by Sarad Davenport
It was good to sit down and chop it up with Professor A.D. Carson, Ph.D., to discuss his groundbreaking work, his Grammy-considered albums, and the profound legacy of Black music, with a specific focus on the inimitable artist, D’Angelo. Professor Carson, a professor of hip hop at the University of Virginia, was not only an acclaimed academic but a practicing artist, which made his perspective uniquely insightful at the intersection of cultural studies, history, and creation. The discussion explored his argument that Blackness itself operated as a technology and how Black musicians D’Angelo treated linear time as merely a “suggestion,” allowing them to be simultaneously ancient and futuristic. We were privileged to delve into the process, the politics, and the spiritual archive that defined Black musical aesthetics.
From PhD to Grammy Contender
Professor Carson began the discussion by reflecting on the work behind his recent Grammy considerations, which he viewed as a matter of respect for his collaborators. He explained that his new albums were created in anticipation of his forthcoming book, Being Dope, Hip Hop in Theory Through Mixtape Memoir.
“The book is kind of a culmination of working here at UVA as a professor of hip hop since 2017 and some of the work that led up to that with my dissertation album,” Professor Carson explained. He argued that the book’s core philosophy lies in understanding hip hop as a teaching practice. “If you understand hip hop as a teaching practice or hip hop as a way of approaching learning, then I think most of the stuff in the book will make sense to you because… we teach people through stories and we teach people through organizing.”
During the conversation, we agreed with the idea of hip hop as a powerful tool for human acceleration, noting its early inclusion of the body, literature, and reading. Professor Carson elaborated on this concept with a provocative analogy at the heart of his book:
“The book is actually making the argument not just that hip hop… but Blackness as a technology that the United States has persistently used and abused,” he stated. He suggested that the nation’s fixation on Blackness was like a fixation on a drug it sought to “prescribe, that it could abuse, that it could perfectly mix.” He then offered a startling historical parallel. “The dope that they were trying to perfect was blackness… And so all of these cultural products, hip-hop included, are byproducts of the American dope trade.”
The question his book asks, he noted, is fundamental: “what if the dope told its own story?“
D’Angelo: The Black Music Pioneer
The conversation shifted to the recent passing of D’Angelo’s brother and the artist’s enduring legacy. Professor Carson immediately addressed the industry’s impulse to categorize Black artists.
“What did D’Angelo say about his music? What did D’Angelo classify his music as?” Professor Carson asked. “I make black music,” he affirmed, stressing that this singular definition transcends manufactured labels like neo-soul. “When you say you make black music, then that includes hip hop, that includes funk, that includes soul, that includes country. I mean, it includes everything.”
Professor Carson insisted that to respect D’Angelo’s memory, listeners must reject these labels. “We don’t need Spotify or J Records or Apple Music or what. We don’t need those folks to tell us what we make. And we don’t need them to tell us what somebody already told us when they were here that they were doing.”
He emphasized that hip hop’s power lies in its malleability and its focus on process over product. This focus, he believes, is what D’Angelo gifted to other artists.
“I felt D’Angelo gave me as an artist permission to access. The full archive or a fuller archive than the very narrow lane that I thought that I occupied as a rapper,” Professor Carson revealed. “It feels D’Angelo in his music, his trajectory, gave a whole lot of people that same kind of permission… He went into the past and then reclaimed this inheritance for all of us.”
Virginia’s Unlistened-To Sound
The discussion took a local turn, noting D’Angelo’s familial connection to Charlottesville. Professor Carson pointed out that Virginia’s musical influence is often “erased from the Black music map” because its regional sounds become globally popular so quickly.
“People will say that’s not your sound. That’s the world’s sound,” he remarked.
“The Charlottesville connection is salient,” he said. “It’s a matter of music being so powerful that we know that this place can’t help but have been influenced by it because those folks are here.”
Time and The Black Spiritual Archive
Analyzing D’Angelo’s musical evolution from Brown Sugar to Black Messiah, Professor Carson characterized the journey as a move toward fewer restrictions, resulting in an increasingly free and complex sound. He tied this to a deeper cultural concept: Black people’s relationship with time.
“I thought that… D’Angelo treat[s] linear time as kind of a suggestion,” Professor Carson said, arguing that this allows Black music to be in constant conversation with the past and the future. He shared a powerful, personal anecdote about a late cousin appearing on a voice recording, which inspired his album Talking to Ghosts. “How many occasions do we find Black musicians or Black music in conversation with ancestors, in conversation with literal ghosts?”
He connected this concept to Black spirituality, which many Black musicians absorbed through the church—a process that provided a deep, common musical language.
“That music kept jumping out at us and saying. Don’t you remember this? This is what home sounds like,” he shared. The true archive of Black music, he concluded, can’t be found in a museum or a label’s vault. “What exists now is our memory of those rooms. We are the archives.”
Professor A.D. Carson provided not just an interview, but a powerful intellectual framework for understanding Black creativity. His work, which positioned hip hop not as a genre but as a process and a technology, challenged the commodity-driven categorization often imposed by the music industry. By honoring artists D’Angelo—who expressly claimed to make “Black music”—and tracing the lineage of sound back to the church and beyond, Professor Carson highlighted the deep, spiritual, and intergenerational nature of Black art. The concept that Black artists treated “linear time as a suggestion” accurately summarized the notion that their music was in perpetual dialogue with the past and the future, making them the “living, breathing archive.” As his book, Being Dope, prepared for its release, the conversation served as a vital preview of work that sought to recover the authentic narrative of Black cultural production from those who had historically sought to package and profit from its essence.