Richmond News: Hip-hop program fuels thirst for knowledge at academy

Hip-hop program fuels thirst for knowledge at academy

Hip-hop artist Black Liquid Works with Franklin Military Academy Students

Posted: Saturday, April 5, 2014 12:00 am | Updated: 1:02 am, Sun Apr 6, 2014.

BY ZACHARY REID Richmond Times-Dispatch

Full volume, beats blaring, Lil Roc, Jes and Bre, and the rest of Buck 80 & Change tore up the joint.
Hands in the air, rhymes flying, the rising hip-hop stars worked the crowd into a frenzy this week: girls swooning, boys busting moves fast and furious, all in sight yelling and screaming and laughing and having the time of their lives to the pulsating beat.

“Get ’em up, get ’em up, get ’em up,” Deshawn Payne kept chanting, and the kids never wavered.

Except when they were grabbing a bite of pizza.

Welcome to lunchtime at Franklin Military Academy — Black Liquid style.

The Richmond public school best known for strict discipline and neatly pressed uniforms loosened up a bit Monday so students in a class sponsored by teacher Daniel Fox and taught by Black Liquid, a Richmond hip-hop writer, producer and performer, and his assistant, Roger Tyler, could show off what they had been learning.

“Hip-hop is another way of telling a story,” said Robert “Lil Roc” Allen IV, one of 10 students who took the class. “We’re definitely learning a lesson.”

The lessons have come through a program run by the nonprofit group Art 180. Liquid and Tyler teach a similar course at Sabot at Stony Point, a private kindergarten-eighth grade school in South Richmond.

“The decisions you make can make you or they can crush you,” Liquid said. “We’re trying to teach students the power of making positive decisions.”

Having the students perform for their classmates — a 10:30 a.m. show for the school’s high school students and a noon show for middle schoolers — was an easy call, he said.

“They need to know that anything they see someone doing, they can do, too,” he said. “Everyone in hip-hop started at the bottom.

“And everyone can participate. Not everyone up there is rhyming, but everyone has a role.”

Efam Taylor, a senior, said he was already comfortable writing poetry. The class helped him develop ease and comfort in performance.

“I’d get nervous at first, but this helped me develop confidence in myself,” he said.

Eighth-grader Talaysha Lewis also found a level of unexpected confidence. She opened the show with a spoken word piece, which she recited from memory.

“I wrote it in the sixth grade,” she said. “I’m ready to do it now.”

Other students on stage included junior Juwan Hatch; sophomore Breon Lucas and his brother, senior Jesse Lucas; and eighth-graders Tozeane Samuels, Lasasha Hanks and Charlé Brigham.

Junior Larry Anderson made a guest appearance during the second set, and eighth-graders Tyquine Akers and Jawan Roane also participated.

“This is a good way of showing them different ways you can participate in music,” said David Corey, the band teacher at the school. “If you can’t perform, you can still be part of it.”

Liquid said it was a matter of figuring out what success really means.

“I think success is based on what you put forth, not what you expect out,” he said.

zreid@timesdispatch.com (804) 775-8179