/ GRADUATION GUIDE / THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2011 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
Wide range of options available for new graduates
BY CLAIRE MCINERNY editor@kansan.com
As some seniors are preparing for jobs and planning their lives after school, some students are experiencing a different scenario the end of college manic
er. One opportunity that enables students to make that happen is through Teach for America. Teach For America is a program that allows recent college graduates to teach in public schools in low-income communities. The assignment lasts for two years.
a way to prolong having to find a job,but rather look at it as a way to find new opportunities and new ways for students to use their passions.She said a lot of politicians who now work in Congress were in the program and are now fighting for education rights.
Four year degree later
Wiechman spent his two years in Saint Lucia doing community development. He helped a farmers' cooperative develop a grant proposal to get funding for a composting project from the United Nations and also taught reading and music at a school.
kn co' rig
The Peace Corps was an attracta-tion for Wichman because
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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2011
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
FOUR-PART SERIES
Same beat, different dance
BY CALVIN MCCONNELL editor@kansan.com
Hip-hop holds weight in the Heartland
Today: The Professor
Next week: The Poet
Nicole Hodges Persley asks her students how homosexuality shows up in hip-hop culture. Can they hear feminism or peaceful expressions of "blackness" in the music once known for misogyny and rape culture? Educated in Los Angeles before directing programs at the Hip Hop Archives at Harvard, Hodges Persley has brought the music's academic study to stereotypically white, conservative Kansas.
Bryan O'Brien throws his lanky arms in the air, cocks his head toward the ceiling and releases a rhythmic cadence from his chest. Standing behind the microphone at the Mirth Cafe, 745 New Hampshire St., downtown on a Friday night, he couldn't have imagined those Vanilla ice verses he memorized in elementary school in North Dakota would lead to this.
Week 3: The Promoter
James Baker bobs his head to a jazz-infused beat as he and a sweaty, eclectic audience in downtown Lawrence get a full serving of Midwestern hip-hop. A white male from a suburban background, he's smack in the middle of the music's target audience, but the 22-year-old self-proclaimed "hipster" promoted tonight's concert and has a vested interest in its success.
n the 1985 guide to the music genre
entitled "Fresh: Hip-Hop Don't Stop," Harlem rapper and hip-hop pioneer Kurtis Blow wrote, "Maybe one day, when I'm old, people will finally realize that rap is here to stay."
hip-hop creators and consumers are increasingly a blend of all races and backgrounds. The genre has diffused globally and exponentially, becoming a major commercial force in fashion, dance and music, including in Lawrence, a small, largely Caucasian town.
nomenon that surrounds it has come a long way since the South Bronx's DJ Afrika Bambataa outlined the four pillars of hip-hop: Emceeing, DJing, break-dancing and graffiti writing.
The art moved from improvisational performances at parties in New York neighborhood centers to breakdancing or "breaking" and "freestyle"
"Maybe one day, when I'm old, people will finally realize that hip-hop is here to stay."
Week 4: The Dancer
Kurtis Blow
Chelsea Ybarra's feet slide across the Robinson Dance Studio floor, her limbs are flowing and her step is in-sync — she's hip-hop and she's "on" tonight. Her skin is painted green as she performs an interpretative dance to Kid Cudi's "Embrace the Martian," living a dream that's literally and conceptually far from her hometown of Ulyssess.
More than a quarter century later, it's safe to stay it stuck around.
Far from the predominantly ethnic and economically-marginalized urban centers hip-hop calls home, and farther from the violent streets in New York City and Los Angeles from which the genre burst onto the popular stage, the promotion, study and performance of hip-hop is influencing an interesting mix of lives right here in the Heartland.
The music and the cultural phe-
It stood for ethical and moral trials almost annually, spending its thirty-year history defending usage of the words "ho," "bitch" and other degrading epithets while surviving criticisms for perpetuating a culture of violence, drugs and death in inner-cities.
battles on city blacktops and to the pains of disgruntled youth rapping "gangster" rhymes about deplorable urban-living conditions.
Today, the movement at its core is strongly African-American, but
National acts have visited here for decades, playing sold-out shows at venues such as the Granada, 1020 Massachusetts St. The local scene, most prominent in the early 2000s when groups like Archetype and Soundso good represented a strong hip hop culture on and off campus, is getting stronger.
All the while, hip-hop in the Heartland is popping up in unsuspecting places.