Howard Professor Uses Hip-Hop as a Literary Lesson

Gilbert Perkins, whose stage name is Sage Salvo, works to challenge the notion that hip-hop is not a literary art form.
Last October, Gilbert Perkins, 31, found himself on the coveted stage at TEDx’s Mid Atlantic Conference. During his 15-minute lecture, he gave a brief hip-hop 101 lesson on how 16 bars translate into a 1,000-word song. Thus, a 12-track hip-hop album renders a literary production of about 12,000 words. To Perkins—an adjunct professor and Ph.D. student at Howard University—this length of composition merits a literary feat.

In one of his favorite cafés in Washington, D.C., sipping his customary black coffee with honey, Perkins further validates this often-disapproving genre of music as true prose by explaining the piercing symmetry he has found between the lyrics of hip moguls like Jay-Z with the school-taught works of William Shakespeare.

“Jay-Z is really good at using extended metaphors. I can give at least three or four examples of how Jay-Z uses this technique, the same way Shakespeare uses the device,” Perkins says.

This skill of identifying recurring patterns of literary devices—double entendres, metaphors, onamonapeias—between varying texts started out as a hobby for Perkins. He would listen to music and read poetry and be able to pinpoint the similarities.

Today, he uses these correlations as the basis of his program, Words Liive—a semester-long curriculum for high school students, which delves into more than a dozen examples that bring together traditional literature and philosophy with current, urban rhythm and rhyme.

“I wanted to develop an augmentation tool to teach literature and history by using a portal that kids are familiar with,” he says.

Being a first-hand witness to the effects that irrelevant curriculum and misguided teaching can have on a student’s academic performance, Perkins believes that most students are not intellectually challenged; they’re simply bored in school.