Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal and Grammy winning producer 9th Wonder (pictured left) are using SunMoonChild – amazing song by imani uzuri, amazing video by Pierre Bennu – as part of the midterm exam for their course, ’sampling soul.’ The course is about black cultural production and the tradition of borrowing/remixing/sampling and how it all relates to today’s legal issues of intellectual property rights and copyright law. Since YouTube just removed SunMoonChild after three years this issue cuts particularly close for us.

He’s made the midterm public on his blog to encourage a wider dialogue and wider exposure to the ideas. Stop by and give it a read, comment if you can! )

–jb.

As a DJ, an artist, a sometime teacher, and the son of an academic, I will never get tired of marveling at the intersection of HipHop and academia. It’s an honor to have my work thought of as contributing to this discussion.

–pb