Building Children's Self-Esteem Through Hip-Hop with Chad Harper

In this episode of KeyBARD, Host Thembi Duncan sits down with Chad Harper, founder and CEO of Hip Hop Saves Lives, a social entrepreneurship that uses hip-hop as a tool for education, empowerment, and global connection. Chad shares his journey from Cleveland, Ohio to New York City, where he combined his passions for hip-hop and community service to create a curriculum that teaches humanity through hip-hop.

Learn more about Chad and his work with Hip Hop Saves Lives and check out the single I'm Just Like You on YouTube.

Want to be a guest on KeyBARD? Send Thembi a message on PodMatch: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1740803399472257afce75768

KeyBARD is produced, written, and hosted by Thembi Duncan, a theater artist, educator, and tech enthusiast exploring the intersections of art, education, and technology through conversations with creative thinkers.

Theme music by Sycho Sid.

Listen and Connect:

• Spotify: Follow, Rate, and Share
• Apple Podcasts: Subscribe, Review, and Rate
• Instagram: @Keybard_IG
• Facebook: The KeyBARD Podcast

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Thembi (00:12): Hello, hello, and welcome to KeyBard. I am Thembi and I am here today with Chad Harper from Hip Hop Saves Lives. Chad Harper was born in Cleveland, Ohio, educated at Morehouse College, mentored and molded by New York City, and cultured around the world. He began his life in hip-hop as a break dancer in junior high school, followed by becoming an emcee in high school.

He today is an educator, hip-hop artist, humanitarian, music producer, songwriter, videographer, video editor, and founder and CEO of Hip Hop Saves Lives. He has combined his two passions - hip-hop and community service, to create a curriculum that teaches humanity through hip-hop. He founded Hip Hop Saves lives based on the Gandhi quote, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Seven years after founding Hip Hop Saves Lives, he was honored by Gandhi's ashram as a guest speaker in 2014. He has traveled to 60 + countries exploring cultures, absorbing wisdom and mentoring youth through his curriculum. Hip Hop Saves Lives is here to reinstate the original purpose of hip-hop, which is peace, love, unity, and having fun. Welcome, Chad Harper.

Chad Harper (01:28): Thank you so much. Thank you so much...honor and a pleasure to be here.

Thembi (01:31): Yes, yes. I'm so happy to have you. So let's jump in. Tell us about your first memory of experiencing hip-hop culture.

Chad Harper (01:39): Wow. I'm 52 years old. I have to go back to Beat Street, I think 1984 when that movie came out. Born in Cleveland, Ohio. And I remember when "Rapper's Delight" first came on the radio. I remember when that song hit and everybody was like, "What in the world is this?" And if you had a barbecue, if you had a party, you know what I mean? That song had to play. So that was -- "Rapper's Delight" was my first experience with hip-hop, which was technically the first hip-hop song on the radio. Definitely nationwide. There was a song by a Brooklyn group, I forget the name, that was a few months earlier, but this is the official hip-hop on the radio that the country remembers. So that's my first experience. And then Beat Street, the movie, getting the visuals and seeing the breakdancing and the New York City streets. And I just knew right then and there, I'm going to have to move to New York at some point, I'm going to have to pursue hip-hop. I mean, it just hit me like a brick. So yeah, that movie just changed everything for me.

Thembi (02:46): Were you and your friends back in Cleveland opening up cardboard boxes and putting them on the ground and spinning on them like we were in the DMV back then?

Chad Harper (02:55): Absolutely. We had the Crushing Crusaders was our clique. We had the cardboard in the driveway in the backyard, in the middle of the street. We were breaking all summer long after school. We were doing that, but also beatboxing as well. We were battling through beatboxing and breaking.

Thembi (03:19): I love it. So those are two big components of hip-hop culture, right? Breaking and beatboxing. So yeah, eventually you ended up using hip-hop as a change agent, right? With a focus on creating work with young people. Can you talk about what led you to that decision?

Chad Harper (03:37): Yes. Growing up in the 80s, we had for sure the gangster rap. You had the NWA, but you had the fun party rap, and then you had the conscious hip-hop and KRS-One. Poor Righteous Teachers, Queen Latifah, Public Enemy, all those guys. I learned more about Black history from those hip-hop artists than I did ever in school. So for the late 90s to come, and I don't want to even bring Puffy into this, but the huge commercialism of hip-hop through Bad Boy, I'm living in New York and Bad Boy is like the king. They're making so much money. Everybody wants to sound like Bad Boy. Everybody wants to be the next Biggie. So there was no more NWA, there was no more Poor Righteous teachers. You know what I'm saying? I love Lil' Kim, but we need Queen Latifah too. You know what I mean? And for me it was just like there was no balance anymore in hip-hop. So for me, I remember going to a Public Enemy show and X Clan was opening up for Public Enemy -- shout out to X Clan -- and...

Thembi (04:49): Yes, indeed..."Vainglorious."

Chad Harper (04:52): "Vainglorious." And I remember Brother J being on stage and saying, "Please support conscious hip-hop because conscious hip-hop is not supported by the radio anymore, and it's not supported by the mainstream anymore." So when he said that, it just really hit me like right, something has to be done. You know what I mean? And I just decided to create this curriculum where young people could learn about social issues and write their own rhymes, write their own stories, and create music about it. So yeah, that's where the curriculum came from, feeling like hip-hop was out of balance and actually going to that conscious hip-hop concert in New York City and Brother J saying support conscious hip-hop. And I was always an entrepreneur. I was like, what can I do to help support that?

