It’s the early 1970’s, you’re waiting to get into The Sugar Shack, you’re finally in and the music is loud, the drinks are cold, entertainers are on stage, and ideas are bouncing from artist to artist.

Fast forward to 1980, you’re walking down the street and hear the faint sound of Wonder Mike—“I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie to the...”—just hoping someone will walk your way with a boombox blaring on their shoulder.

It’s 1994, you’re out with friends and you know when you hear that catchy beat and the lyrics “I love it when you call me big poppa," there will be people throwing their hands in the air.

Producers like Prince Charles Alexander, were among the first ones to produce hits that still stand as a representation of Hip-Hop culture. While sounds have changed and the culture is ever-changing, it’s roots are still apparent. David Ortiz known by many as “Big Papi” sometimes strolled up to the field with The Notorious B.I.G.’s "Big Poppa" playing on the loudspeakers, during his time as a Boston Red Sox player.

Although Hip-Hop is sprinkled throughout the city, “specifically in Boston, Hip-Hop seems fractured,” said Prince Charles Alexander.

Alexander, a Music Production and Engineering professor at Berklee College of Music, record producer, recording artist, and 3-time Grammy Award winner, has worked for artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Diddy, Mary J. Blige, and Faith Evans. Among his vast number of achievements, Alexander is in the works of creating the first ever Bachelor of Arts degree in Hip-Hop at Berklee College of Music.

Through a Hip-Hop degree, Alexander hopes to promote change to the bigger picture: to empower the conversation around Hip-Hop, challenge the stereotypical views, and develop the Hip-Hop community in Boston.

With any great venture, comes great challenges. “One of the challenges is that people that do [Hip-Hop], don't have the credentials to teach and people that teach, haven't actually done [Hip-Hop],” said Prince Charles Alexander, referring to staffing the Hip-Hop degree program.

Though staffing is a challenge, it is being done, and to show for that is Boston native musician Cliff Notez. Notez, who prefers not to go by his birth name for personal reasons, is an educator, filmmaker, photographer, and owner of the digital media production company, HipStory. Notez is not only a well-versed artist, but also has the qualifications to educate, and started an Assistant Professor position at Berklee in January.

Just like Alexander, Notez expressed the importance of opening the conversation surrounding Hip-Hop and Hip-Hop artists. “It's pigeonholing because people are so quick to make assumptions based on what a rapper is and I think I have more complexities than that, than just those face value interpretations,” said Notez.

Notez had a love for music since he was a kid, but centered his career around it two years ago after he quit his position working with the digital media program at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Since, Notez has been managing HipStory, doing guest lectures at MIT and Harvard, and producing for artists such as VQnC, a member of HipStory. Among his most notable accomplishments: Notez put out an album in 2017 titled "When the Sidewalk Ends," was named New Artist of the Year at the 2018 Boston Music Awards, holds a Digital Media Master’s Degree from Northeastern, and a Music & Psychology Bachelor’s Degree from Wheaton College.

New Hip-Hop seasoned professors emerging at Berklee, have made the viability of being able to create a Hip-Hop degree at the college more concrete. “Each year we're getting brighter and brighter people that are finishing their bachelor's degrees, finishing their master's degrees, finishing their phd’s, and many of them are finishing their work with Hip-Hop centric concepts,” Alexander said.

While the future of Hip-Hop is currently being crafted, it is still lacking elements it may need to thrive: such as a face to represent the community.

“When you think of Eminem you think of Detroit or L.A.; you think of Nellie, you think of Saint Louis, we don't have a Boston rapper yet. The last one we had was probably Ed O.G., and I think we need another one,” said Alexander.

Chance The Rapper and Chicago, Drake and Toronto, Travis Scott and Houston: these are just a few more duos that may come to mind when you think about the respective cities and Hip-Hop artists. But, when someone says Boston, if the match to the city that comes to your mind is Mark Wahlberg or a Boston sports player, you’re not alone.

Out of my own curiosity I asked four friends; “who is the first person that comes to your mind when someone says Boston?” the answers being: Mark Wahlberg, Tom Brady, and Big Papi twice. This had me wondering if these people seem to truly represent Boston; so, I continued the poll, asking a total of 20 people. Out of those 20 responses, 12 people named Boston sports players, and five people said Mark Wahlberg.

While Wahlberg is prominent figure who got his start in music, and sports are a considerable part of Boston's culture, when you think Boston, you probably don’t think of a powerful modern musical figure; and that is something that might have to change for the Hip-Hop community in Boston to blossom.

“I think there's a lot of conversations about Hip-Hop and I think in Boston the conversations are looking for a scene and looking for a leader more or less, cause every once in a while there might be a couple of groups or a couple of artists that create a little scene, but I don't see anything that's sticking yet,” said Prince Charles Alexander, who thought Hip-Hop would only be a short-lived fad when it emerged, but later made a career out of it.

