Demone Carter—musician, rapper, educator, and arts advocate—has been bringing hip hop and contemporary art into California classrooms for the past eight years. Currently, Demone directs a Bay Area based arts program called Future Arts Now that seeks to positively engage students in their school and community through arts. Chatting recently with MNS team member Eliot Winder, Demone’s story reminds us that with constantly progressing technology and shifting culture, Service Artists must be prepared to adapt their approach...

Eliot: Can you tell me a little bit about Future Arts Now and how it differs from your previous programming?

Demone: So with Future Arts Now, we’re trying to build on the work that we have been doing for the last seven years in the realm of arts and education.  So the original program I founded along with a couple other folks called Hip Hop 360, the whole idea was to go into schools that don’t have art programming to begin with and give the kids a relevant, more engaging take on the arts and use that as a vehicle to build self-esteem and also re-engage them in school.  So our primary medium for that with Hip Hop 360 was hip hop culture.  So we were very much based around doing the four element DJing classes, rapping classes, breakdancing and urban art.  What we’re doing now with Future Arts Now is kind of a continuation of that work but we’re kind of expanding the definition a little bit.  There are a number of kids who don’t self-identify as being hip hop, and we still want to provide options for them.  So what we’re doing with this venture is the same kind of model where we’re going out and working with schools but now we’re offering more classes.  We have photography now, we have video production classes, we have some spoken words classes.  But the other key difference is that we’re trying to work with talented artists from the Bay Area and pair them with the schools, whereas in the past we’d get somebody and train them on our curriculum and what we wanted them to do but what we’re focusing on now more is finding artists who are really passionate about what they do and have a knack for working with youth and getting them plugged into schools so they can teach the curriculum and guide the courses in the way that they want to. 

E: When you say that kids aren’t self-identifying with hip hop nowadays, how has that changed over the last 10 years or so?

D: Well when we first got into schools, we’re talking maybe 2004, in the South Bay, hip hop was just a new, novel thing everywhere we went, and the response was overwhelming.  As time moved on and kids down here got an idea of what actual hip hop culture is as opposed to what I like to call “rap culture”, once the kids got a feel that this is a whole culture involving dance and art it was very popular, but now we’re kind of coming into a new era where the kids have a million options in front of them at any given moment, whereas in 2004, this was one of two cool things they could maybe do.  Now it’s wide open; you have kids because of where the software’s at, they want to make movies, they want to do videography, they want to shoot their own videos.  They want to do photography; digital cameras are cheap enough to where these kids have exposure to these things now and they have a want to do these mediums whereas before, that wasn’t really the case and so it has kind of shifted.  Although a lot of kids still do self-identify as being hip hop, but a lot don’t and our goal with Future Arts is that we want to have something relevant for everybody in our target audience, which is 11-18 year olds, so we’re just constantly working to try to keep up with what the youth are interested in and find artists that can match their interests up.  For instance, last year we piloted a graphic design course.  Kids were very interested in, “How do I start my own t-shirt line,” “How do I make my own clothes,” “How do I design logos,” and when I started, their level of conscientiousness wasn’t there, but now we’re finding a lot more that these kids are motivated to get into fashion and things like that so we’re also developing some programs around that. 

E: Do you attribute that mostly to the advancing technology?

D: I would say technology definitely has played a role, but I think moreover, we’re in an everything culture.  No matter what you want to be into, there’s a wealth of free knowledge out there on how to get started.  For instance, in 2004 when I started, if you wanted to learn to breakdance, you still had to buy DVDs, you had to go train with somebody, etc.  Now these kids’ starting point is YouTube.  They come to us and say, “Have you heard about XYZ new dance?” and I’m like, “No I haven’t heard about it,” and they’ll go, “Oh, it’s on YouTube.  You got to do this, that and this.”  Their level of exposure to different things is higher and I’ve just seen their interest levels broaden and what Future Arts is trying to do is match that and not have such a narrow scope in saying, “We are a hip hop program exclusively and we only do hip hop.” 

E: Right, give like a venue to channel that kind of energy. 