Thembi (05:43): Well, let's back up a bit because you talk about arriving in New York, but before that you were saying you wanted to get to New York. So can you just fill that in for us, and tell us how you made your way to New York City?

Chad Harper (05:56): After studying at Morehouse College, I mean, I had plans to move to New York City, and I remember there was an audition at MTV for 106 & Park. So I actually auditioned--

Thembi (06:12): Was that BET or MTV?

Chad Harper (06:17): Yes, yes. BET, correct, BET. So I went to audition for BET for 106 & Park and I got to almost the final round, but it was just like, passion. I didn't really have any experience with radio, didn't have any experience on television. It was just my passion, energy that they liked. But I didn't end up getting it. But once I saw that audition, and I don't even know how I saw that, where I-- maybe I read it in the Source magazine or somewhere, but I knew that there was an audition for one day, we're doing a new show at BET. But yeah, I moved up to New York and I knew I was coming to stay, and that was it.

Thembi (06:55): And stay, you did. I love that. So the origin story of hip hop-is deeply connected to late 1960s, early 1970s gang culture in the Bronx borough of New York City. So can you talk about how a truce between dozens of gangs led to the birth of hip hop culture?

Chad Harper (07:14): Absolutely. For everyone listening, there is a documentary called Rubble Kings, R-U-B-B-L-E Kings, A gentleman from Queens, New York named Shane Nicholson did that documentary. I met with him and he captured the story in the perfect time where there was a gang called the Ghetto Brothers, and this was when they were just taking all the resources out of Black and brown neighborhoods in the late 60s, actually just trying to break down the Civil Rights Movement. And so they basically turned our neighborhood into ghettos, pushed in heroin, and created an environment where kids really didn't have sustainable families and parents to look up to and to guide them. So they went to the streets and they joined these gangs. And initially it was to take care of your block in New York City, but it eventually got out of control and different blocks were beefing with the other blocks, and then there was gang wars.

(08:22): And it became a whole culture all across New York City of these, I mean, they said there was 101 different gangs in the Bronx. And long story short, the Ghetto Brothers formed a gang to try to bring peace between the other gangs. And the lead peacemaker was a guy named Black Benjie whose life came, was transformed through joining the Ghetto Brothers. I think he was a former heroin addict, and they got him to kick the heroin and they realized he had great character in speaking to people, but he ended up getting killed at a big gang fight.

(08:58): And everybody loved this guy. He was like the Martin Luther King of the hood. He was the guy that always saved lives and created peace. And they were like, how can you kill this guy? And some people say it was a mistaken identity, whatever, but they went to his mom's house and they told his mom, the ghetto brothers were like, listen, we're a gang of peace. But they murdered Black Benjie and so many gangs were so hurt by his death that they all came together to revenge his death. And they went to his mom to tell his mom we're going to revenge his death. And she said, my son died for peace. If you love my son, then you will stand for peace. So having all these gangs assembled outside his house, the mother's house, the lead guy of the Ghetto Brothers who was actually Yellow Benjy because he was Puerto Rican, they called him Yellow Benjy, and Black Benjie was a Black guy.

(09:51): He came outside and he said, "Listen, there's going to be no revenge, and we're going to meet in a couple of days and we're going to sign a peace treaty in honor of black Benjie. The fact that he lost his life, we are going to continue to save lives in honor of him. So 42 gang leaders met on Hoe Avenue, December 8th, 1971, signed that peace treaty. And the Ghetto Brothers also --a couple of guys in the gang had a group and they played live music. And they said, every Friday and Saturday night, we're going to jam in the park. We're going to play some funk, we're going to play some disco, we're going to play some Latin music, we're going to play some soul. We're going to play some rock and roll, a little music for everybody, and we want all the 42 gang leaders to bring all their gang members, and we're all going to party together to make sure that we stay peaceful during the week. We're going to party together every weekend. And that's how the culture of hip-hop was birthed through those parties.

Thembi (10:48): Absolutely incredible, and I appreciate that you did that research and came to those understandings of how hip-hop began and fed that into your curriculum, which we'll talk about in a minute. I think -- I also am interested in how you have partnered with various hip-hop pioneers over the years. You talked about conscious hip-hop and your connection to that, and it seems like a lot of the partnerships revolve around artists who are conscious hip-hop artists. Is that intentional? What has that been like to expose young people to the architects of hip-hop?

Chad Harper (11:25): Absolutely. I want to shout out to Big Jeff who's part of the Zulu Nation. He is, man, if you are part of the old school or true school hip-hop culture in New York City, you know big Jeff, so that's my homie. So when I would get grants to create, I got grants from Carnegie Hall to make my program bigger and work with teens on probation. Initially, they were funding my work for teens on probation, and I wanted to give these kids an opportunity to meet hip-hop legends and to inspire them and to record songs with them. So Big Jeff was my liaison. He would reach out, he reached out to Melly Mel, Mr. Cheeks from the Lost Boyz, Brand Nubian, Keith Murray, Greg Nice. Just a bunch of different of the true school hip-hop artists to come and record songs with the kids. Even Smif-N-Wessun, who's known as kind of gangsta Brooklyn rap. You know what I mean? But when you meet those guys in person, it's like their love for their kids and their love for community is just as much as any conscious hip-hop artist. And that was one of my favorite artists to work with was Smif-N-Wessun.

