The Rap Lab at UVA presents a listening event to commemorate publication and release of Owning My Masters (Mastered): The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions by Dr. A.D. Carson, associate professor of Hip Hop & the Global South (University of Virginia), with University of Michigan Press. The event will feature remarks by Carson, a roundtable discussion with Chicago Urban Historian Sherman “Dilla” Thomas, album collaborators, Marcus “Truth” Fitzgerald (producer/emcee) and Blake “Preme” Wallace (producer/emcee), scholar Alonya Castillo, and scholar/D.J. Rah Hite.

More than a decade in the making, the composition of the peer-reviewed rap album began in 2013, when Carson matriculated at Clemson University in the Ph.D. program in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design. In 2017, the unmastered version of Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions was submitted as Carson’s doctoral dissertation.  The album and digital archive are rhetorical interventions that speak to issues like police brutality, histories of the U.S. and how they affect the present, enslavement and its afterlives, and much more.

For his work with Owning My Masters at Clemson, Carson was recognized with a Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Excellence in Service and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the university’s Graduate Student Government. The unmastered album was named one of the “Ten Best Political Albums of 2017” by Greenleft Weekly and received international media coverage by Time, All Things Considered, Complex, Radio New Zealand, and USA Today, and many others.

The official release of Owning My Masters (Mastered) with University of Michigan Press is available open access on the Fulcrum platform, free to stream and download and is now available on all streaming platforms. Along with the newly mastered 34-track double album—produced by Carson, with beats by Marcus “Truth” Fitzgerald and Blake “Preme” Wallace—Owning My Masters (Mastered) features an E-book with lyrics and a new prose introduction; digital liner notes (PDF) with lyrics and new prose introduction; a new video introduction with 13 associated original videos, explainers, and collages; a new website with an interactive chronological timeline annotated with media, photos, and bibliographic resources.

The listening event, cosponsored by the IHGC, is free and open to the public and will include food and refreshments for guests. Contact: A.D. Carson aydeecarson@virginia.edu.