Carson’s essay notes Tupac’s “Keep Ya Head Up,” the iconic song that defends a woman’s right to choose abortion.

“Since a man can’t make one/ He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one/ So will the real men get up/ I know you’re fed up ladies, but keep your head up,” Tupac says in the track.

 

Other songs featured in Carson’s article include “Retrospect for Life” by Common and Lauryn Hill, as well as “To Zion” by Lauryn Hill.

“I’m sorry for taking your first breath, first step, and first cry/ But I wasn’t prepared mentally nor financially,” Common raps in the 1997 track.

 

Hill, in her 1998 tune, sang about resisting the pressure to terminate the pregnancy that brought her son Zion.

“Woe this crazy circumstance/ I knew his life deserved a chance/ But everybody told me to be smart/ ‘Look at your career,’ they said/ ‘Lauryn, baby, use your head’/ But instead I chose to use my heart/ Now the joy of my world is in Zion,” Hill says in the song.

 

With his own lyrics, Carson is also advocating for women and other marginalized people.

“For the mothers, the daughters, the sisters/ We don’t give attention but often are victims/ We inflict them with violence/ And tell them to suffer in silence, so why would we listen?” the professor raps in his “Familiar” track. “For the beatings, the treatment, the rapings, the hangings and lynchings/ I hope we can be forgiven/ I hope we can be forgiven/ Boy, it’s familiar.”

 

“Familiar” is one of 34 tracks featured in the album Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes and Revolutions, a project Carson produced for his doctoral dissertation instead of writing a traditional academic paper.

Speaking with Blavity, Carson said the message illustrated in “Familiar” would be true in any era of American history.

“We have as a society consistently undervalued, devalued women,” Carson told Blavity. “That has been the consistent refrain of, not just American history, but America’s present. How do we intervene in a future that sounds different than that? We should be learning from the past rather than sort of repeating it.”

The “Familiar” rapper earned a Ph.D. in rhetorics, communication and information design at Clemson University after completing his dissertation album. Since then, he has produced many more songs and articles dedicated to examining topics such as gender, identity, social justice and culture. In his article titled, “When all else fails to explain American violence, blame a rapper and hip-hop music,” Carson fights back against the negative stereotypes surrounding his craft.

“Despite the immense popularity of hip-hop, the culture and the music continue to be portrayed as a cultural wasteland in both subtle and explicit ways,” Carson writes. “Worse, in my view, these harmful assumptions affect the ways ordinary people who experience tragedies are described. The word ‘rapper’ is used to conjure negative imagery. It leaves hollow expectations in its place, to be filled with the specter of death and the spectacle of violence. The person described by it becomes a boogeyman in the public imagination.”

Carson has also dedicated part of his work to highlighting his hometown, Decatur, Illinois. This Central Illinois town, according to Carson, has been erroneously depicted in films such as Playtown USA, a 1940s flick about Decatur’s park and recreation system.

“If you look at that old film, it makes it seem as if — we weren’t living there in the ’40s — but this image that’s put forth of Decatur is not the same as the kind of thing that I remember growing up,” Carson said. “My grandma lived in a house where, you know, I’m not certain that she ever locked her front door. It was just like a very welcoming place to any and everybody.”

The scholar rapper found his love for music as a child in Decatur, where he was surrounded  by family members who shared the same passion.

“My pops and his siblings, they had a band. My mom, she was a choir director at one point and loved to sing and write in her downtime,” Carson said. “The subtext of all of it was music was everywhere, whether I was paying attention to it or not.”

In 2020, the Clemson graduate released i used to love to dream, the first peer-reviewed rap album ever published by an academic press. According to the University of Michigan Press, the academic press that reviewed the album, i used to love to dream names the author’s hometown “as a reference point for place and time-specific rapped ruminations about the ideas of growing up, moving away, and pondering one’s life choices.”

“At the same time, the tracks attempt to account for moral, philosophical, and ethical dimensions undergirding unease about authenticity, or staying true to oneself and to one’s city or neighborhood, as well as the external factors that contribute to such feelings,” the Michigan Press wrote. “i used to love to dream highlights outlooks on Black life generally, and Black manhood in particular, in the United States.”

Carson said the album has been honored with the Research Achievement Award for excellence in the arts and humanities from the University of Virginia. Additionally, the project was a category winner of a Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers.

After the July 4 mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, which killed seven people, Carson also wrote another piece about how rap is being blamed for the tragedy. In his article “Scapegoating rap hits new low after July Fourth mass shooting,” the professor said several news outlets described the suspect as a rapper in their headlines.

“In addition to the headlines, media outlets noted that Crimo had musical references to mass shootings on his social media accounts as well as crude drawings depicting violence,” Carson wrote. “But none of these justify the use of ‘rap’ or ‘rapper’ in describing Crimo’s alleged criminal behavior — and everything to do with criminalizing rap and rappers.”