Thembi (12:45): What's interesting, anybody who isn't familiar with that rap duo and hears the name and knows that that name refers to a weapon, right? I think your point is very profound in that there was definitely an understanding of an appreciation of nuance in late 80s, early 90s hip-hop where there were so many different artists who were making their mark by sounding distinct and telling distinct stories. And that's not something that necessarily in current hip-hop culture people get to experience. So I think it is interesting to talk about how a group named after a brand of a firearm really were quite peaceful and instrumental in their community growth. Now, you talked about receiving support for programming with young people. Hip Hop Saves Lives is a social entrepreneurship that you founded in New York City a number of years ago, maybe about a dozen years ago. Can you talk about what it means to lead this organization for so many years and how you strike that balance between organizational work, the business of organizational leadership and working with young people?

Chad Harper (13:52): Wow. To be honest, that balance is hard. It's a blurry line. A lot of those kids I've worked with have called me Pop and Dad, and I've been a father figure to them still keep in touch with a good handful of them. I can tell this quick story of the first school that I worked at. The principal hired us for one month as a test. This is actually Congressman Jamal Bowman's school when he was still a principal in the Bronx, and he wanted to test this out. He hired us for a month and then he said, "Okay, it was great. I don't have any more money this semester, so we have to cancel the program and we'll holler back next semester." So at the end of that month, I had to make that announcement that last day to that group of kids that stayed with us Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday after school for two, three hours.

(14:43): And I said, "Hey guys. The principal said this is the last day. They don't have any more money this semester." And as I'm talking, this one girl, probably 12 years old, starts to speed walk towards the front of the classroom. And I'm like, I'm talking, thinking why is she walking so fast? And she comes right up to my face in the middle of the class and she goes, "You cannot walk in and out of our lives like that." And she storms out of the room and tears were bursting out of her eyes. And I was like, oh, wow, okay, this isn't just an afterschool program. So ever since that day I realized what the program and what the mentorship meant to the kids, so to say, the working life balance, it kind of fuses into one.

Thembi (15:34): You bring up an interesting point about also the challenge in funding for arts in schools and the challenges with young people who feel that way, that adults come in and out of their lives and don't provide them with a sense of stability. And so I think it's important that you're doing this work that fills in those gaps where in theory music, the arts, theatre, dance, all the arts should be in schools all the time in theory, right? In our perfect world, young people would have access to all of these art forms on a consistent basis in schools, but we know that that's not a funding priority. So we end up creating organizations that infuses this into schools. And then when you have these funding gaps that aren't caused by the organizations, 'cause the organizations have to have their operating and program funds. But you go into the schools and then you get this like, "Oh, sorry, we're out of money, we can't bring you into the schools anymore." But the losers of that are always the young people because they've grown accustomed to it, and now, "Oh, you're leaving. Where are you going to go? And what am I going to do after that?"

(16:40): And so I'm just curious if -- you talked about that experience that you had, did that experience with that young girl lead you to think about the way that you do your work in a different way to try to mitigate or offset the challenges? Because any folks who are listening to us who have worked with or inside these organizations know that funding is always the biggest challenge. Did that lead you to any sort of financial decisions or just operating decisions around funding?

Chad Harper (17:10): Yes. So just first to say, we honored that young lady's request, and I told the principal we will volunteer every Friday to meet with those kids. So for the rest of that whole semester, I had to take the train from Brooklyn where I live, to the Bronx, which is an hour and a half each way. So that's three hours out of my day. Then work with the kids for two hours. So I volunteered five hours every Friday to meet with those kids for the rest of the whole semester just to honor that young lady's request. And that stayed with me. And I remember when Carnegie Hall first hired my organization, Hip Hop Saves Lives to work with incarcerated kids, and they hired us for three weeks, and after three weeks I went to them, I said, "So what's the plan now?" And they said, "Well, we do this every six months." And I said, "Okay, I'm not doing this with you every six months." And I was like, I explained, I told them the story that I just shared here, and I said, "You can't do that to kids." And I was like, "Basically, you had me go in with these kids, work with them for three hours a day for five days a week for three weeks to create an album that you can show to your donors, to collect more money and then you're done."

Thembi (18:29): Yeah, it sounds like it.

Chad Harper (18:30): Yeah. And so I said, "If you want to work with my organization, you'll create a year-round program. No questions." I was like, "There's no negotiation." And they ended up creating a year round program for the kids.

Thembi (18:43): That's great. I'm glad you stood up for the work that you do and for the kids. That's so important, because it's clear that you came to understand that, wait a second. Especially with young people involved in the justice system, that's a transient population. They're in and out. So even if you're doing work with them, you might have them for a very short time and don't know where they go after that, if you're working inside of a center and they're gone. And it's always difficult to track young people obviously for privacy reasons, but even just wanting to know, well, how are they doing? Are they okay and do they have what they need? So I love that you use that experience to build out your model in a more thoughtful way, and also to hold others to account. That's really powerful. It says a lot about you.

