Last month, it was announced that Grammy Award-nominated engineer, deejay, and producer Young Guru would be joining University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music as an Artist-In-Residence.
Known primarily for his work with Jay Z, Guru recently taught his first class.
Chris Sampson, Vice Dean of Contemporary Music at the Thornton School of Music, spoke extensively about Young Guru’s prowess as a teacher. “What I was pleasantly surprised about was how natural of an educator Guru was,” he said.
Sampson elaborated on Guru’s abilities as an educator. “He immediately understood scope and sequence,” said Sampson. “How to line up ideas through logic and connectivity in a way that, really, I hadn’t had a chance to experience before.
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Watch footage of Young Guru teaching below:
“I would like our culture to understand its value and its reference point in history,” Young Guru said in a press release when he first announced the position. “I want to preserve the culture and value of Hip Hop so that people understand how big it is across the world. I want it to be fully understood by people, to be studied and revered the same way you would study jazz artists or opera at a class in a university.”
In an interview with HipHopDX earlier this year, Guru spoke about the role teaching plays for him. “Another one of my loves is just teaching. So a lot of times I do that just out of the love of wanting to spread the information and wanting the culture to grow. You start to see a lot more movement. It’s like I’d rather show you than keep telling you, so that’s what you see in terms of me just being all over the place. It’s like I’m really trying to show people what it is instead of just yapping all the time.”
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