American Scientist

Welcome to the first episode of a series on STEM+Art and Inclusive Science Communication! For this episode, Jordan Anderson, MA in Bioethics and Science Policy at Duke University explores how science communicators are using music, namely hip-hop and rap, to make science more reflexive, equitable, and engaging to audiences. This episode features Baba Brinkman, Canadian rapper and science communicator, Ryan Briggs, Duke University environmental science and music student, and Mark Fitzpatrick, a biology professor at the University of Toronto and friend of Brinkman’s who has explored how Brinkman’s work can influence science classrooms.

Transcript

Jordan Anderson 00:00

Science communication!

Inclusive science communication!

Welcome to American Scientist’s D&IComSci, the Science for All Podcast where we aim to explore how science communicators are making science more reflexive, equitable, and engaging to all audiences. I'm your host, Jordan Anderson, an intern at Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. I'm also a master's student at Duke University in Bioethics and Science Policy, and an early career science communicator. For this episode, we're focusing on how scientists and science communicators are using music to make science more reflective, equitable, and engaging. But first, why do we need inclusive science communicators?

Well, science communicators use many different mediums—media, entertainment, graphic novels, art—to attract audiences to science. Inclusive science communicators recognize that some people in the audiences that they speak to might belong to communities that have been historically marginalized from science. For example, in 1932, scientists injected males in the African American community with syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that causes neurological and brain damage. They wanted to study its effects but denied these African American men treatment. Many of them died. And it's instances like this one that have made certain communities uncomfortable engaging science even today. So the question is now why are science communicators using music to make science more inclusive?

Baba Brinkman: Rapguide to Evolution, “Group Selection” 01:27

…slime molds and amoebas. Each of them is a separate single-celled organism. But when they get into trouble, when they run out of food…

Jordan Anderson 01:53

I'll go back to a conversation I had with a good friend of mine, Ryan Briggs. Ryan, like myself, is a black male at Duke University working in inclusive science communication. We were talking about why music might be an excellent way to engage audiences with science. I told him a few weeks ago I had come across a blog by Max Audience Exchange [editor’s note: Music Audience Exchange, also known as MAX]. This is a tech company that works at the intersection of branding, marketing, and music. Music, it said, presents sound and language that ultimately define a person's identity. This drives fans to connect with the artists who create the music they love. And for many fans, the connection they feel to the artist is part of their identity.

Ryan Briggs 02:30

Music is so central because I think it's one of like, the most primal things that we have other than dance and I can't dance. So, I remember in those like two years that I wasn't in school. I didn't pick up a book like I was in school, but I listened to music every day. And the first thing I talked about when I was trying to make new friends was like, “Oh, what music do you listen to?”

Jordan Anderson 02:54

Ryan and I both studied hard sciences as undergrads. I studied chemistry at Xavier University of Louisiana before coming to Duke, and Ryan studied engineering before switching to environmental science and music. We were both familiar with how some educators inexperienced in inclusive science communication may treat science as for an academically elite audience rather than for all people.

Ryan Briggs 03:18

Scientists, engineers, educated people who are trying to educate others often think the answer is “I'm going to write a long 15-page paper with the biggest words you could ever imagine and these graphs with no titles on them, and that's going to teach the layperson what they need to know.” And I think it's more important that we meet everyone where they are. And where everyone is, is listening to the radio or they have like some free version of Spotify or they're singing music in their head. Every culture has music. Even people who cannot hear have their own versions of how they interpret music. So, it's important to me that we are meeting people as scientists, as engineers — meeting people where they are so that they can learn what they need to know.

Jordan Anderson 04:07

The Handbook of Psychology finds that certain areas might lack the critical infrastructure to support science learning. This is why meeting people where they are is so important to inclusive science communication. Newsgeneration.com, an issue-driven media firm, finds that 90% of adults 18 to 34 are reached by radio alone. This doesn't even consider accessing music through television and cell phones. Through music, scientists and science communicators can work to reach areas with limited science infrastructure and help create a more science-aware society.