D: Exactly, because at the end of day, when you’re that age, you’ve got energy, you want to put it somewhere, a lot of kids put it in the wrong places.  All we’re trying to do is channel that by recognizing that kids are different.  Every school has its particular culture and what they feel is cool and we’re just trying to be steadily adapting to meet the needs and interests of our target audience. 

E: Interesting, so when the program is so flexible, how do you make sure you are producing outcomes? You know, if you don’t have a curriculum…

D: You know, the term curriculum can be heavy.  It implies that there is this 12 step process that can be applied to any group of kids and will take them from step 1 to step 12, and we’ve done that and we have courses like that that we’ve developed.  But what we found is that coming up with a set of best practices and principles that are adaptable to each group of kids is been a better approach for us than saying, “This is the Future Arts curriculum.  No matter where we go this is how we will implement it.”  What we try to do more is work with the artist teachers on fleshing out, “What are they passionate about?,” “Where do they want to take the kids?,” “Where do they want to go?,” and basically what we do with them is apply all the lessons we’ve learned from the last seven years of being in the field and showing the teacher how to get the kids from point A to point B without the very rote standard thing of “this is our curriculum.”  So it puts a lot more onus on the people that we work with, the teachers, to kind of develop their own curriculums but using the Future Arts principles and best practices that we picked up all the time. 

E: That makes sense - keeping it flexible and specific to the teacher, but also keeping it in line with the overarching values.  When you approach a funder or partner you’ve got to be able to tell them something. 

D: Yeah, yeah these are our core principles and this is what we do, but I find that when you put the ownership in the hands of the artist teacher, I find that their motivation level is higher and there’s more buy-in on the teacher end, they don’t feel like they’re just a vehicle for this grand scheme that we’re putting on them. 

E: I’m into hip hop so I’d like to talk about how hip hop fits into an educational setting.  When did you start rapping and at what point did you know that you were going to go ahead and make education and youth development part of your repertoire?

D: I’ve been rapping for a long time.  I would say maybe ‘90, ’91, I really started taking it seriously, learning to craft.  I’ve done hundreds of shows, made hundreds of songs and I was kind of going along at the clip that a normal, local underground rapper goes through around here. Flash forward, we’re talking ’03, ’04, working a day job, still working with my group and doing songs at night and doing the typical 9-5 but also the 5-9 MC life.  But, I really wasn’t making the type of headway that I wanted to and also hating my day job and kind of going through a little rut there. I was working at a bank, kind of the suit and tie thing every day. And then say, late 2003, I’m getting up and I’m going to work and my wife is like, “What are you doing? You hate what you’re doing.  You need to find a way to do what you like to do on a daily basis.”  She’s a teacher, so she gets to do something she wants to do every day, and I wasn’t doing that. 

Then my mind state shifted to, “How can I use my hip hop experience?” I’ve been an MC for 15+ years, I’ve organized a lot of events down here, both free and for-profit events, battles, I DJ as well, so I’m just a hip hop guy all around and I starting getting into this thought process of, “How do I take this wealth of experience and make it something that is sustainable and that I could do every day?”  I kicked around a lot of ideas, quit my job on a whim and I was lucky enough to where my brother was working for a local nonprofit called Unity Chair that was kind of looking for something new.  His boss was like, “We’ve done all the standard programs telling [at-risk youth] what not to do, we need to give them something to do.”  It was one of those things where everything was meant to happen.  My brother brought me into to meet this guy, Gilbert, who eventually became the other co-founder of Hip Hop 360 and so we had a bunch of conversations around, “How can we reach out to at-risk youth from the schools that we are from in East San Jose, South San Jose?  What’s going to be relevant to them instead of us just walking into a school and saying, ‘Don’t be in a gang’?  What’s going to be the hook?”  So that was kind of a light bulb moment for me where I went, “You know what, I have this experience, I have very deep contacts within the hip hop community, we could start a hip hop program, I’ll go get my friends that I’ve been doing events with and making music with to be the teachers. So working with Gilbert, he kind of fleshed out the nonprofit piece of how you actually form that into a program.  I used my connections, we borrowed a bunch of equipment, got some friends to come through and do some pro-bono classes in the beginning and we went out to this middle school in March of 2004, we had some breakdancers start breakdancing and say, “Hey kids, who wants to do this?  Who wants to do hip hop?  Who wants to rap?  Who wants to DJ?” and so we had 150 kids that were interested and now we knew we had something and so since 2004, it has just kind of been a steady evolution.

