Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH)

January 27, 2003

Author: Bakari Kitwana; Special to The Plain Dealer

Section: Arts & Life 

With hip-hop as the mainstream pop culture craze for at least the last decade, arenas from Hollywood to Fifth Avenue to Broadway have turned to hip-hop to reach the next generation. So why not bring it into the educational arena as well? Consider the success of rapper-educators The Funkamentals, a Tucson, Ariz.-based duo of middle school teachers. For the past seven years, the two have moonlighted as rap artists, using their skills as rappers to educate. Funkamentals Wade Colwell and Ranson Kennedy started out working with Project Pride to create an intergen-erational dialogue in the wake of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The two began conducting education-oriented programming with juvenile detention centers and high schools in Tucson. Colwell began incorporating their music into his classroom to get students to use musical expression as a means of personal empowerment. "In the teachers lounge, teachers were so critical of the learning abilities of kids," Colwell recalls, "but those same students were memorizing full albums of popular music, which to me showed a high degree of academic application. It was obvious that we weren't tapping into the potential of our students." In 1998, Colwell and Kennedy worked with a local radio station and middle school to promote National Geography Week. The Funkamentals developed their first rap song, "Worldside," which resulted in 700 students reciting the song (which names 196 countries) in unison in a local park. The idea was to give students a sense that they were a part of a much larger global community. From their work in Tucson to recent programming for the Harlem School of the Arts and an 18-school tour in Mexico, Colwell measures their success mostly by the changes teachers have observed in their students. "Music is not always a quantifiable change," he says. "It's a spiritual change. Giving students a sense of positivity about life and learning in general is what our music is about." This doesn't mean that the Funkamentals are without hard evidence. In 1997, Thomas Saarinen, a professor at the University of Arizona's Geography department, helped the rappers test their effectiveness. They gave junior high students a pre-test to see how many countries the kids could list in 15 minutes. Following the test, they gave the kids a gift: a cassette of the rap song "Worldside." Without instructing the students to listen to the cassette, without devoting class time to the material, and without informing students they would be tested again, three days later they retested. In those three days, the students' knowledge of country names increased 120 percent. Rap as a vehicle of information is nothing new. For urban kids without a vehicle for articulating their issues, hip-hop first became a means of communication with each other, and second gave them a national and international public voice. KRS-One long ago coined the phrase of his brand of rap as "edu-tainment" and dubbed himself "The Teacher" more than a decade ago. Rappers like Chuck D, of the rap group Public Enemy, and KRS-One for nearly two decades have never veered from their path of using rap as a tool to educate. What puts the Funkamentals on the cutting edge is their success with hip-hop in the classroom. The two recently released their self-published CD, "Education By Any Means Necessary," which includes rap songs about the periodic table, the quadratic formula, metric conversions, English grammar and much more. Having grown up with hip-hop themselves, Colwell and Kennedy don't romanticize or underestimate its power to educate. "The object is not to teach the entire subject but to be a catalyst for learning about that subject," explains Kennedy, who's responsible for the CD's production. "At the same time, the content is subtle -we're not trying to beat kids over the head with a subject. We don't think you can put any subject to a beat and kids are going to like it -but you will want to bump our music in your car." Of course, there will be skeptics who will find this approach far-fetched at best, delusional at worst. I have closely observed the growth of hip-hop over the last three decades, seen the Funkamentals perform at a conference last fall at Harvard University, and more than once in recent years totally recalled rap lyrics popular in my late '70s and early '80s childhood. I think they're on to something.

Kitwana, who lives in Westlake, is the author of "The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture." Caption: The Funkamentals' logo evokes the duo's educational message. The Funkamentals are teachers Ranson Kennedy, left, and Wade Colwell, who also happens to be the grandson of actor Anthony Quinn.