Hip-Hop—the underground urban movement that emerged in New York in the 1970’s—started less than 50 years ago, but has since risen to the number one genre in America, where it stands today.

Alexander got to see the evolution of Hip-Hop firsthand; he grew up in Boston, received an undergraduate degree at Brandeis University in 1979, and later in 2014 received a Master's in Music Entrepreneurship at Northeastern University.

After attending Brandeis, Alexander was present for booming funk music, until he moved to New York in 1981 when the Hip-Hop scene was really starting to break through. In 1986 at the Center for the Media Arts, he studied audio engineering in hopes of becoming a producer “that would be able to spot, and be proficient with, any new trend in music, and it worked,” Alexander said.

“Literally [19]85 to [19]86, almost everybody that wasn't a Hip-Hop group lost their major deals at labels,” Alexander said, including himself. At the time, Alexander along with other artists such as Maurice Starr and the group 9.9, were doing R&B/Funk music.

“We were looking at it [Hip-Hop] as like an aberration, that hopefully it'll go away so we can get back to business as usual.”

Business as usual for Alexander was a singer, a band of musicians playing instruments, choreography, and costumes, all coming together to provide entertainment. Alexander quickly got back to business, but not business as usual.

Clubs like one in Boston called The Sugar Shack that were once the stomping grounds for R&B/Funk and early Hip-Hop artists such as Alexander, disappeared as the revenue shrunk and Hip-Hop culture became negatively stigmatized.

“The younger the crowd, the blacker the crowd, the more Boston had a problem with it even existing. So, as Hip-Hop starts to become more powerful in Boston, as Hip-Hop starts to be less about music and more about culture, a way of being black, the influence of that old fashion R&B club started to wane. As that started to wane, those clubs just couldn't, they couldn't afford the rent, so they started to shut down,” Alexander said.

With the shut-down of these once booming clubs, and the diminished demand for R&B/Funk at record labels, Alexander quickly realized that Hip-Hop wasn’t just a quick fad, and he began to quickly adapt.

For about twelve years Alexander worked for Bad Boy Records mixing and producing music for artists. In 2006 he transitioned from producing to full-time academia, simply because he felt he had gotten to the end of one journey and was ready for another, and has been a professor at Berklee College of Music since.

In Alexander's courses he talks about Hip-Hop everyday which led him to pondering solutions for the minimization of Hip-Hop in Boston—that solution being a Hip-Hop degree. Alexander has been working with his colleagues at Berklee to form an outline of what the Hip-Hop degree would look like, before it’s set in stone and available for students. Cliff Notez is on board in developing the degree.

Last semester, Notez taught one course on Hip-Hop songwriting, and next semester he plans to teach two additional courses: a music production and sampling course, and a Hip-Hop history course. Additionally, Notez is now a Music Marketing professor at Emerson College.

Both Notez and Alexander recognize the misrepresentation, as well as the underrepresentation of Hip-Hop in education, and in Boston; they hope the tentative Hip-Hop degree will promote change in both sectors. “I think with Berklee what we’re trying to do is really think about the musicality of it and try to measure that in different ways which hasn't been done, because anybody can teach a Hip-Hop history class but how can we teach the music of it, how can we talk about what the snares are doing or how the rhythm of someones flow is, transcribing to sheet music, stuff like that,” Notez said.

Alexander said he’d like to structure the degree with different tracks: a vocal track focused on becoming a rapper, a beat making track focused on becoming a proficient beat maker, a business track centered on how artists generate revenue with musical product, and a creativity track for production and interaction that dives into multimedia representations of Hip-Hop and interacting with other Boston colleges, such as Emerson.

Alexander asserted that Hip-Hop is too narrowly defined by most, when in reality it’s quite complex and constantly developing.

“Being able to access it [Hip-Hop] takes being open to going on a journey to find those things that one can connect with,” said Alexander who sees this as the role of the Hip-Hop practitioner and creators. “Hip-Hop is known to change, known to look at itself and reinvent itself year after year, and my goal would be that one of those inventions very, very soon, turns a corner and invites everyone to the table to be included in what we call the conversation of Hip-Hop,” Alexander said.

While the role of the educator may be pertinent in promoting the growth of Hip-Hop, the culture itself, particularly in Boston, must also prevail. Alexander emphasized a need for different communities within the Greater Boston Area to come together. “It seems like there is a, a street by street, not even a neighborhood by neighborhood, but a street by street representation of Hip-Hop that exists in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, which are the three dominant African American neighborhoods,” Alexander said.

