University of New England Professor Matthew Anderson, Ph.D., was driving home from work one evening last fall when he heard the host of WPMG’s show “Rhyme Beat Radio” discuss the cultural impact of hip-hop, and Anderson turned up the volume to listen — and learn. He said it was a revelation to learn hip-hop’s history reaches back to the ’60s and has strong roots in the social justice and activism of the time.
“There’s a whole world in the history of hip-hop that it was becoming clear to me I didn’t know anything about,” Anderson said.
For an English professor who teaches poetry from around the world, from antiquity to modern times, as well as a spring course called “Whitman to Hip-hop,” the history of hip-hop was something his students needed to learn more about, said Anderson, who teaches in UNE’s School of Arts and Humanities. So, he invited DJ Yung Dirigo, whose real name is Ben Pinette, to lead a three-hour long class on the history of hip-hop for the students in his upper-level poetry seminar.
Pinette joined the class on April 16 in Marcil Hall and presented a jam-packed account of the music’s historical context with the aim “to raise awareness and an appreciation of hip-hop as a genre, but also a culture.”
Pinette, who is White and calls himself a “guest in hip-hop culture,” described how the lyrics from hip-hop artists detailed the cry from urban Black communities for equal housing and education. Pinette called their music “truth telling in the streets” and “windows to people’s lives.”
“So, these poets through the ’70s and the rappers who would follow offered vital, first-hand sources of daily American life in the 20th century,” Pinette said. “You might not really hear their work in mainstream media channels. Hip-hop was wordsmiths breaking down for the masses what’s happening in their neighborhoods.”
All 13 students in the class sat silently mesmerized by the polished, fast-paced presentation full of historic music videos and the passion from the young man, who remembered for them his own college years before graduating from Endicott College in 2016.
Pinette said that, from the genre’s early influencers in the 1950s and 1960s to the birth of hip-hop in the 1970s — on up to 2025 — hip-hop has been, at its core, a cultural movement grounded in rapping, graffiti, deejaying, and breakdancing that serves to amplify an ongoing commentary on capitalism and systemic racism.
He introduced early influencers — Black artists such as James Baldwin, Langton Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, jazz musician Gilbert Scott-Heron, and Beat poet Bob Kaufman. He explained how, later, in the 1970s and 1980s, hip-hop emerged, both on the West Coast and the East Coast in New York City. The birth of hip-hop in the Bronx saw the rise of outdoor, block-party-style events, where people learned firsthand of the creativity, artistry, and technical innovation of the first hip-hop artists, such as DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican-American pioneer often considered the founder of the genre.
For UNE junior Owen Wadlington (Marine Biology, ’26), the lecture didn’t feel anywhere close to three hours in length and was as entertaining as it was thought-provoking. Wadlington already knew several of the hip-hop artists discussed — such as Wu-Tang Clan, Redman, Run-DMC — but was grateful for the expanded history lesson on the culture and activism around hip-hop.
“That was super cool. I thought it was really engaging and really put together,” Wadlington said after the class. “I learned a lot about a history that I hadn’t really had much education in. People just tend to think of the music and not the history behind the music.”
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