Ryan Briggs 04:41

But music is also you know, one of the biggest cultural defining movements that we have, especially in the western context. This was right after “Homecoming” by Beyonce came out, her Coachella performance, and just seeing the ripple waves of that. And so I was thinking, “Well, what are other things that can be talked about in like a pop music space to sort of get people to think differently?”

Jordan Anderson 05:07

One of these other things is and for a while now has been science.

[Musical interlude]

Ryan, of course, isn't the only one working at the forefront of inclusive science communication through the music industry. Professionals like hip-hop and rap artist Baba Brinkman, and molecular biologist and rapper Raven the Science Maven have formed their careers in music-centered inclusive science communication. I was fortunate enough to speak with Baba Brinkman on his successes in hip-hop, rap, and science, his thoughts on what we should be working towards in inclusive science communication, and the initiatives he's starting to bring together: artists and scientists through music.

Baba Brinkman: Rap Guide to Evolution, "Natural Selection 2.0" 00:57

…Adam and Eve, and that Edenic myth, because their family tree is showing some genetic drift. Taken from this bald-headed non-celibate monk with the lyrical equivalent of an elephant's trunk. It's time to elevate your mind state, and celebrate your kinship with the primates. The weak and the strong, who got it goin’ on, we live in the dark for so long. The weak and the strong, Darwin got it goin’ on, creationism is dead wrong.
“The view which most naturalists entertain…, namely that each species has been independently created, is erroneous.”
–Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

Jordan Anderson 06:30

Earlier this year, in mid-July and while quarantined at home, Sigma Xi and American Scientist connected me to Baba Brinkman to learn more about how an entertainer and hip-hop and rap artist incorporates inclusive science communication into his work. I called him on Zoom. That was really the only way to hold meetings at the time. And so, I quickly learned. Baba Brinkman: he's bald, he's white, he's Canadian, he wears these enormous studio headphones, and he's sitting in front of a mic. He's a hip-hop artist rapping about science and working in inclusive science communication. And his experience is also very interesting. Rather than coming from a science background, Baba comes exclusively from entertainment.

So Baba, could you tell us a little bit more about how you became a rapper and about how you got involved in the science community in the first place?

Baba Brinkman 07:18

Yeah. So I started out as a sort of avid hip-hop head and poetry nerd in the late 2000s, let's say, or late 1990s and early 2000s—dating myself there. But I was I did an English Lit degree. And I saw some parallels between sort of English literary traditions and hip-hop culture. So, I wrote my master's thesis comparing like Medieval and Renaissance poetry competitions with freestyle battling and hip-hop. And I argued that they were both sort of products of highly stratified unequal societies. Medieval England, you know, there's the aristocracy and the common people. But there was this sort of new emerging literary culture where a skill with words and talent and creativity could get you recognized at court for your skill, and you could be promoted by the king to become a public servant, or courtier, or whatever. So, people were competing with their poetry to get recognized by the aristocrats and elevated in society. But that was how to kind of feel of meritocracy because you're not born into it. It's like whether you got the skills or not to do the poetry nice, and like entertain the people. And I see a lot of those themes in the Canterbury Tales. And looking at hip-hop, I would hear that in the rappers’ lyrics as well. And their story would be like, ‘I came from nothing, people recognize my talent, and now look at me, I’m the man.’ And I was like, well, that's kind of what the poets were boasting and bragging about in the Middle Ages, too. So I sort of wrote that parallel at the same time as I started rapping myself, sort of poetic literary-themed lyrics, trying to figure out my path in hip-hop as a bookish suburban white Canadian, you know, not really sharing the background with the seminal artists but a lot of passion for the artform. So I did several years of like literature-themed rap on tour and release like a record with the Canterbury Tales done as rap, and I did like Beowulf and Gilgamesh and all these literary epic sort of bringing my thesis to life in storytelling, rap style—Allah, Slick Rick, or Rakim, KRS-One. And then at a certain point a biologist reached out to me and said, ‘You know you’re pretty good at bringing like academic topics into hip-hop, maybe you could do the Origin of Species.’ And this was in 2008-2009. I sort of premiered my Rap Guide to evolution…