Chad Harper (19:29): Absolutely.

Thembi (19:30): Yeah. So when your team creates music with young people all over the world, you use the curriculum, you mentioned that earlier, your curriculum's grounded in the exploration of social issues that are important to them, and then it leads them to explore an everyday hero who's addressing those issues. What happens next in the process?

Chad Harper (19:49): So after we meet with the kids, we do the lesson, record the song, music video, then we share that music video with the hero that was honored in the song. So even working with kids -- the first couple of years, it was mainly in New York City, we would send that song to the organization and say, "Hey, we're this afterschool program. We pick a different everyday hero of the week that's working to solve a social issue. You guys were our everyday hero of the week last week. Here's a song and music video of our kids honoring your work." And we've gotten so many incredible responses. I would say the biggest response was the man who coined the frame, the phrase "extreme poverty" and first addressed extreme poverty on a global scale. That organization we thought was somewhere in Europe, but it was actually had an office in New York City.

(20:43): So when we sent the email to the European office, they forwarded it to New York City because they saw that we were from a school in the Bronx, and we got a phone call saying that "We want to meet you," and invited me and my partner, my business partner, to their office, and we were like, wow, we had no idea they were in New York City, and they said, "We work with the United Nations and we have -- there's an official day at the United Nations called the Eradication of Extreme Poverty where we address extreme poverty on a global scale. We have all these global speakers, and... blah, blah, blah. We would like to invite your junior high school kids from the Bronx to perform at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City."

Thembi (21:28): Wow.

Chad Harper (21:29): That was the first year of the program. And again, that was at Congressman Jamal Bowman's school. I can't remember how many kids he took. I mean the kids in the program, we came and we performed, but I think he brought about 50 other kids, as many as he could, to just experience going to the United Nations and being on the General Assembly floor and watching a handful of their classmates perform in front of delegates from all over the world. So that was one of the greatest responses that we got from sending out that surprise song and music video from the curriculum.

Thembi (22:08): That's great. I love that full circle approach you have to making sure that the young people get to experience the joy of the figure, the everyday hero who they're honoring.

Chad Harper (22:18): Absolutely.

Thembi (22:19): You've worked with youth impacted by the justice system. We spoke about that. How did you go about building those partnerships with incarceration facilities, detention centers, probation centers? How do you go about building those kinds of partnerships so that you are able to use your curriculum with young people who are affected by the justice system?

Chad Harper (22:40): To be honest, it was word of mouth. I don't actually remember reaching out to incarcerated -- we worked with incarcerated teens, teens on probation. We worked at homeless teen shelters all over New York City. It was just word of mouth. We were at three or four different schools putting out a couple of songs and music videos a week and seeing these kids rapping and singing, and I mean, these songs transformed the whole vibe of the school that these kids were at. They're in rough neighborhoods and now they're rapping about lack of clean water, fair trade, all these different social issues, and they're rapping and they're in music videos and parents are showing up at the school like, "I never knew my kid could rap." "I never knew my daughter could sing." 

And they're coming to the afterschool program, like "I just want to shake your hand. I never knew my kid had this talent." Teachers are coming up to us like, "That kid who was the best rapper in the music video last week is the worst kid in my class, and I look at that kid totally different after I heard the lyrics that they wrote for that song. That kid's actually really intelligent to put those lyrics together. I'm going to sit with that kid and figure out what's going on and why aren't they paying attention in class, if they can write such intelligent lyrics and say profound things." We would have five kids on the song and hundreds of views would come in from the school, from the teachers, from the parents. Teachers would share it with other teachers. We would get calls from other schools, "Can you come to our school?" I mean, it was just a point where every week there was a different request for us to come work with kids.

Thembi (24:23): So the curriculum has built in it a video that you use to showcase the song and perform the song that the young people wrote, which also sounds like it serves as a marketing tool and a storytelling tool about the work that you do, which is pretty brilliant. I love that. So like you said, you didn't have to knock on as many doors because you had all this built-in marketing and these built-in ambassadors who were involved in the programs putting out the information and literally singing the praises of the program. I love that. So that said, though, you said you had a lot of anecdotal responses from educators, from administrators, from parents and students themselves, I'm sure, but how did you formally measure the impact of your work? Were you able to gather data or was it more of a focus on just keeping the momentum going so that you could continue the work?

Chad Harper (25:23): I can say that we did a couple in-house documentaries where we got a lot of testimonies from the teachers and the principals, and that was our best way of gathering data. Actually, again, Jamal Bowman's school became one of the top scoring junior high schools in all of New York City about two years after having our program there. And it was, if you talk to him, the teachers, they would say the program. And to be honest, we got so much kid participation from that school that I remember going to Jamal Bowman one day at the end of the first year, and I said, "What if we made this afterschool program a class during the day and we planned it out? So throughout the entire year, every sixth, seventh and eighth grader would have an opportunity to have a semester in our class." And he said yes. 

So we became, there was no longer art class and there was no longer a music class because he realized kids were more interested in rapping, singing, dancing, acting. We had acting in our videos. We did visual arts in our videos, so we were covering so many different art mediums, and he knew that kids wanted to be on songs and music videos more than learn to play the violin or flute. So he gave us those slots and we became full-time teachers, and every kid touched the program, so his school totally transformed the numbers, the overall grade point average, the attendance, school skipping, school dropouts, the fighting incidents, all heavily decreased while we were full-time teachers at the school.

