Professor Marcyliena Morgan, director of The Hip Hop Archives at Harvard University and author of the book The Real Hip Hop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground, was recently interviewed by Rolling Out during their visit to the archives at Harvard.

During their talk, Professor Morgan discussed the importance of studying hip hop at an ivy league institution and how the hip hop generation has approached higher education.

Why it’s important for an Ivy League school to highlight the study of hip hop:

The people who were involved in hip-hop always took it seriously. Los Angeles had an underground hip-hop scene called the Good Life. There was an importance of the quality of the content of lyrics of emcees and beats. People were committed to the highest levels of story telling. I saw it as part of African American oral tradition. University setting was ideal because it’s where you take time to examine things that change culture, art and life. People will say with a lot of disdain, ‘Why is the Hip-Hop Archive at Harvard.’ I ask, ‘Where do you think it should be?’ When you’re talking about hip-hop at its highest skill level, why wouldn’t it be at Harvard? A lot of topics are being discussed because of hip-hop. Whether it’s sexuality, responsibility or crime, it’s discussion that hip-hop keeps in the mix.

How The Hip Hop Archives came to be:

The Hip-Hop Archives came about when I was a professor at UCLA. Many of my students were involved in hip-hop in the late ’90s. They would bring me hip-hop material and I took a closer look at it. I am a linguistic anthropologist so I’m interested in language and culture.

Read the entire article at Rolling Out.