On the Science of Hip-Hop and the Underground Sound of Dr. C. Malik : An Interview

Dr.C. Malik Boykin is a Hip-Hop artist turned Psychology professor at Brown University. We talked about what it was like growing up in the DMV surrounded by culture, music, family in academia and how the academics of hip-hop just makes sense.

Not unlike Hip-Hop, Malik found his roots in the books. We get into it here.

How did you get started in music?

I love music and grew up in a household where music was constantly being played. My parents played a lot of Motown, Rufus and Chaka Khan, tunes and funky records they grew up on. On our trips to the Midwest, my father being from Detroit, and his father, having been a professional musician, and then my mother from Gary, where we would be hanging out at Aunt Jane's house (did I also mention we’re cousins?), was able to be a time where the cousins would be singing and performing, playing the piano, telling stories and jokes. It gave me this idea that getting together, performing and sharing your talent and what it is you do is a natural thing to do.  

I was really inspired by the hip-hop music that my brother was introducing me to and I was listening to on the radio. Slick Rick, Grandmaster Flash, Big Daddy Kane, and I started trying to write my own rhymes. I was in elementary school, fifth grade and they were terrible, terrible raps. They were cute as a kid, and my mom encouraged me. And as my language became more sophisticated in hip-hop, in that time they really had an ethic of who can use the best vocabulary and say the most clever things, it was very lyrically focused. That linguistic jousting, and demonstrating bravado through your command of language spoke to me. I thought that was really cool. As a person who read a lot, it gave me an outlet to use all of these groovy words that I was reading and ideas that I was playing with, and, put them in a cultural expression that I could share with my friends and family. That was creative and fun, as opposed to being stale and boring. 

Malik rapped to show his personality and performing with family was like a cipher at school. 

I was so far gone into it that I'd be skipping class just to battle rap against other dudes in school like “ We got the best rhymes.” I had this crew in high school called the No Name Clique and we’d be battling against these other dudes with these exotic rap names. And I got this idea that maybe I could do this professionally. I felt like I was as good as the people on the scene and on television. So I poured hours and hours into it, and it felt good. It really felt good in ways that other components of school didn't. And it was validating, communicating with people and they’re clapping for you, they’re impressed with the stuff that you're doing. And so that positive feedback, I just turned up, and kept diving into it, and kept on sharing my  heart and my ideas and command of language through art, and through hip hop. 

T: Sometimes I'll be listening to a song and hear certain words, and be like, man, where did that come from? Or how did they come up with that? So, what was the process for you learning and putting new language into your music?

I was always a reader from early. And also, with some of the hip-hop artists that identified with being educational, people like KRS One, whose nickname was The Teacher. 

 And he had the song called Part-Time Suckers where the opening line was like

“Vocabulary, difficult, isn't it? At least it looks that way when you witness it”

and then I got this idea that vocabulary is cool. And trying to find the illest word and flipping it and using it in a clever way was an ethic that was partially instilled in me, by rappers that at that time who would be actively trying to pull in interesting words. 

So I was trying to actively pull in interesting words, and my friends were trying to and it was like whoa, we just used loquacious or whatever. Really cool. That just stuck with me. It became something that my friends and I identified with. I think it was a community thing. But I think it was also what many people in the broader, global hip-hop community were doing at that time. So I picked that up. And while that wasn't necessarily the coolest thing, at my high school, or in my place, there was a loop of people for whom that was the cool thing. So I gravitated towards those people. There was this little sub community of people that listened to hip-hop that was a bit more intellectual.

T: So you were in hip hop and doing rap when you were in your 20s? And then, did you get away from it for a little bit? Or did you decide to focus on being a professor and going to school? 

My journey with wanting to pursue art, and also wanting to pursue psychology, or science probably is an interesting one. It's been like this push-pull that has existed my whole life.  Or at least since elementary school. You get to middle school,  at that time I'm a horrible student. But I'm rapping and wanting to be a professional rapper in middle school. You get to high school  and then one rap group, a second high school, and then another rap group…

Transferring schools meant transferring rap groups.

But I also took a psychology class and it was my favorite class and I get an “A” in psychology. But I was rapping all through that time. I get to college, and my first stint in college and undergrad, I put the rhymes down. I was still freestyling but I wasn't trying to pursue it like that. Then I left school to pursue hip-hop in my 20s and we were really doing that heavy. I came to a point where I'm like I don't see the pathway to blowing up, being able to buy a house from making this business, maybe I need to go back to school. And I did do that. But that whole time that I was back in school finishing my bachelor's degree, I was touring with a band that whole two year stretch of finishing undergrad. I'm playing shows every week  with my man, Mr. Cliff, who was in my rap group. Then I graduate. I’m working in psychology as a research assistant for my dad. But I'm still rapping. 

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T:So what brings you back? No matter if you're teaching psychology or doing something else, it seems like you always come back to music.

It's a part of me even now, I make music and I just recorded a song last weekend.

And I've performed that this semester. And there's a hip hop club in town. And, me and some rappers that I know from DC and Connecticut did a show here, ran into my buddy, Stephon Alexander, who's a physics professor here in Brown, who is also the science consultant for The Universal Hip Hop. He and I have done like six songs together, and we're working on a new one right now.  So in his hip hop science movement that he's running through the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx. I'm one of the hip hop scientists and I'm part of that particular movement. And that's cool. 