Thembi (27:24): That's fantastic. That's a lot though. That's a lot of work that I'm sure that you all had to do. I mean, I even think back to when you talked about the three-hour round trip you took to make sure that you got back to that school on Fridays, and so with all the work that you do for others, how do you implement self-care into your day-to-day life?

Chad Harper (27:45): I have to say that I didn't start doing that until I just took a sabbatical and moved to Kenya in 2017. I did get secondhand trauma from working with a lot of incarcerated kids and kids on probation, and I wasn't, to be honest, taking care of myself. When I did that, I got into meditation, got into gratitude. I did always exercise and that was my outlet, but I would say the meditation and daily journaling of gratitude was the self-care that really created balance in my life.

Thembi (28:25): You moved to Kenya for a while. You say you took a sabbatical to go there. I just want to run a quick list. This is not comprehensive, but I'm going to do, because I'm a theatre professional, so I always say I like to do things in real time so we can experience them together. Haiti, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Cuba, Bermuda, Liberia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, England, Italy, Nicaragua, Mexico, Brazil, India, Hawaii, Spain, Poland, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Norway, Morocco, The United States of America. You have memories in each of those countries from work that you've done through Hip Hop Saves Lives. What motivated you to take your work to so many different corners of the earth?

Chad Harper (29:22): Wow. I mean, I think it was the curriculum because the curriculum was designed to like, okay, one week we're going to tackle a problem right here in New York City. The next week it's going to be somewhere else in the United States. The next week it's going to be somewhere in South America. The next week we're going to cross the Atlantic and tackle problems. So we were researching humanitarians from all over the globe. We did one song about a woman who, I think she was Hawaiian, but moved to Indonesia to open birth centers for women in rural areas because the infant mortality rate was high, and we did a song, a music video for them, and we sent it out and she was so honored. She emailed us back and said, how many kids are in your program at the school? And I said, well, in this particular class that did that song, there's 20 kids. And she was like, I'm shipping 20 T-shirts from my birth center in Indonesia all the way to the Bronx, so each one of your kids can have one of those shirts. And she said, I just want you to--

Thembi (30:26): Oh wow.

Chad Harper (30:26): Yeah. She said, I just want you to know that every time we give birth, a woman gives birth at one of our birth centers, we will play your song that honors our work. So to get messages like that, and then she would say, "Hey, if you're ever on this side of the planet, please reach out and pop in and visit us."

Yeah, so we were just getting so many contacts from organizations that we were honoring and invites to visit. And also being in New York City, you meet so many people from around the world, and I was speaking at different humanitarian conferences at New York City and just meeting all different types of people. A friend of a friend introduced me to someone who had an organization from Haiti. She was from Norway, but she had friends in New York City, and they introduced me to her and she invited me to come to Haiti. That was the first international trip, and I think that was four or five months after we started the program, and I loved it so much. I ended up going to Haiti every six months for the next four or five years.

Thembi (31:34): You love to travel, and that certainly seems to have made that process of traveling around the world easier for you for the organization, thinking globally and applying the work in that way. You said you'd gone to Kenya, right? For a sabbatical, but you're not in Kenya now?

Chad Harper (31:58): No.

Thembi (31:59): Where are you now?

Chad Harper (32:01): I live in Spain. I live in Spain.

Thembi (32:05): And you're an expat?

Chad Harper (32:06): Yes.

Thembi (32:07): Can you talk a little bit about that and how that connects to your work? And maybe, yeah, let's start with that. What made you decide that, yeah, it was time to move on from the US.

Chad Harper (32:20): To be honest, it was the very first trip when I went to Haiti, which was 2012, and I didn't leave the States until the end of 2016. But I don't know what it was...when I was in Haiti for that first nine days, I just felt a different type of humanity that I felt like I didn't experience in the United States. And that first trip changed me. I was like, there's a whole world out there and there's a lot to see and a lot to experience. And first it was just about experiencing other cultures. The Haitian people were so warm and so welcoming and had such high spirits despite their, I think this was two years after the earthquake and many parts of Port-au-Prince were still in rubble. Their spirit and their energy and their self-esteem. I was like, wow, these kids have high-- and the way they supported each other in the workshops, I didn't experience that in New York City. The kids I worked with sometimes made fun of each other, and it was a lot of picking, and I'm always teaching, but also keeping peace between certain kids, and there was a lot of just aggression in the American culture that I didn't see or experience in Haiti. They were so much more unified and supportive of each other, and that just planted a seed.

Thembi (33:58): Then in 2016, you more formally became an expat. Is that what happened?

Chad Harper (34:03): Yes.

Thembi (34:05): Have you lived in Spain since then, or were you living in different countries?

Chad Harper (34:09): Different countries. First it was just East Africa. Kenya was the place I spent the most time, but I also spent a month and a half in Ethiopia, three months in Tanzania and Zanzibar. And then 2018, I spent three months in Uganda. I was really spending a lot of time in East Africa and then also traveling Europe also in 2016. Yeah, no, 2017. 2017 is when I first traveled Europe and came across Spain and Málaga.