Funkamentalz: A Group that Makes Hip Hop Educational

Arizona Daily Wildcat

Thursday, September 18, 2003

If "Pass the Covassier" becomes "Pass the Course with A’s" and "Shake your Ass" becomes "Shake your Math," it's been flipped funkamental style, deems Funkamentalz co-founder Wade Colwell. Funkamentalz takes the "School House Rock" concept up a few notches, playing live sets for primarily adolescent audiences, with up to 13 people on stage at a time, hip-hopping through grammar, geography, science and even test-taking skills. "The idea is to perform hip-hop music to teach young people academic subjects that were traditionally maybe boring, inaccessible, irrelevant and unappealing. We wanted to repackage it in a way that would be fresh and exciting," gushed Colwell, appropriately oozing with the enthusiasm and dedication of both a parent and a teacher.

The show's just a Hip Hop and Jump away:

When: Wednesday, Sept. 24 8 p.m.

Where: Rialto Theatre
Who: Saul Williams with openers Funkamentals
Tickets are available for $10 in advance and for students and $12 (plus $2 box office fee) at the door at the Rialto Theatre, 740-1000 or www.rialtotheatre.com; Biblio Bookstore, 222 E. Congress; Antigone Books, 411 N. 4th Avenue; and The Poetry Center, 1216 N. Cherry Avenue.

About 10 years ago, Colwell collaborated with Ranson Kennedy and formed Funkamentalz after heading social action projects in Tucson and Los Angeles. Years later, the duo's Funkamentalz sports a full band led by Joel Gottschalk, and the Tucson-based Funkamentalz has attracted national attention, including recognition from Harvard University and the National Academy of Education. The group's strategy in both method and skillful audience targeting count for a couple reasons their educational endeavors have seen such explosive success. As far as method goes, Funkamentalz uses urban music to appeal to the younger generation. Funkamentalz believes that the adolescent age group in particular would respond the best to their education through hip hop music concept. "Our motivation lies in reaching that group of young people. It's really the point where education becomes a lot more sterile. It's the point where teachers stop reading to their kids, stop singing to their children, stop using the arts as part of the methodology and it becomes a separate entity," Colwell thoughtfully and sensitively assessed. "What we're trying to do is re-integrate music and creative expression into the traditional, academic disciplines. You can utilize the arts to teach mathematics and science, very technical subjects," he said. Funkamentalz aren't all talk  or rap they've produced some serious results. At one school, after only a few days of listening to a track about the nearly 200 countries of the world, students' knowledge of world geography increased significantly. With the Funkamentalz flip, even the Periodic Table of Elements becomes poetic in the track, "I Want Your Elements." "Actinium stare with aluminum glare, astatine attitude with americum flair. Antimony lips like the grey arsenic. Your argon gloss is looking boron slick." Besides rapping about nouns and verbs, the quadratic formula, Zimbabwe and Fiji, Oxygen and Helium or Juneau and Alaska, Funkamentals educate their audience by sharing life experiences ranging from sexual abuse, drugs, health and violence. "[We say] things that might even be considered inappropriate in certain settings, but we found a way to make it appropriate by being real about it, by being authentic, not trying to place judgment, but expose people to it. These are the things that happen in life," Colwell explained. Even if the parts of speech are as familiar as the back of your hand or you don't need someone to tell you that Sacramento hails as California's capital, it doesn't mean you should skip their performance Wednesday night at the Rialto when they will open for Saul Williams. Beyond the technical facts found in the track of their cd, Education by Any Means Necessary, in listening one participates in the growth and evolving as a human being and that can reach adolescents or adults, according to Funkamentals. Pushing lyrics aside for a moment, Funkamentals can find a groove and engage an audience in the music, too. This Wednesday, the University of Arizona Poetry Center hopes to engage the literary community and hip hop community alike with the Funkamentals and Saul Williams Show. "Funkamentals was a real find for me. I didn't realize there was such an incredible hip hop activist group in Tucson," said an excited Frances Shoberg, literary director for the UA Poetry Center. But they may not be in Tucson too long. Funkamentals hopes to spread their words and educate more people in more cities. This is your chance to see the quickly evolving and ambitious group in an adult venue here in Tucson. So pay very close attention this Wednesday and maybe you'll ace that next TRAD midterm or rock the MCATs.