I still make my music, and I feel like being in arts and education has recharged me as an artist myself. So I still make my music, I do all that but for the most part, I’m putting my energy into, “How can I reach out to kids like me that want to do something creative?” because hip hop is a very do-it-yourself thing or at least when I was coming here it was, it wasn’t anybody who came out and showed you how to do anything, you had to know somebody or figure it out yourself.  So what I wanted to do is turn around say, “Let me find the kids that were like me and give them the opportunity to work with these teachers, give them the opportunity to see that hip hop is a broader culture than just rap.”  When I started, every kid was talking about 50 Cent and we were like, “Okay, yes, there’s 50 Cent, but there’s a lot more than that in this culture,” and so, kind of broadening their view of that and so that was kind of my evolution, taking 10+ years of hip hop experience and trying to turn it around and give it back to the kids and we’ve been fortunate that schools have been willing to go out and fund us as well as foundations and the city of San Jose.  We’re just basically trying to take that work forward and make this next evolution.  I’m a hip hop artist, but I realize that creative energies have all kinds of outlets and that’s kind of what Future Arts is about. 

E: That’s interesting you bring up the 50 Cent thing, one of the questions I’ve written down is about reconciling that - the more violent nature or culture of hip hop.  Even some foundational, real old school hip hop stuff is very graphic.  So when you started doing this is 2002, ‘03 or ’04 that’s like around when you started having kids, right?

D: Yeah.

E: So I often ask myself, at what point is it going to be okay for my kid to listen to Tupac?

D: Never (laughs)  Yeah, I mean, it’s one of those things where I started having kids, I have three children, and it definitely changed my perspective, I have a seven year old, and compared to other seven year olds, he’s kind of ignorant to current hip hop because I feel what ends up happening is we’re taking an R rated form of entertainment, and that’s all it is, you know, I don’t think 50 Cent is the anti-Christ or any of these guys, Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane, they’re all entertainers in their own right – it’s just an R rated form of entertainment.  A problem that we were up against early was reshaping the minds of administrators, almost more than the kids, it was about reshaping the minds of principals and people at the district, “Don’t confuse this R rated form of entertainment with hip hop culture.”  So with my own biological children and with the children in my program, we don’t bash their music and all that, but we just try to open it up and say, “It’s not just about rap.  Yeah, there’s Tupac, that’s great, but there’s a lot more to it. There’s a visual piece, there’s a movement piece, there’s dancing.”  It’s not so much trying to reconcile is hip hop good or bad based on the kind of R rated element of entertainment, I accept that for what it is and what I say is as adults, we need to maybe do a better job of shielding our kids from that, just like, you know, a ten year old shouldn’t be watching Saw IV, you know what I’m saying?  That’s not appropriate and that’s what we try to stress.  We know that that’s the starting point for a lot of these kids, but what we try to stress is that we’re not going to go in there playing that music, we’re not going to go in there using that language or glorifying that piece because is R rated. This is a PG program.  So whatever their take on it, I understand there is a harder core element, but when we’re going in the schools, we’re working with districts and schools and community centers, we’re bringing that PG element and when we put that out, the kids get it.  It’s not really like the kids are like, “Oh this is weak because we don’t get to cuss and say the ‘B’ word,” it’s like, the kids get it.  Kids want structure, discipline and limitation, and what has happened with the way that the radio, video and all these things work is that there’s no limitation, they’re exposed to way too much, way too soon.  We just try to be like a filter and say that, “There is that portion of it, but there’s some other, better things and we’re not going to carry that negativity into our classes.” 

