In an era where beats can teach and bars can bear witness, Dr. A.D. Carson stands at the crossroads of culture and classroom. The University of Virginia professor, artist, and activist has built his career around a radical idea — that hip-hop is not just music, but a method of thinking. His new book, Being Dope: Hip-Hop and Theory through Mixtape Memoir (Oxford University Press, Nov. 19, 2025), transforms that idea into prose, showing how rap can serve as both sound and scholarship, healing and critique, rhythm and reason.
A Book That Sounds Like a Record
Being Dope is not a typical academic text — it moves like a mixtape. Through memoir, verse, and analysis, Carson turns his life’s soundtrack into theory. “A lot of times when people think about hip-hop, they think about it as pure expression,” he said in an interview with NBC29. “The argument I’m making is that it might be expression, but it’s also theory.” Each chapter flows like a track: personal yet political, lyrical yet learned. The book stitches together stories of growing up in Illinois, teaching in the South, and navigating the halls of higher education with the same pulse that drives a beat.
Carson challenges readers — and the academy itself — to hear learning differently. His writing draws on the same creative process that shapes his albums, where every verse functions as both confession and critique. The result is a book that feels lived-in and alive, proving that scholarship doesn’t have to sound sterile to be serious.
From Mixtape to Manuscript
Before Being Dope, Carson made headlines when his doctoral dissertation, Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions, took the form of a 34-track rap album — a first in academic history. The project reimagined what a dissertation could be: an audio experience where rhythm replaced citation. It went viral, sparking conversations about legitimacy, race, and who gets to define “real” scholarship.
Since then, Carson has continued to release work that fuses sound and study. His peer-reviewed album i used to love to dream (University of Michigan Press) and his orchestral-rap collaboration and metaphors with the Charlottesville Symphony expand that mission. Each piece treats hip-hop as a living archive — a tool for knowledge, healing, and resistance. “The work that I’ve done is to make sure academia sees the intellectual value in the thing we’ve been doing for a really long time as rappers,” Carson says.
A Scholar with a Mic
Though Being Dope engages questions of power and race, its heartbeat is creative. Carson’s activism is present but never heavy-handed — it hums beneath the art. His years teaching at Clemson University, where he witnessed racial inequities firsthand, shaped his resolve to let the music speak truth. Now at UVA, he mentors students to approach writing and production as complementary ways of understanding the world — one verbal, one sonic.
For Carson, the classroom is a studio, and the studio is a classroom. “Hip-hop has always been about making something out of what you have,” he says. “That’s also what learning is.”
Hip-Hop as Healing — and Theory
In Being Dope, Carson uses metaphor to explore America’s complex relationship with Black creativity. He writes that the country treats Black culture like a drug — criminalized when it resists, commodified when it can be sold. “Hip-hop,” he observes, “is both the pharmacy and the trap house.” The phrase captures the dual power of the genre: it can heal the pain it documents, even as it survives within systems that exploit it.
This lens makes Being Dope more than memoir. It’s a framework — one that challenges institutions to recognize how communities have long theorized through rhythm, language, and art. It’s a call for educators to stop translating hip-hop into academic language and start listening to it as language.
The Sound of the Future
As hip-hop celebrates more than fifty years of shaping global consciousness, Being Dope arrives like a remix of what scholarship can be. Carson’s work argues that critical thought doesn’t need to abandon emotion, rhythm, or soul. “My hope,” he says, “is that people take seriously the kinds of things we can learn by evaluating a rap, by composing a rap, by thinking about the contexts in which rap gets created.”
His message is as simple as it is radical: hip-hop is education. Every verse is a lesson plan. Every beat is a bibliography. And every listener — if they listen closely enough — can learn something profound about themselves and the world.
About Being Dope: Hip-Hop and Theory through Mixtape Memoir
Published by Oxford University Press, Being Dope is part memoir, part mixtape, and part manifesto. Through personal narrative, lyrical excerpts, and critical reflection, Dr. A.D. Carson explores how hip-hop builds knowledge, heals trauma, and redefines power. The book releases Nov. 19, 2025, and is available for pre-order through major retailers and university outlets.
Connect with Dr. A.D. Carson:
Website: aydeethegreat.com
Instagram: @aydeethegreat
X (Twitter): @aydeethegreat
Bandcamp: Metaphors — Live with the Charlottesville Symphony
Spotify: A.D. Carson
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