Rodney Carmichael, 'Down by Law: Property, 'Policy and (Dis)possesion on Blast in the Projects'

In-person and livestreaming at youtube.com/hutchinscenter

Rodney Carmichael is a storyteller, journalist and cultural critic, covering hip-hop at NPR Music since 2017. He often works at the intersection of race and inequality, telling stories across mediums that combine reporting and criticism to spotlight the sociopolitical significance of Black cultural production. As co-host/co-creator of NPR’s first narrative music podcast Louder Than A Riot, he and co-host Sidney Madden traced the collision of hip-hop and inequality across two seasons that respectively exposed how mass incarceration and misogynoir impacted the culture. Louder’s investigative reporting helped former No Limit rapper Mac Phipps gain clemency in 2021 after serving 21 years in prison for a murder he maintains he didn’t commit. In 2024, Louder Than A Riot became the first podcast team to receive Journalist of the Year honors from the National Association of Black Journalists.

An alumnus of Poynter’s News Writing and Reporting for College Graduates Fellowship, Rodney’s early journalism career featured staff-writing positions covering religion and public health at the Waco Tribune-Herald and Black pop culture at rolling out Urbanstyle Weekly. During his decade-long tenure at former Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing, he was an award-winning music editor, culture writer and senior writer. His most impactful stories use hip-hop as a lens to interrogate rhyme and punishment, gentrification and erasure, masculinity and Black identity.

BOOMIN’ SYSTEMS, a narrative exploration of hiphop’s complex relationship with public housing and the hood, will trace how the politics of race and class laid the foundation for an unlikely creative economy of the dispossessed. Rap naturally boasts some of the most transformative sonic innovations of the last half-century, many of which were seeded and sprouted on sites of extraction and erasure. Rodney Carmichael’s research will focus on interrogating and documenting the sweeping disconnect between the economic disparity and disinvestment suffered by hiphop’s communities and the wealth, innovation and cultural capital these communities create. 

Despite the vested interest in devaluing Black property, America’s seemingly most impoverished zip codes contributed to the richest musical legacy and cultural export of the last half century. Channeling rap’s commercial value back to its birthplaces will require a push for structural change and reparative economics — from establishing community equity trusts to Hiphop Heritage Districts. By documenting the collective uprising of hiphop innovators and entrepreneurs and centering them within the historical context of such exclusionary forces as redlining, gentrification and shifts in public housing policy, Carmichael intends to underscore the connection between systemic inequality and Black cultural production. Because it’s high time origin stories not only honor the past, but instruct on how to secure hiphop’s speculative future.