Thembi (34:43): Where were you during the pandemic and how did that affect the work that you did? Did you start doing remote work?

Chad Harper (34:49): No, I mean, I was back in Brooklyn during the pandemic. Yeah. I actually had came home for Christmas to be with family--

Thembi (35:00): Oh, in 2019?

Chad Harper (35:03): Right. And then I was planning to leave in February, and then it didn't work out.

Thembi (35:09): It was like yeah, not so fast. Not so fast. Okay. But now you're in Spain.

Chad Harper (35:16): Right. Spain is home.

Thembi (35:17): Okay. So now you've worked with young people from all over the world. You talked about some differences between your experiences with Haitian children and children in the United States. And can you talk to me a little bit about -- you've been all over the world with different children. Do you feel like the culture that surrounds young people has an impact that is stronger than the impact of hip-hop? Because we know that hip-hop now, we talked about the origins of hip-hop. We know that hip-hop now is a global phenomenon, and it influences a lot of young people. And I would assume that that's a great launching point, right? A great point of departure for you to work with young people because young people are going to be familiar with hip-hop no matter where you go. It's kind of a universal form. And I'm curious if you found that the cultural aspects of a particular place are stronger than the culture of hip-hop in terms of influence on young people.

Chad Harper (36:16): So you're saying, is the local culture somewhere stronger than the culture of hip-hop?

Thembi (36:22): ...or do you find that hip-hop can overtake that?

Chad Harper (36:25): Yeah, it definitely, Africa has their own music. Afrobeat is huge. Hip-hop is still definitely big in Africa, but it doesn't compete with Afrobeat. Afrobeat is definitely king when you're in South Africa, amapiano is king. They do love hip-hop. They do have major hip-hop celebrities, but when you're at the club, when it's time to party, hip-hop is not the first music that is put on. Definitely not. Jamaica as well. You not going to compete with dancehall in Jamaica. You can forget that.

Thembi (37:04): Okay. Okay. So does that mean then, that when you're working with young people in areas that have such a strong local culture, do you make connections to the musical culture of their home?

Chad Harper (37:18): That was always my thing. When I traveled, I mixed local sounds with the hip-hop for sure. When I was in South Africa last year, we did an amapiano hip-hop song. 'Cause we wanted the kids to really vibe to it. Absolutely. And then even when I go to European cultures, I worked with refugee children from Ukraine who were living in Poland, and places like that where music doesn't dominate the culture like Africa or Jamaica. I mix in traditional sounds from traditional-- so we sampled traditional instruments from Ukraine to put into the production. So there was familiar sounds that the kids might hear from the music that their parents listen to, because places like that, they emulate American hip-hop because they don't have that really strong music presence in their country. But just to honor where-- the people that we're creating with, I always sample local sounds. I did a song in southern Spain, and flamenco music is really -- that's indigenous to southern Spain. So we even hired a flamenco guitarist to play on the song. So yeah, I tell people I do indigenous hip-hop because I always like to infuse indigenous sounds into the music that we create.

Thembi (38:48): You're like a hip-hop anthropologist.

Chad Harper (38:51): I like that. I might use that.

Thembi (38:53): It is all yours. That's how I feel like or --

Chad Harper (38:56): Thank you.

Thembi (38:58): You're like a hip-hop Zora Neale Hurston.

Chad Harper (39:03): Okay. I have to Google that person.

Thembi (39:05): Oh, okay. Well, briefly, Zora Neale Hurston is a Black woman who in the early 20th century in the United States went down the Eastern Seaboard. Is she coming to you now? She wrote "Their Eyes were Watching God..."

Chad Harper (39:17): Yes.

Thembi (39:18): But she collected folklore specifically in Florida and some other parts of the south where she would collect songs, and music, and instrumental sounds, and she even sang.

Chad Harper (39:30): I'm just taking a note.

Thembi (39:31): Yes, yes. She's wonderful, and I love to invoke her because I think she's so important. She collected the sounds and text and folklore, folk music, folk culture in America that is now preserved in official collections. And that's one of the important things that I think when we're doing what we're doing now, what you're doing is sort of collecting these sounds, combining the sounds of, I would assume, like a hip-hop, a New York-based hip-hop of a certain era with all of those indigenous sounds and those cultural sounds from all over, and recording them, and putting them into the public consciousness. And so that's what she did. And at a time when, of course, we didn't have YouTube, but knowing that it would need to be preserved, because I think when you're talking about marginalized populations and the suppression of people's art forms, if somebody says, "Well I don't hear it, it doesn't exist." You know what I mean? It's wanting to preserve a marginalized culture so that it doesn't just completely get suppressed or erased out of existence. So yeah, I definitely connect you with that kind of work.

Chad Harper (40:47): Thank you.

Thembi (40:48): Of course. What's next though? What do you have going on in the pipeline? Are you incubating? Are you resting? Are you gearing up? What's going on?

Chad Harper (40:56): I wish I had the mindset to rest.

Thembi (41:02): It's not in you.