It was tough in 2004, but I feel like now, most of the kids and most of the adults get it, that there’s this hip hop and then there’s that hip hop, whereas when I started it was just like I would say “hip hop” and you’d see a principal cringe reflectively.  It’s changing and I would say the main thing that’s changing it honestly is “America’s Best Dance Crew” show.  There’s not one more powerful single thing I can point to because especially where we’re coming from, kids overnight went from wanting to be like Mac Dre, to wanting to be like the JabbaWockeeZ.  Parents watch that show too.  My mom knows who the JabbaWockeeZ are.  She watches “So You Think You Can Dance”.  So now when you say hip hop, the connotation is more like, “Oh, that’s that choreo style of dance I saw on ‘Dancing With the Stars.’”  It has really changed it and I look at our target audience and these kids want to be dancers, they want to be the next JabbaWockeeZ and that’s a beautiful thing because especially when you talk about dance, it stresses a healthy lifestyle, you know, dancers aren’t drinking and smoking 24/7.  It’s a really healthy thing and so that in and of itself has helped tipped the scales back to the more positive and healthy side of hip hop. 

E: What demographics are you mostly serving?  Do you have high school kids? 

D: We do 11-18, so that’s like 6^th grade-12^th grade.  The majority of our students are in middle school, so I’d say about 60% of the kids in our program typically are going to come from the middle school, 6^th through 8^th grade, but we branched out last year into doing a lot more high school programs. 

E: I was just going to say, more controversial rap lyrics would be a good starting point for discussion for high school students.  Although I know that’s kind of less what you do, but for like high school kids, like 17 or 18, they’re obviously listening to it anyways. 

D: Right.  You know what I was really surprised in doing more high school work last year is a lot of those kids get it.  A lot of those kids I think because over past 7 or 8 years, you’ve seen a shift in rap.  When I started in 2004, the most popular rapper of the moment was 50 Cent and everything was kind of a spin-off of that.  But now, there’s just so many choices.  There’s many kids that like hardcore gangsta rap and like the Black Eye Peas or Lupe Fiasco or Mos Def.  You know, I was always surprised to go in and do our session and the kids are like, “Have you heard the new Mos Def with this and that?” and I’m like, “Oh word, really?”  There’s not as much emphasis on being hard, if you know what I mean.  I find the kids now are trying to gravitate to someone has a quirky originality to them, that dresses different.  It’s a different era, kids wear purple now, they wear pink brawl shirts.  It’s a different era and they like their music and their entertainment reflects that – they don’t like for you to assume that, “Oh, you just listen to hip hop.”  Their iPod has 5 or 6 different genres too.  Working in high schools has been an education in what’s the real 16-18 set, where they’re at, where their heads are at, what they’re thinking, what they’re doing, which obviously is kind of different from where the middle school kids are at. 

E: To close out, can you suggest references and resources about how a non-hip hop kid or a non-dancer, non-rapper can incorporate these styles into their curriculum?

D: There’s a great number of resources out there right now.  I know if you go to the Hip Hop Congress website, they have some resources and tools there.  What I’d say to everybody is we live in a world where you go to Google and you type in a sentence and you’re going to find 27 different things.  Type in “hip hop in the classroom,” there’s a bunch of different books.  We’ve used the Hip Hop Poetry and the Classics book, which is a great book for teaching poetry and relating it back to the hip hop classics and the classics of poetry. 

So, I mean, we used some of that stuff, but I’ll be honest with you, our primary thing, what we do, is just try to keep our ears to the street and be involved in the local hip hop community and allow the artist teachers that we bring in to be our greatest resource.  We’re trying to bring in people who have that body of knowledge on their own that walk that same path that I did, going from being an artist into an artist teacher, and that’s really what we try to do, we try to find talented, knowledgeable people and kind of pick their brains for what resources and knowledge they have and then apply that back to our program. 

E: So great talking with you. Anything else you want to emphasize or promote?

D: I would say check out our blog, FutureArtsNow.org – that’s going to keep you up to date with the latest and the greatest stuff that we’re doing down here and in closing, no matter who you are, no matter where you’re at, we need to advocate to keep arts in these schools and that’s kind of our overarching thing, we have to keep arts in the schools, arts is a part of education, but especially in California, it has been systematically cut out.  We all can bear some responsibility in being advocates to make sure that kids in school have some type of artistic outlet.