miles

one of the group members for my black pop culture class is a guy named miles. this is a CES 336 class, which counts for my minor. most of the people in the course are either CES majors or minors. it's a nice, happy, diverse club. i am one of the only white girls in class. it's a lovely change.

there are also students in the class who are not majors or minors- this course fulfills at Tier III requirement for graduation. needless to say, some of these students stick out like sore thumbs. those who are not in the "club" of CES folk look like scared puppies- and most of them are white as well. honestly, they probably haven't seen that many brown people in a WSU class before. the class is loud, boistrous, and out of the ordinary. it's "edutainment" as KRS-One (a rapper, listen to his stuff) calls it. i love it.

for this semester we were put into groups for the dreaded final group project. we did not get to choose our groups and i happened to end up in the only all white group (a change for WSU). we're writing about political hip hop-- i promised myself we wouldn't be lame.

while i immersed myself in the lyrics of KRS-One, Public Enemy, and scholarly work on hip hop (yes, it's out there and a growing field) we asked Miles to do his piece on the music composition of hip hop-- the sampling, the disco rebellion, the scratching, etc. we knew he was a trumpet major so i was pretty excited to see what he came up with, considering in know nothing about music composition.

this skinny white kid who comes in every day blasting jazz on these ginormous headphones killed it. he downloaded this virtual dj thing with turntables you can scratch on your computer and demonstrated how to sample stuff. he made a break beat to play while the rest of us were giving our presentation. he put on the gangsta look, made sure we all had our MC names and taught us how to properly hold a mic like an MC and how to scratch records. he was phenomenal. his name is miles raker so he went by dj moon raker- so brilliant.

as he was going through his thing the class couldn't stop laughing- they loved it because they wouldn't expect this to come from a skinny white kid, and miles bought in to the whole dj persona. while not a gangsta in any way that you would imagine, miles might be the most gangsta of them all because he did his thang. skinny white kid with sweet sampled break beats...who woulda thunk it.