He took his mic, sprung to his feet, and launched into the alphabet song, concluding with, “Now you know your ABC’s!” Reacting to the applause, he shouted, “You know what I’m saying!?” At the Skoll World Forum, DMC, egged on by Williams sitting beside him, bet that everyone in the audience had learned something fundamental through “one of the greatest hip-hop songs in the history” - the singsong ABC song. Everything about hip-hop uniquely has a way to inspire people into transformation.” There’s something universal about hip-hop, says DMC, who serves on the advisory council of Hip Hop Public Health: “Old, young, white, Black, even if you don’t understand English, you can relate to the feeling of it. Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, a hip-hop pioneer formerly in the seminal group Run-DMC, says “it speaks in a youthful, fun, understandable way” while packing the intensity of punk rock or rock and roll. The team at Hip Hop Public Health says that hip-hop offers something extra when it comes to the information they’re trying to relay. “Music has powerful neurological effects on our brains,” says Williams. For patients with a stroke, we use melodic intonation therapy to help them to speak,” which refers to hitching spoken words and phrases to different pitches and rhythmic patterns to restore speech. “We use it for agitated patients with delirium - we use music to calm them down instead of using restraints. “Music helps us to learn, music augments our memories, music lowers our stress,” he explains. Williams, now a neurologist at Columbia University, says that music has a role to play in medicine generally. In this anniversary year, Skoll wanted to call attention to this lesser known part of hip-hop history - which continues to thrive in 2023 with new rhymes and expanded programming for young people. “And that’s the power of hip-hop.”Ī year later, the organization Hip Hop Public Health was born, co-founded by Williams and Fresh. “Imagine that fourth, fifth and sixth grade children, through a hip-hop intervention, were able to do what most people can’t do in the setting of that drama and that trauma,” said Williams at the Skoll World Forum held in Oxford, England, last month at a session devoted to the 50th anniversary of the musical genre. Williams says this knowledge translates into saving lives in a high-risk community like Harlem. They reported that of the 582 fourth, fifth and sixth graders in Harlem that they worked with, most learned where a stroke occurs in the body, what the classic symptoms of stroke are and how to take urgent action. He and his colleague published a scientific paper in Stroke, a publication of the American Heart Association, demonstrating that efficacy. “When I heard those stroke symptoms in the hook of that track, I knew that there was no way this wasn’t going to be just sticky, but it was also going to be contagious. Williams says it was clear right away that it was going to be a winner. It took them weeks to get the beat and the lyrics of “Stroke Ain’t No Joke” right, but once they had it locked in, “Doug went into the studio and I think he knocked it out in a few days,” says Williams. This is what Williams and Fresh were trying to do in that Harlem studio. “And yet in my mind, we hadn’t fully leveraged it for public health.” “Music has always been able to diffuse not just through our personal lives but across the world,” he says. Our problem is often scaling those answers.” To Williams, music, and hip-hop in particular, could serve as a powerful tool. “Our problem is not coming up with the answers. “There was a lot of skepticism about whether this type of work could lead to a fruitful, productive” career, he admits.īut Williams knew when it came to more traditional public health interventions, “they don’t diffuse into society” as easily. Williams wanted to demonstrate that hip-hop could be used for public health interventions. Their goal was to create a hit but with an unusual lyrical premise - to teach people how to detect stroke symptoms and respond appropriately. “We would be going over different beats, different sounds.” “I would be with Doug for hours and hours into the wee hours of the morning,” Williams recalls. Each evening, he’d finish up his work as a physician at Harlem Hospital Center and walk seven blocks to the studio of hip-hop artist and “The Original Human Beat Box” Doug E. Olajide Williams felt like he had two jobs. Hip-hop’s got a message real stealthy: To teach the world to be mad healthy!
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