Chad Harper (41:04): No. I'm working on a new project. It's called "I'm Just Like You," and it comes from a song that I recorded probably like in 2015 or 2014 in Liberia. Now I'm just in Liberia to volunteer for friend's organization. I know her from Brooklyn. She has a clinic in Liberia. And again, my trips to Haiti, and then I had a trip to India and I was like, I just don't feel like being the States now. So I called her, I said, can I go to your house in Liberia and volunteer with your clinic? So I'm there, and another friend of mine from DC who's a filmmaker, happened to be in Liberia at the same time. So she invites me to this school where she's doing a documentary on this school for deaf children and what it's like to have a disability in a country that a lot of the majority suffer some extreme poverty.

(42:01): So I'm sitting in the classroom watching her create this documentary, and I just start to hum these words, and I was humming the words that "If you could talk with your hands and listen with your eyes, then maybe you would realize I'm just like you." And she heard me humming this, and she was like, "Write that down." So she was there for about nine days, and as she was leaving, she was like, "I'm just here to create a trailer for the documentary. Go back to the States, release the trailer, fundraise to come back and do a full documentary." And I said, "I have an idea." I said, "A good music video, if we fuse it with the footage of the trailer, so we create a song and music video that serves as the trailer, and people will listen to a song a lot more than they'll watch a movie trailer."

(42:55): So she said, "Okay, let's try it." So I ended up finding the number one hip-hop artist in the country at the time, paid him like 75 bucks to be on the song with me. And we wrote this song called "I'm Just Like You." And we found a local artist to sing the chorus, those lyrics that I was singing in my head that day. So we recorded this song, shot the music video, got the kids, the deaf children in the video dancing, and they explained, "We know the rhythm of the song, 'cause we can feel the bass in our chest. So we can dance to music if you have a big enough speaker that puts out that bass." So the song ended up going viral in Liberia, reaching the president and the vice president invited the famous rapper to come meet and talk about how we need to address this community in our country because it was such a huge hit.

(43:52): So that planted a seed with me working with people with disabilities. Fast forward to last year. I'm in Sierra Leone, and sometimes I just go to a country and I don't have any idea of who I'm working with. I had zero contact in Sierra Leone. I had just felt called to go to Sierra Leone. So I'm there and I'm just hanging out for a couple of days looking for something that sparks my interest. And I walked past this one-- no, I went to this really nice restaurant on the beach, just to have a little fresh juice. And I walk out and I get surrounded by six, seven guys, and half of them are in wheelchairs, half of them are on crutches, and they're begging for change. And I said, gents, okay, hold on. First of all, y'all ran upon me like a gang. You know what I'm saying?

(44:41): I'm from New York. My first response is to hit one of y'all. You know what I'm saying? The way y'all just came out quick, you know what I mean? I was like, so I'm just making jokes with them. And I was like, but let me ask you guys a question. I see people selling fruit, selling juices, or selling this on the street. Why do you choose to beg, over doing a little small business like that? And they were like, "Being disabled in a country like this, no one will ever give you a job." Those people that started those little small businesses, maybe they had a job, they saved their money. They were able to put some product together to start selling something. And I said, "Okay, well, how much would that cost for you to do something small?" So we figured out from doing the currency exchange about 50 US, and them begging on the street, they got about a dollar a day or something, and they would just go get their little one meal for the day.

(45:42): They were living in an abandoned building. So I said, okay, I'm going to do a little fundraiser with a few people from the us. We raised $50 for each of them and outlined how they want to start their little small business. And that was the first step of just helping these disabled men. Some of them said, we live in this area on the beach, there's a lot of bars, a lot of clubs. We could sell cigarettes, we could sell gum, candy, lighters to all the club. And that was a common theme. A lot of them wanted to sell petrol to the motorcycle taxis. In Africa, a lot of countries have motorcycle taxis as transportation. So we bought them these, I don't know, 10-gallon jugs of petrol, and they would sell it in little quarts. But then I ended up meeting these two polio rappers through another connect that I found just on Google.

(46:33): I said, okay, this is interesting. These disabled guys, I wonder if there's a disabled organization that I can reach out to and work with some kids there. And the guy said, "Okay, yeah, there's a school for disabled kids, but I want to introduce you." -- 'cause I told him about my organization -- to some disabled rappers. So I met with them, recorded a song with them, and these guys were really talented. They wrote and recorded that song, and -- the first day I met them. So I said, I want to repeat what I did in Liberia. So I was looking for a famous rapper, and I'm at this premier hotel just one day having a coffee. And it just happened, a famous rapper who was a woman named Swadu was sitting at a table next to me, and the restaurant kept getting my order wrong, and the guy sitting with her was mad.

(47:22): He was embarrassed. He's like, "This guy's from the United States, can't you hear his accent? Get his food right! You're embarrassing us." You know what I'm saying? His sister was married to the president, so he took it personal that the country was looking bad. So he asked me to come sit to his table and told the waiter, "Put whatever he orders on my tab." So I said, "Okay." So I'm sitting with him. Yeah, so we're just chit-chatting, finding out...I found out she's one of the top rappers in the country, told her about the project, she agreed to be on the song, and then the rappers wanted me on the song as well to make it, to have someone from the States on the song. So we did this song and it just made me think about the impact that we had with the people in Liberia. So this is a long story. I apologize for the listeners...

Thembi (48:04): Take your time. That's what we're here for, for the stories.

