"i used to love to dream" focuses on the idea of home
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Millikin University graduate and award-winning artist A.D. Carson '04 has released the first ever peer-reviewed rap album from an academic publisher titled "i used to love to dream" (University of Michigan Press, 2020).
"i used to love to dream" is what Carson calls a mixtap/e/ssay, a blended genre of storytelling and scholarship that bridges the spheres of his professional life as a scholar and a rapper. The album uses sampled and live instrumentation; repurposed music, film and news clips; and original rap lyrics.
Carson's album focuses on the idea of home – told through reflections about his past growing up in his hometown of Decatur, Ill., from his present elsewhere, contending with the moral, philosophical, and ethical unease about authenticity and what it means to stay true to one's city or neighborhood. Caron uses Decatur as a reference point for rapped reflections about the ideas of growing up, moving away and pondering one's life choices.
"Writing and recording 'i used to love to dream' was actually very similar to the writing of the previous two 'sleepwalking' projects and the 'Battle Royale Mixtape' as well as 'Owning My Masters' (my dissertation) because it is responding to a particular set of circumstances in a particular place with the goal of raising questions about identity, home, citizenship, race, class, justice, etc.," Carson said. "The primary difference is that I was in a much different place and position when writing this project, and none of the writing really felt as thematically intentional as the others."
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Carson added, "I didn’t feel well mentally and was asking myself all kinds of questions about the choices I'd made that brought me to that moment in this place. I write whatever I'm feeling, so it took some time sitting with the writings to realize all the things I'd been writing fit together to tell this story about the idea of home and memory, and the differences between here and there, now and then."
The album features eight tracks highlighting outlooks on Black life generally, and Black manhood in particular, in the United States. The time period described in one of the tracks overlaps with his time as a student at Millikin University.
"I recorded and released music throughout my time at Millikin. I found lots of support in my group of friends at Millikin, those who were artists and others who weren't," Carson said. "I also felt supported by many Millikin faculty and staff, and had great opportunities from teaching the hip-hop writing roundtable to being a member of the Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association (MEISA), Scratch Table, the concert committee and so many other groups on campus."
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Carson says his time at Millikin played an integral part in his development as an artist and an educator. He recalls significant moments such as designing an album cover as an assignment for one of Dr. Michael Hollis-George's (professor of English) classes, and Dr. Randy Brooks, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, being incredibly receptive to his composing practices when he wanted to integrate original rap lyrics for a class.
"I remember the support of Pej Clark and Bryant Smith in the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the community they helped create for so many students, and folks from the Decatur community – my community – helping people feel welcomed and a part of what we were doing at Millikin," Carson said. "I feel like this continues today with folks like Dr. Carmella Braniger, whose support and advocacy is consistent and constant; the same for Raphaella Prange. All of these people contributed to my development as an artist and educator, and person in the world."
It is Carson's hope that people will sit with the album, listen, and be reminded of the idea of home.
"I hope listeners will think about their heres and theres, nows and thens. I hope people will earnestly engage with it as music and art. I hope people will earnestly engage with it as scholarship," he said. "I hope people will think about whether there are differences in their engagement when they think of it as music and art than when they think of it as scholarship. I hope people will share it with people they care about. I hope people will share it with people they want to converse with. I hope people will listen again, and again, and again and again. I hope people hear it."
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Sara Jo Cohen, acquiring editor for the University of Michigan Press, saw Carson's project as an opportunity to challenge what counts as scholarly publishing in terms of both form and content.
"Publishing 'i used to love to dream' would be an opportunity to support cutting-edge scholarship that we were uniquely able to take on because of the digital affordances of our Fulcrum platform," said Cohen. "We'd be able to publish the tracks, the short documentary, and the liner notes in a book-like format that would be intelligible to scholars and tenure and promotion committees."
Cohen was drawn to Carson's project because of its grounding in Decatur. "Additionally, I feel a political imperative to publish more work by Black scholars. I like that Dr. Carson's work reflects on and theorizes his specific experience as a Black man in the U.S. while at the same time thinking through themes like home and family that are more universal," she said. "His work seamlessly brings the personal, the political, scholarship and music into conversation in a way that's exciting to me as a listener and as an editor."
A.D. Carson
Carson currently serves as assistant professor of Hip Hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University doing work that focuses on race, literature, history and rhetorical performances. A 2016 recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Excellence in Service at Clemson, Carson worked with students, staff, faculty and community members to raise awareness of historic, entrenched racism at the university through his See the Stripes campaign, which takes its name from his 2014 poem. His dissertation, "Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions," is a digital archive that features a 34 track rap album and was recognized by the Graduate Student Government as the 2017 Outstanding Dissertation.
Carson is an award-winning artist with essays, music and poetry published at a variety of diverse venues such as The Guardian, Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program, and Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, among others. His essay "Trimalchio from Chicago: Flashing Lights and the Great Kanye in West Egg" appears in The Cultural Impact of Kanye West (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and "Oedipus—Not So Complex: A Blueprint for Literary Education" is in Jay-Z: Essays on Hip Hop's Philosopher King (McFarland & Co., 2011). Carson has written a novel, "COLD," which hybridizes poetry, rap lyrics and prose, and "The City: [un]poems, thoughts, rhymes & miscellany," a collection of poems, short stories and essays.