The street to street type of conflict isn't a revelation though; on a smaller scale this can be seen as a mirror to the 1990’s East Coast/West Coast Hip-Hop rivalry, centered around deceased Hip-Hop artists Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, whose legacies live on as praised artists of the 21st century.

Some, including Alexander, say the artists deaths were attributed to this conflict, beckoning the question: if a grand sense of community among artists on the East Coast and West Coast, not just the two respectively, was apparent, would things be different today?

Today, a greater sense of community and a forefront Hip-Hop figure could entirely reinvent the Hip-Hop scene, and even the music scene as a whole in Boston. “Once that rapper or group comes to the floor, then you'll probably see more solidification of the community of Hip-Hop around that rapper, and I would hope that Berklee would be at the forefront of helping that rapper to come to the floor,” Alexander said.

Going further, communities needs space to gather, another lacking element in Boston.

“I don't see anything that's like a consistent place where we can go to process Hip-Hop and for any scene like the R&B scene that we had for you to have those day to day, week to week places for the music to evolve and grow,” Alexander said. He accredits an absence of places like Hip-Hop clubs and venues to the current political climate and negative associations attached to Hip-Hop like violence and gunplay.

28-year-old Sergio Estany, better known as his stage name Forté, is a contributor to HipStory and a Hip-Hop/Rap artist born in Boston and raised in Somerville, who also recognizes the lack of community that Alexander emphasizes.

“From what I’ve seen, when I go online or go out and talk to people there's not really a Hip-Hop scene for a lot of people who aren't from here,” Estany said. Estany also pointed out a misrepresentation of Hip-Hop from lack of Boston representation on a national scale.

While he pointed out flaws, Estany still expressed that he sees potential in Boston, and credited Boston artists like Joyner Lucas and Cousin Stizz who are doing their thing and making a name for themselves.

“You can feel it, you can feel the anticipation for what’s next to come or what's the new thing that's going to happen or pop off. That’s a real good feeling,” said Estany, “I think a lot of people are starting to realize that we need to make more of a collaborative effort in the music scene in Boston to really get somewhere, support each other.”

Another affiliate of HipStory, co-owner Tim Hall, has been playing music professionally for 15 years, is a Detroit native whose lived in Boston since 2013, and is currently an Assistant Director of the Career Communities sector at Berklee College of Music.

Hall is a saxophonist, poet, and music producer, specializing in design and production; he also has a background in entrepreneurship which he uses to enrich HipStory. At Berklee, Hall does career advising and coaching for students. “I see my purpose in this world to help other people build resilience for themselves,” Hall said. He helps to navigate students through the path in which they wish to pursue.

As far as Hip-Hop goes, Hall said he feels “like there’s an industry being crafted, there’s an infrastructure for a music industry that's being built in this moment by people within our community and I think that we’re realizing it's only a representation or a mirror of what's happening on a global level with Hip-Hop.” Hall is another member of the music community in Boston who is hopeful of what’s to come.

“We’re starting to see I think a lot of ownership and if you want this you can't just want to make money from it you have to care about the people, you have to care about the culture, you have to care about where this comes from and who it comes from,” Hall said.

Hall, Estany, and Notez all have one thing in common, that could arguably bring together any musician—that music is a central part of their lives. These artists are a representation of music and Hip-Hop in Boston, who collaborate through HipStory and even have closely established friendships.

Notez was one of the first people Estany started making music with. “We’ve just always been collaborating and making music with each other and just giving eachother good game on life and connecting on those bases a lot. He has always been a guy who I could count on when it comes to touching base with Somerville and just my upbringing around here, and being a good friend,” Estany said.

To hear from these voices of music in the Boston community themselves—Estany, Notez, Hall, and Alexander—on where Hip-Hop is headed, click on the link below.

The solution to get Boston a seat at the Hip-Hop table isn’t definite, and may take time, but something like a Hip-Hop B.A. emerging in the city is a start. Alexander is optimistic that the degree will be available within about two years, and hopefully sooner, he said.

Alexander said his initial thought in creating the degree was a vision of merging the current Hip-Hop courses together, expanding the curriculum, and forming “a bachelor's degree in Hip-Hop that empowers people to extend the conversation of Hip-Hop beyond the stereotypical view point of what Hip-Hop is, how Hip-Hop is perceived, and create new conversations, new conscious statements, new statements about what women are, new statements about what skin color is, new ways to express themselves, and Hip-Hop.”

For Alexander, his colleagues, and others alike, one can only hope his vision is executed to its fullest potential.

It's 2019, the second annual Boston Art & Music Soul Festival has taken place and local names like Cliff Notez were on the lineup. Bostonians gathered, displaying the music community that Boston has and is developing. With events like this, the proposed Hip-Hop degree, and new Hip-Hop artists and educators coming to the floor, the future of Hip-Hop in Boston, with hope and hard work, will flourish in years to come.