The beat goes on

“We don’t just want to create good music, but we want our music to do good.”

Seeing hip hop as part of a music department’s course offerings might come as a surprise to some. But for music professor Mark Katz, a pioneer in blending musicology and hip hop, the musical form is at the heart of his classes on music and technology, popular music and modern art music.

Made up of Katz’s hip hop-related courses, the Carolina Beat Academy has gone beyond the classroom and Chapel Hill to bring hip hop to such far-flung places as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Panama, Senegal, Fiji and Ethiopia.

Mark Katz is the Ruel W. Tyson, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

This is story number 172 in the Carolina Stories 225th Anniversary Edition magazine.

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