Chad Harper (48:07): Okay. So we released this song, and there was something about -- my engineer in Kenya who I worked with said, "The guy that you bought the beat from, he must've been like a new guy making beats. It wasn't mixed well," this and that. I said, "Okay, let's just take off that beat and make a whole new beat." So we took off that beat. We made a whole new beat so it has a better sound quality. I didn't feel like the sound quality was as good as the type of music we do. Then a friend of his -- so this guy from Kenya, my engineer, he works with me on all the projects. Spain, Poland, and everywhere I go, he co-producers the music and mixes and masters it for me. A guy in Nairobi hits him up and he said, "Man, I've been watching you for the last couple of years. You're doing a lot of international songs with young people about social issues. You're doing songs from Spain and Poland. You're in East and West Africa, you're in a..." so he was like, "I'm really interested in what you're doing." And he said, "Just so you know, I work with kids too. Just two years ago in 2022, I was nominated for a Grammy for Best Children's Song."

Thembi (49:16): Oh, wow.

Chad Harper (49:17): "And since you and your homie from Hip Hop Saves Lives, you work with all these kids, I think we should do a project together." So then we get a Zoom meeting with this guy, you know what I'm saying, who was just nominated for a Grammy for Best Children Song. And I said, "Hey, man, a friend of mine actually won a Grammy for the Best Children's Song a couple of years ago," and I was like, "Her name is Falu."

And he was like, "That's who we lost to!" He was like, "You know her?" And I was like, "Yeah!" And I actually had worked with Falu. We were both hired by Carnegie Hall back in 2015 working with kids. So I was like, wow, this is a small world. So anyway, he says, "I want to do," he's like, "You guys have already done enough work to make an album, an international album with all these children's songs." But he was like, "I want to continue this work, and I want to get some celebrity attention to your songs by...let's do like 10 songs, and I'll pull some celebrity contacts and get one on each song to boost the marketing for your songs." And he said, "With my Grammy connects, I can submit the album to the Grammys for either Best Children's Song or Best Social Change song, 'cause we do children's songs about social change."

So then I said, "Can you listen to this one that we just did in Sierra Leone?" And he was like, "You should have a theme to this album. We should come up with a theme to the album." So I told him about working with people with disabilities, and I was like, "I don't think that's ever really been done on a global scale, collecting songs from people with disabilities around the world." And he loved the idea. So we sent him a song and he was like, "Okay, I'm going to hop on this song." So he just laid vocals to this song and we just finished mixing and mastering the song yesterday.

Thembi (51:02): Oh, wow. Okay.

Chad Harper (51:03): Yeah. And I just sent it yesterday to the disabled rappers, the guys from Sierra Leone who had polio, and the famous local celebrity from Sierra Leone. I was like, "Have you guys ever been on a song with a Grammy nominated artist?" And I was like, "Well, now you are." So this is the lead single for our project, and this is going to be a 10-year project with Hip Hop Saves Lives. So it's me, it's this guy named Muzi, but the group is Jabali Africa, J-A-B-A-L-I, Afrika with a K, Jabali Afrika, and there's two guys, two singers in the group. He's one of the singers, Muzi, M-U-Z-I. So he laid these incredible vocals on this song. So right now we are promoting this song, and we have to promote it strong because you have to submit to the Grammys by, I think August 30th. So we will spend July and August promoting the song, creating some buzz for it, to submit this song for Best Social Change Song to the Grammys, and then finish recording the album because the Grammys are not until February. So we have time to piece together those 10 songs and submit the album as well. So that's the project that we're working on. It's a global campaign working with artists with disabilities called "I'm Just Like You."

Thembi (52:32): Wow, that's powerful.

Chad Harper (52:35): Thank you.

Thembi (52:36): Yeah, I love that. And that's essentially under the Hip Hop Saves Lives umbrella in terms of your side of the collaboration?

Chad Harper (52:44): Yes, yes.

Thembi (52:44): Okay, okay. Okay. The nomadic collaborator, I guess we'll also call you that. That's beautiful.

Chad Harper (52:53): Thank you.

Thembi (52:54): Well, I want to make sure that I get information about your project in the show notes when the episode goes up, but I just really thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about the incredible work that you've been doing all over the world and just how -- your commitment to young people. Can we close out with your mission? Can you tell us what your mission is when you work with young people?

Chad Harper (53:19): Yes. I tell people that creative arts is just a tool. Our goal is very simple, and that is to build kids' self-esteem. When you work with these kids in low income areas where there's drugs and there's gangs and there's violence, they don't see themselves outside of their community. It's hard for them to dream past what's going on in their environment. And so that's one of the reasons why our curriculum tackles social issues from all over the globe to introduce them to other parts of the globe. But our main goal is to make them realize that they're good at something, and give them a sustainable opportunity to grow, and be good at something. I remember having young kids their first day and their first rhyme they wrote, and other kids laughed at them like, man, you wasting your time. And then three, four months later, they're one of the best rappers in the school. Their self-esteem is high. It really transforms how they see themselves. So I can honestly say hip-hop built my self-esteem, and that's what I want to give to other kids. Hip-hop, creative arts, is a way to build your self-esteem. So Hip Hop Saves Lives is in the business of building self-esteem. Creative arts is just the tool.

Thembi (54:38): Thank you, Chad.

Chad Harper (54:39): Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.

Thembi (54:42): Yes, indeed. It was good to have you here. Until next time...

Chad Harper (54:45): Peace and love...