Chesney Snow Creating Innovative Princeton University Hip Hop Course

A pioneering figure in American beatbox culture, celebrated performer, Drama Desk winner and respected creative force is now incorporating his passions into teaching. This semester Chesney Snow, lecturer in theater and music theater at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, is presenting the course “Miss Education: The Women of Hip Hop.”

After performing at a concert in Times Square (New York City) marking the 50th anniversary of hip hop, he had a conversation in which the title for a possible course was suggested. “I said, it should be a course, because I had been ruminating over the years about women in hip hop,” says Snow, co-founder of the American Beatbox Championships.

“I could see the representation for women in that subculture of the community. I wanted their contributions to be more understood ... as it relates to academia,” says Snow, who became the first full-time music theater faculty member at Princeton in 2022. Prior to that, he was a three-time artist in residence at Harvard University.

To develop the course, Snow collaborated with two women: Eternia, a celebrated Canadian rapper, and Dr. Francesca D’Amico-Cuthbert, an award-winning historian of American and Canadian hip hop culture. There have been courses about women in hip hop, but Snow wanted to take an embodied approach, so the students are not only studying the history and foundational context of the culture intellectually, but they are engaging in and embodying the craft as practitioners.

“We’re doing the study of hip hop theater, which is a form of music theater,” says Snow. “It’s a new approach to the study of women in hip hop.”

One element of the course is understanding the archival process and how information about the women of hip hop is gathered and archived. Then, communicating what is in the archive, which is done through embodying the work. The students are also learning about hip hop journalism and how to create a podcast in addition to doing a rigorous exploration of the history that forged hip hop.

“We are taking that information and research … and we are learning how to perform that, how to actually put that on stage through hip hop theater,” Snow explains. “This year, we’re focusing on the MC (a vocalist who commands the microphone) as the entry point into the study of hip hop. Women, like any other group, are incredibly diverse, so each artist if they’re aspiring to greatness or building a legacy, then they’re centering a unique voice or perspective.

“Some might center that in a hyper-sexualized content within their music that is intended to represent resistance to the dominant masculine narrative or patriarchal system that might be very oppressive,” he continues. “That can also align with a larger entertainment, industrial focus … that has used women’s physical and emotional sexuality to garner attention or sell the product.”

The course reviews a vibrant spectrum of how women have expressed themselves in their music. There is reflection of women’s history and how hip hop has intersected with Black feminism. Of course, there has been an evolution of the art form and artists who have transformed the culture.

“One of the reasons that I really wanted to do this course was to be a part of that evolution,” Snow says. “Women were not just accessories in hip hop. They really were foundational architects of hip hop, and that’s a driving theme in the course.”

DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) is widely credited with creating hip hop in 1973 at parties he threw in the Bronx, New York. Snow notes that those parties were largely organized by Herc’s sister.

“Women’s contributions have been enormous,” Snow says. “This year, we’re focusing primarily on the MC. The next iteration of the course, we’re aiming to add other elements of hip hop. … The next course will be bringing in the dance, the visuals, the photographers and other components. We’ll be looking at beatboxers, another major component of the culture, and the deejay.”