Do you think that creative fulfillment is important in every stage of life, or in general for people? Do you think it's important to have that outlet? 

I think that different people have different things that help to center. For some people, for some people, basketball is life. For me, it happens to be music. And I think if I didn't  sometimes, if I get too far away from me, I can feel it eating at me. And I also have a range of ideas and range of ways that I like to express myself. So not everything can be a paper for the American psychologist, APA journal. Some things that I want to say, and some people that I want to talk to, it’s best for me to talk to him through hip-hop, because they're not going to pay $30 to download a paper. 

They don’t go to this university and have access to this. And that's not even what I want to say. Those are things that I want to say to other scientists, but if I want to talk to other people that are going through various kinds of experiences, I talk a lot about just my own personal history with racism or police harassment, and things of that nature, some days it's talking about psychology. 

 On other days, Malik sits with a beat telling his own personal narratives. 

And for those kinds of communications and expressions, hip hop is just a better medium. One that really lets me get these sorts of things off my chest, so they don't bother me.

As a psychology professor, how do you think music like jazz, rap or hip-hop has been therapeutic to the Black community or to you?

There are so many ways that jazz is meditative. At the time that people are playing, they're really getting their emotions out and communicating their emotions. Which can also have the opportunity to connect with other people's emotions, so that you can feel that same moment. Feel some kind of emotional connection with the artists through being on that same vibration and really feeling and understanding that music. Hip Hop is the same way. 

So the experience of playing, people really can just zone out or if you're gonna do improv, you're really just kind of exploring what's inside of you making it audible. That's deep and heavy.

One of my favorite musicians, artists of all time, is John Coltrane. He has an entire album called Meditations, it’s an entire era of his music, where he went to study the various breathing  techniques that people go through in South Asia, and brought that into a transformation of what his own musical sound sounded like. So he's doing like a personal development, personal exploration, through sound.

Hip hop, since early, has talked about psychology, mental health, healing, and these sorts of things. But you even go to like The Message. What's the opening to The Message? 

Don't push me cuz I'm close to the edge

 I’m trying not to lose my head. 

If that isn’t psychology, what is it exactly? He's going down the road of just talking about  the stresses of poverty, and the kinds of ways that economic inequality creates a stressful experience. This stressful experience contributes to negative outcomes for the people that live there. You can really just analyze that song from that lens. It's so heavy and that song inspired generations of people to rap. Generations of Black people who are going through things and say, this song really speaks to me and I have things that I want to say.

Do you think hearing about your own experiences in a song and having validation can help you to let go of it or help you to be inspired?

Absolutely. And also help you to know that you're not alone. Yeah, to help you know that this is a human experience. That the kinds of vulnerabilities that you feel or the ways that you may feel marginalized or surveilled by the police or invalidated are ways that other people are feeling also. So it helps you to just not feel so alone. And this is a common experience. And as such many rappers, talk about their own mental health journeys. You hear rappers talking about depression.  And it's kind of one of those places where in it may be in some earlier era, talking about depression or wanting to not feel that way was taboo. 

In hip-hop it’s okay to talk about and just as a way that people can be vulnerable, and human, and communicate that And maybe hopefully even inspire other people to be vulnerable in those ways and talk about their own mental health journeys.

T: From a male perspective, a rapper, they kind of have to have a sense of hyper masculinity and try to not be vulnerable, but I feel like in the music, they're allowed to have that space where they can say what they want, and share their emotions, say how they feel. It's kind of like that outlet.

Yeah, it’s very emotional. You hear a lot of men, emoting in ways that people don't always have access to. But rap artists can model vulnerability, and oftentimes do, they also can model toxicity, and often do as well,  or emotion suppression. But also could talk about what that experience is like, where, this is masculinity and suppression and promotion. Also, as read reprove psychological repercussions. And if you listen closely, all that's in the media, it's all in it. And so, that's just yet another reason why I love it. And yet another reason why I think it's so relevant to psychology. And even in thinking about the psychology of the Black experience, there's a whole curriculum of the psychology of the Black experience…

What is your favorite album of all time?

That is so hard,  I don't know. I feel like my default answer would probably be Nas’ Illmatic.. .If I gotta give an answer quickly, that would probably be the one I would give. But there are a lot of great hip hop albums out there. And some that I think of are really unsung, Digable Planets had a really great album called Blowout comb came out in ‘95. I think that album was incredible. And, it's sonically beautiful, it's lyrically smart. And there's a lot to learn from that album, they essentially went gangster by going like Black radical, Black Panther, sociology, like deep the way I'm gonna be hard, is I'm gonna talk to you about Bell hooks and Black Panthers. And that album just really spoke to me. It's jazzy, the lyrics are well put together. But there's others, yeah, that's a long list.

What is an album that you think everyone needs to listen to at least once?

Marvin Gaye's What's Going On ...Mercy Mercy Me, What's going on, Inner City Blues,  there's just so many incredible songs that really just give you a snapshot of what the 60s were for Black people and in the country and in the world.

How can we listen to any of your music or read your work?

If you go to my website, it's riselab.science. And my music. Malik Starx on Spotify, dance freedom. I've got a music video for Dancing for Freedom as well.