Baba Brinkman: Rap Guide to Evolution, "Natural Selection 2.0" 01:35

It’s time to reveal my identity. I’m the manifestation of tens of millions of centuries of sexual selection best believe I’m the best of the best of the best of the best…

Baba Brinkman 09:48

…which was a really fun project because I saw a lot of evolutionary—sort of Darwinian—themes in hip-hop as well. I've sort of made like a path of finding academic themes that are already in hip-hop and showing people how they're there. So like survival of the fittest is like survival of the fittest on the mic. And rappers are competing for, like their spot. But you know, Pras from The Fugees says there's too many MCs, not enough mics. And that's the Malthusian principle that leads to Darwinian evolution. If there were enough mics for all the MCs, there'll be no competition, and there'll be no differentiation between skilled and unskilled performers. So, I sort of wove those themes of sort of natural selection at the social level for competing for attention from listeners and fans as like a key theme in hip-hop culture into how to explain natural selection. You know, the response from people to this concept was really positive. So, I parlayed it into a whole series of Rap Guide to various science topic albums and live shows and this new teaching platform tries to sort of make it more widely available to educators, you know, beyond just playing a single video or me coming to do a performance at the school. It's like another level of engagement, where you go look at the science behind the lyrics. And that's my whole story.

Jordan Anderson 11:04

Now, of course, there are plenty of examples of pop culture and entertainment artists using music to communicate current scientific advancements and issues even in historically marginalized communities. Katie L. Burke, and award-winning science writer with a PhD in biology wrote an article for American Scientist that lists some of these: GZA’s song “Spark” which served as a musical accompaniment to the launch of the Juno spacecraft to Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA,” which compares how the world views his race versus the way he sees himself, and how he is has been shaped by those two conflicting views. What's important to take away from Baba's experience is that not every scientist needs to learn how to rap in order to engage audiences that might normally be left out of their reach. Rather, it's this collaboration between scientist and musician that is a quintessential example of effective inclusive science communication.

Baba Brinkman 11:59

I think it helped that a scientist reached out to me and said, ‘This is a collaboration, you know, you're good at the arts, I've got the science down, write some rhymes and then….’ You know, I was starting from scratch to a certain degree, like I had read popular science books and was interested in evolution, but I would never stand on stage and say, like, ‘I can tell you the technical details of how the research works.’ Like I would never have woken up in the morning as an artist and been like, ‘I'm gonna try to explain evolutionary biology to the world,’ you know, it just seems like a weird idea. And you don't even know what you would possibly do with it. Like, even if you made it, what would you do with it? You know, but the first scientist that reached out to me, Mark Pallen, you know, he had a vision. He was like, ‘I want you to be the entertainer at my science conference.’ And I was like, ‘I'm not a science rapper.’ And he was like, ‘But you will be.’ And he gave me this sort of eight-to-10-month lead time where he's like, ‘Here's what you got to do: You read these books; you write a bunch of raps about them; you send me the lyrics of your raps; by the time you come to this event, you know, you'll have it down, I'll help you with any of the science you need help with.’ And you know, he already had funding. Like, the hip-hop industry is very profit driven, science rap, probably a little bit less so. But it was him coming with a budget and saying, ‘I'm gonna fly you to England, from Canada, and pay you to go on tour with me for seven days. And we're going to do like five lectures at five different colleges, including like Cambridge, and London School of Economics, and Birmingham University. So, get your Darwin raps ready, because you're gonna be like the main event at all these shows.’ So, I give him a lot of credit for really actually having this vision. And me being like, ‘Alright, sounds dope, I'm gonna start reading right now.’ You know, and like, what I have evolved into as a science communicator was really attributable to the vision that a scientist had, that doesn't, he isn't in arts, but he did see the potential of the arts to, you know, build the bridges that he wanted to build. So, there's like a recruitment factor, you know? Sometimes now I'll start a new project on whatever the science topic is, and I'll be like, ‘Oh, now I got to go find some experts on this.’ You know, now I've got to, like, reach out to the people in the field that know, and say, ‘Check out this rap I wrote, you know, would you be down to give me a peer review and let me know if there's anything weird about it?’ And then if, you know, once they get to the point where they're like, ‘You know what that rip rap really does represent the scientific consensus,’ then I'm like, ‘Okay, now give me a testimonial so I can put it in my press release.’ And, you know, tell everybody that this is fact base or whatever, you know, so now I'm approaching scientists who wouldn't necessarily think of an arts collaboration.

