the basics of turntablism in our video series, DJ 101. 

• Javier emphasizes that positive music was able to take him all around the world, and that he expresses himself as a “catalyst for positive change.” Think about how these ideas about positivity in creative expression are significant or important within the hip hop industry. 

• We all deal with stereotypes, or set ideas about what a person or thing might be like, which may or may not have any truth to them. What images or adjectives come to mind when you hear the words “rap” or “hip hop”? Are these stereotypes? Are they totally fair? In songs like “I’m Good,” Javier challenges the stereotype that rap can only be hard and tough, showcasing something affectionate and tender. Can you think of other stereotypes that might not be totally fair, like stereotypes that may come from people who don’t understand hip hop or give it a chance? How would you challenge them? 

• In “Questions,” Javier lists a series of tough questions that ask why the world is the way it is, and hints that just because things are a certain way, that doesn’t mean they need to stay that way. If you could ask the world a tough question, what would it be? What would you change? Take a listen to Javier’s questions and choose one that resonates with you. How would you answer that question to Javier? How would you explain your perspective to someone who might feel differently? 

Visualize It 

Sometimes, songwriters and music producers are inspired by other artists and will sample (lift a section of an existing recording) to create a new work. Sampling is very important to hip hop and recalls the genre’s roots in block parties where existing records were manipulated and made into something new. But sampling appears in other genres as well. To hear some examples, listen to “Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)” by the Chi-Lites. Is anything familiar? Then, listen to how a part of this song featuring the horns is used in Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love.” Or listen to funk and disco musician Edward Birdsong’s “Cola Bottle Baby” and hear how it was sampled by Daft Punk in “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” To learn more about sampling, check out the book Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop by Joseph Glenn Schloss. 

Javier’s song “Runnin” samples a song by the same name by a group called The Pharcyde. While Javier’s “Runnin” uses the original song’s instrumental music and chorus lyrics (“Run run, run run / Can’t keep runnin away”), it has different verses throughout the rest of the song that represent Javier’s ideas. Sampling can be applied to other art forms, too, such as collaging. Using magazines, newspapers, or images you can pull from the internet, cut out images, phrases, and ideas that you find inspiring. Arrange these images and words onto a new piece of paper (or in a new document or file, if you’re working digitally), and see what new artwork you can create! 

Write It 

In “Glasperlude 2,” Javier uses wordplay that takes the role of an MC (or emcee) and mixes it with the famous Albert Einstein mathematical equation for energy (E=MC^2), which Javier lyrically writes as “Emcee squared, emcee equals...” What types of wordplay can you create? Think about your hobbies, favorite stories, or topics you’ve been thinking about a lot as possible sources for inspiration. How can you pack creative meaning into your work based on the words you use? Try using literary techniques in your writing such as:  

• Rhymes and near rhymes - making the end of each line sound similar, such as: “Are you happy or are you just content? Is the glass half full, is it full or is it spent?” 
• Internal rhyme - including rhyming words within a line of the poem, such as: “What was made for liberation and unification is now a tool of the nation...” 
• Alliteration - using words that begin with the same sound, such as: “News bearer, a beacon born in these dark days...” 
• Play with shades of meanings for a word, such as the word “happen” in: “I bet you thought it would never happen, we happened to fall in love.” 
• Repetition - repeating words or phrases to highlight an idea, like the way Javier repeats the idea of “Emcee equals”; or to give the piece a structure, like repeating “In your eyes” as a chorus between verses.  

Mix It 

Become a music producer! A music producer is similar to a composer—they create beats, adapt samples from other pieces, and more to make the sound world of a song. Once you have penned your thoughts into lyrics or verses, you might want to try laying your words over a beat or some music. If you play an instrument, you can try creating an original tune. If you want to try a DJ route, there are apps you can use to mix beats and musical tracks to create new songs. For example, by Ampify Music is a free app for iOS (iPhones and iPads) that allows you to customize their creations; Ampify also has  and (both free) which allow you to create more sounds and record live sounds respectively. Do you want to use samples or reference other pieces, like Javier did with Glasper and Yancey? What sample would be meaningful in connection with the words you’ve created? How can you use music to tell your stories and describe the world as you see it?

Emcee, songwriter, and poet Javier Starks fuses clean lyrics with vocal melodies to create his unique flow. He has introduced his fan base and new audiences to the possibilities and creativity of curse-free hip hop with his live performances filling rooms across North America and on international stages. Embraced by many of the music industry’s biggest names, including Robert Glasper, Common, Miles Mosley, and Keyon Harrold, Javier finds inspiration in every genre of music while still paying tribute to hip hop’s “golden era.” His music is youth-friendly, yet edgy, and skilled enough to appeal to music lovers of all ages and genres. 

In addition to his solo career, Javier is an educator, youth worker, and skateboarder. Given the opportunity to have his positive message reach youth from Baltimore and D.C. since 2005, he uses his artistic skills to connect with youth on a daily basis. He made the decision that he’d be the role model that most were seeking. When asked about his mission and goals for youth, Javier commented, “I teach kids why self-respect and respecting others is so important when expressing ourselves through art.” 

This video concert also features Federico Pena (piano/keys), Brendan Mills (drums), Johnathan Smalls (bass guitar), and DJ 2-Tone Jones (turntable).  

To learn more about Javier Starks, visit the artist’s official website:  

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Generous support for educational programs at the Kennedy Center is provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

Gifts and grants to educational programs at the Kennedy Center are provided by The Paul M. Angell Family Foundation; Bank of America; Capital One; The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; Carnegie Corporation of New York; The Ednah Root Foundation; Harman Family Foundation; William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust; the Kimsey Endowment; The Kiplinger Foundation; Laird Norton Family Foundation; Lois and Richard England Family Foundation; Dr. Gary Mather and Ms. Christina Co Mather; The Markow Totevy Foundation; Dr. Gerald and Paula McNichols Foundation; The Morningstar Foundation; Myra and Leura Younker Endowment Fund; The Irene Pollin Audience Development and Community Engagement Initiatives;

Prince Charitable Trusts; Dr. Deborah Rose and Dr. Jan A. J. Stolwijk; Rosemary Kennedy Education Fund; The Embassy of the United Arab Emirates; The Victory Foundation; The Volgenau Foundation; Volkswagen Group of America; Jackie Washington; GRoW @ Annenberg and Gregory Annenberg Weingarten and Family; Wells Fargo; and generous contributors to the Abe Fortas Memorial Fund and by a major gift to the fund from the late Carolyn E. Agger, widow of Abe Fortas. Additional support is provided by the National Committee for the Performing Arts..

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