A hip-hop archive at Harvard University? Classes at Berkeley, Stanford, Michigan, Yale and MIT? Panel discussions on Jay-Z and Nas sandwiched between Milton and the Harlem Renaissance at the Modern Language Association conference? The sea of change under way in the academy started in 1994 with two historians: Dr. Tricia Rose, now of the University of California-Santa Cruz, and Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, now of New York University. Rose's Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America--along with the brilliant final chapter of Kelley's Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class--roiled the placid waters of the academy's consensus on rap and hip-hop: that they weren't really music, that they weren't worthy of critical study. A decade later, a new group of scholars is coming of age. And they're poised to make a little noise of their own. So how does one get to be a hip-hop scholar? Well, there's a bit more to it than quoting the stray lyric or writing the occasional essay. For example, some of the journalists and academics who followed in Rose's and Kelley's footsteps in the 1990s have been criticized for being more into than up on the culture. A decade after Black Noise, observers say, a pivotal moment in the history of hip-hop scholarship appears to have arrived. For Dr. Scott Heath, assistant professor of English at Georgetown University, the implications are clear: Hip hop scholarship has the opportunity to begin to ask a new set of questions. For Heath, the essential questions are: what hip-hop is, who it belongs to, who it's speaking to and speaking for. Hip-hop has been defined as a mode of expression for a marginal population, for an underclass, but it's been commodified and globalized, as has the audience. So he talks to his students about cultural property and representation, agency and identification and how these are bound up with nationalism, transnationalism, cultural identity and authenticity. The contemporary state of hip-hop gives Heath the blues--and not in the sense popularized by some critics, as the expression of "the people's" sorrow. Heath imagines "a room full of racist White people sitting around a table in a board room saying, 'Listen, let's come up with some TV shows, some videos, some songs that make Black people look promiscuous, like criminals who can't help themselves." But at the same time, recognizing that hip-hop is, in fact, bigger than commercial rap culture, Heath adds he's cheered to see the hip-hop generation of scholars moving into directions that were difficult for previous generations of scholars--involved as they were in the demanding work of legitimizing the African American presence in the academy. One of the reasons that hip-hop is such a vital mode of African American cultural expression is its immediacy and its insistence on lived experience as a requisite for authority to speak in and about the culture. If you listen to rappers, it's always about where they were, what they did, that they will never leave. He believes that makes hip-hop an area where we might see theory and practice coming together inside African American intellectualism; where we might see an attempt to develop innovative approaches to using hip-hop as a method for organizing African American youth around issues that are important to their survival. "There's new ground to be broken, and it's being broken," he says.