Jordan Anderson 14:42

Earlier, we learned inclusive science communicators work to make science more reflective, equitable, and engaging to audiences.

Hip-hop and rap music are powerful means to connect to audiences that might not always feel represented by or connected to the science that affects them each day. See, hip-hop and rap music have their origins in the 1970s housing projects of New York—in the Bronx and Harlem—in primarily Black and Indigenous People of Color, underserved, and low-income communities. While there was no one particular founder of hip-hop and rap music, people like DJ Kool Herc, Kurtis Blow, and groups like The Last Poets helped create this music genre we know and love today. And all of them were part of the African American community.

As we’ve also learned, music can drive audiences to connect with artists who create the music they love because the connection they feel to the artist becomes a part of their identity.

On the other hand, hip-hop and rap music’s history is also connected to a history of gang violence. A lot of this has to do with the genre originating from low-income and underserved communities. Still, critics have associated hip-hop and rap with promoting criminal activity, misogyny, promiscuity, and materialism. Though not a Black, Indigenous Person of Color himself, Baba aims to promote hip-hop and rap as a gateway to success both in these communities and in the scientific and academic sphere. His work shows that by forming collaborations between scientists, who work at the cutting edge of new research, and artists engaged with communities like the hip-hop and rap industry, science can expand its reach in more inclusive and representative ways. Baba mentioned this: just as there are plenty of scientists looking to reach society with their research, there are plenty of music artists looking for new opportunities to perform, develop fan bases, and stand out.

Baba Brinkman 16:34

You know, there's a lot of artists that used to envision themselves on tour playing concerts who are now like, ‘Damn now what do I do?’ Actually, rapguide.com has a whole like request bid concept behind it as well that hopefully will get more people writing and engaging with scientists and sort of connect people that wish there was a science-based rap about something with sort of smart young artists that could totally tackle the work but would never think of it as a viable pathway. So, you know, that's one of my ambitions for the site. So far, it's just me doing it all. But I'm recruiting some help. And you know whether it's through the Rap Guide platform, or just in general, like I encourage any scientist listening to this, like, ‘Figure out what artists are doing interesting things in your city, and propose working with them on a science communication project.’ And if any artists are listening to this, like scientists are not hard to hit up. They're all on Twitter, you know, say like, ‘Find a scientist researching something interesting and say, like, have you heard my music? Or have you seen my art. I'd love to collaborate,” and sometimes something cool will come of it.

Jordan Anderson 17:38

Rap Guide also serves to foster these sorts of collaborations at the classroom level: students and teachers can engage with science-rap, and the sorts of scientist and musician interactions to not only improve their experience learning science but do it in a way that is more inclusive of the different interests of each student.

Baba Brinkman 17:54

I knew some teachers were playing my music videos in their classes because somebody would comment on YouTube and be like, ‘My biology teacher played this and I got an A,’ or whatever. But you know, there's just no way to formalize or track it. So, I had started thinking about like, ‘You know, what tools could I give a teacher who was gonna play my video that would take it to the next level?’

