Mic Check: Rowdy

Born in Durham, Rowdy teaches English as a second language (ESL) at Rankin Elementary School. He has been featured on BET, NPR, and PBS Kids network and has given a TEDx talk on the importance of hip-hop culture. A graduate of the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, Rowdy majored in business and minored in Chinese language. At UNC, he immersed himself in the campus’s hip-hop community and founded UNC Cypher, a meetup of local creatives who freestyle together, participating in one of hip-hop’s oldest traditions. For Rowdy, the weekly cyphers paid off. In the spring of 2018, he was selected to be a participant in the resurgence of BET’s iconic competition, Freestyle Friday. In 2019, Rowdy obtained a Master of Arts in Teaching from UNC-Greensboro. For his master’s thesis, he focused on offering innovative ways to teach ESL by using hip-hop pedagogy. Rowdy has served as program director for Blackspace, an Afrofuturism digital makerspace based in Durham, and as a U.S. Hip-Hop Ambassador in the U.S. Department of State’s collaborative international arts-based exchange program. Rowdy’s music explores the theme of Black excellence. He chronicles his personal experiences growing up as a Black suburban kid with a private school background in America in his first two projects: Return of Black Wall Street and Black Royalty. For Come Hear NC, Rowdy’s verse rejects negative stereotypes of Black men while also calling out the culture vultures of hip-hop. Rowdy is one of five hop-hop artists who participated in Mic Check: Culture, Power, and the Politics of N.C. Hip-Hop a project documenting how North Carolina hip-hop artists are using music to address contemporary forms of racial injustice. Inspired by Genius lyric videos, hip-hop scholar Kyesha Jennings asked five hip-hop artists to perform and then analyze one of their politically conscious verses. Explore the full story at www.ComeHearNC.com Video Directed by: Kyesha Jennings Videographer: Laura Casteel Editor: Laura Casteel Photography: Sandra Davidson Special thanks to Playground Studios for providing a space to film. Learn more about the Durham-based studio at http://playgroundstudiosdurham.com.