The MTV2 logo appeared on screen over a number of scantily clad female dancers. It was the video for "Run It!" _ a hit song by 16-year-old singer/rapper Chris Brown in which he promises to " show you things/that's gonna have you sayin' I can't be 16."

It's a hit song, but the groans from the class were audible. The students in "Hip-Hop: Culture, Economics and Politics" take hip-hop seriously, and this song was lightweight.

"This video disturbs me greatly," said Tracey Salisbury, the lecturer who created the class in UNCG's African American Studies program. "The video re-enacts a high school dance in which the kids go to the locker room and simulate sex ... what's the message?"

Salisbury's lecture style is free-form and aggressively Socratic. She stalks the floor in front of the class, posing the hard questions about the culture of hip-hop _ an art form that was born on the streets of New York City, was dismissed as a fad and went on to conquer the music charts and invade pop culture.

Salisbury loves hip-hop. She talks about old-school artists such as Run DMC and Whodini with the deep, abiding love an English professor has for the classics, but she also studies today's MTV with the careful eye of a sociologist. Her verdict on modern, mainstream hip-hop?

"It's killing us," she told her class. "You've got images and body shapes that are not us. You've got women being exploited, materialism and the glorification of the ghetto and poverty that is absolutely ridiculous. And we go along with it when they tell us that's hip-hop."

The course is in its third semester and, after a few all-black classes, there are finally some white faces in the crowd. The course dissects the bruises on the hip-hop apple: sexism, homophobia, violence and materialism. But not even the most hard-core fans in the class dismiss Salisbury as a detached and overly critical academic. She has street cred.

Salisbury grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of schoolteachers. Her early life was a strange tension between her home in middle-class Baldwin Hills and afternoons with her grandmother in South Central.

"We got to know the Crips and the Bloods in that neighborhood, and there was a definite gang and drug dealer presence," Salisbury said. "But I sort of got a free pass because I could play basketball and my grandmother was the neighborhood baby sitter."

Salisbury's West Coast hip-hop roots are apparent. Outside class she dresses in sports jerseys and sneakers, a silver tag on a long chain hanging around her neck. Though she's soon to be 40, her students often think she's in her late twenties. Salisbury said that suits her fine _ she's used to living between worlds.

Salisbury was one of the students who benefited from the California busing program. She avoided her neighborhood middle school and later got into a special program at Beverly Hills High School.

Salisbury earned a full ride at Holy Cross, a private Catholic college in Massachusetts, where she majored in political science. Before she got on the plane to head east a friend pressed a cassette into her hand _ an early song called "Dopeman" by the seminal West Coast rap group NWA.

"That song and that group said so much about what was going on in Los Angeles at that time," Salisbury said. "We were going through this terrible crack epidemic that devastated so many people, including some of my own family. It was music that was saying something about the community, about that experience. I knew it was important."

"I'm a hip-hop generation kid," Salisbury said. "It affects everything I do _ the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I teach. So when I came to UNCG to get my doctorate (in socio-historical aspects of sport), I knew I wanted to do something with that. I was just blessed that they were willing to let me give it a try in the African American Studies program."

Salisbury has since brought two popular _ if controversial _ courses to the program: hip-hop and a course on the history of the Black Panther Party.

"At first I thought that as the white guy I didn't know as much as the other people or everything I said was going to be stupid," Sumner said. "But now that I've been in the class a few weeks I really don't feel like that at all. (Salisbury) makes it really easy to talk in class, good discussions get going, it's cool and it's not judgmental." Salisbury said students like Sumner are just the sort she wants to reach.

"I want to reach all different kinds of students and share my love of hip-hop, help them understand the culture, not just the big time, mainstream thing it has become," Salisbury said. "Now that I've created the course, hopefully it can keep going when I'm not here any more. The students will always keep coming. Hip-hop isn't going anywhere."

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