Jordan Anderson 18:14

One teacher that's used Baba’s platform rapguide.com is Mark Fitzpatrick. Mark is a biology professor at the University of Toronto, and Baba and I spoke with him to hear his thoughts on rapguide.com.

Mark Fitzpatrick 18:26

It becomes a way to engage students. The students that worked in my class were just so into this because it's something different. And it's something that they can relate to. It's music that they like. It's popular culture. And when you show that science can exist beyond the textbook, it takes on a whole new level of relevance. Then I was teaching a second-year evolution class, and I would play a few of the songs at the beginning of class, and I found that it really loosened the students up. They got to listen. I would put the video up on the screen, and they would, you know, take a look at that. And so then, that was in the in the winter term. And it was during that term that you contacted me about whether we'd be interested to do this. And I’m like ‘I'm already showing these videos.’ Now if I can get them. And they're already partly engaged. They come up to me after, ‘Who was that? What were they talking about? What did this line mean?’ And so now, here's an opportunity for the students to take a delve in. And they loved an assignment that is just atypical. It's not just ’Go complete this set of pages, fill in these blanks, answer these questions.’ There was complete freedom and creativity, which is something that we don't often give biology students. They were told to take a few lines of your lyrics and annotate them however they want. That can be to completely just give us the proper science behind it; try and look for the hidden meaning—some kind of double meaning if they were interested in that—the science and double entendre that could be there; it was up to them. And we, as you’ve seen, Baba, we've seen a variety of responses—a variety of levels that students got into—because there was some repeated annotations. So, with 125 students, each sort of set of lyrics got annotated at least a few times. And I think the comments I'm hearing afterward was that they loved that this was just a fun assignment. There was science to it. There was biology to it. But it was not a task. It was not a, you know, grin-and-bear this assignment, ‘I got to get this done.’ They actually enjoyed it, were working on it, were talking with each other, sharing ideas and stuff, and it got them thinking outside of the textbook. And that's what I think is really important.

Jordan Anderson 20:55

So we're running short on time, but I want to quickly speak to why we're making this podcast on inclusive science communication in the first place. I'll leave you with one last takeaway from the conversation I had with Ryan on how inclusive science communication transformed the way he thinks about science, even at Duke.

Ryan Briggs 21:10

It makes me think bigger than our Duke bubble, which is something that's brought up all the time. And when I think of projects or I'm in class discussions, I always think of ‘Well, what about the people whose voices are often not brought up in these elite spaces: the undocumented person who's working full time and in school full time; how do we think about the Uber elites, also, you know, the people who are so high up that they don't care about the middleman?’ And I make sure that I think of all those perspectives when I'm trying to tell stories and I'm trying to educate people so that they can get well rounded.

Jordan Anderson 21:52

Inclusive science communication involves thinking about these spaces and fostering these sorts of connections with individuals representing these communities. Music is just one example of how scientists can reach audiences through collaborations with the artists who create music they love because the connection they feel to the artist becomes a part of their identity. In future episodes, we'll continue to explore other ways scientists can make their work more inclusive and the nuances that may cause these techniques to be more relevant or less relevant in these spaces.

This episode of D&IComSci has been brought to you by American Scientist and Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. Special thanks to DuArts and Small Town Records as well as its members Ryan Briggs, Alexa Burnston, and MAUI. Also, thanks to Baba Brinkman and Mark Fitzpatrick for speaking with me today. Today's music choices come from Free Music Archive, Small Town Records, and Baba Brinkman. If you want to hear more from them, be sure to check out Baba Brinkman on YouTube and MAUI on SoundCloud and Spotify. Also be sure to check out rapguide.com. If you like what you heard today, follow American Scientist and follow me on twitter @jordan_artsci. I'm your host Jordan. Thanks for listening.