The rap on rap music is that it can be derogatory, misogynistic, violent. In a word, negative. Not exactly the sort of music you’d expect to see or hear in therapy.

You’d be wrong. Look again. Rap has been in the word therapy all along.

Nearly 1,200 music therapists met at the Town and Country Resort in Mission Valley to discuss the art and science of their field on Nov. 14. Thursday, a dozen of them talked about the growing use of hip-hop therapy, using hard-to-rhyme words like countertransference and clinical judgment while listening to tracks from Kurtis Blow, Nas, 2Pac, Matisyahu, and Kid Cudi.

Instead of being silly, the sight of mostly middle-aged white women rapping without judging each other seemed empowering, energizing, awesome even. If this can give us a lift, the people in the room agreed, imagine what it can do for patients with autism, cerebral palsy, depression or a life in a detention center or institution.

The discussion was timely.

Last week, Harvard Medical School wrote about music therapy in its November newsletter.

“Daily doses of Mozart won’t clean out your arteries or fix a faulty heart valve,” it began. “But music can help ease your recovery from a cardiac procedure, get you back to normal after a heart attack or stroke, relieve stress, and maybe even lower your blood pressure a tad.”

Over five hours, the group in San Diego learned about rap’s origins at block parties in the Bronx, re-created the music of actual artists with a range of instruments and, finally, took turns rapping into a microphone while everyone played, and sang along in one giant jam session that raised hopes, if not the roof itself.

Sure enough, some had reservations about using “gangsta” rap in group settings or with young patients, but others stressed the importance of meeting clients in a place of comfort, using words that can be as powerful and poetic as they are cruel, and beats that are only a button away from being replicated with computer programs like GarageBand.

“The kids are always amazed at how easy it is to break down the songs,” says Cheryl Mayton, 47, who uses rap at a juvenile detention center in Virginia.
“The main thing in their life is their music,” she says. “We take that away and say that’s not good, we’re in essence saying they’re not good.”

The mostly female group was a mix of new and longtime professionals, one with white hair, all with white skin except for a young Asian woman with green streaked hair. The lone man attending the session was David Jurs, who works at a state hospital in Los Angeles.

He remembers hearing Run-DMC’s classic rap record “Raising Hell” on a friend’s boombox in 1986, but says his tastes lie elsewhere at 39 and always have. Yet he understands the need to meet his patients “in a real place.”

“For me to bring in a classic rock tune when guys are into rap, I could equate it with a dentist trying to give you a filling when what you really need is a root canal,” Jurs says. “The idea is that’s not what they need.”

Music therapy traces its history to 1944 when Michigan State University became the first school to offer it as a degree program, in part to train musicians to help veterans wounded in World War II. Nearly 70 graduate and undergraduate programs exist now, along with a handful of doctoral studies, a national certification board and a professional group, the American Music Therapy Association, which sponsored the San Diego conference.

Yet even with research grounding music therapy in science, colleges have begun cutting programs, citing budget pressures and dwindling student interest. Chapman University, one of only three schools offering music therapy programs in California, dropped its program last year, and the pioneering Michigan State University abandoned its program last summer after admitting only one student in the fall of 2008.

Nir Sadovnik, MA, MT-BC, LCAT, 37, and Alan Thompson, MA, MT-BC, LCAT, NR-MT, 31, friends from Brooklyn who led the rap session in San Diego, say the field is still finding its way.
“Geriatric music therapy in 20 years is going to be all these rappers in the nursing home,” Sadovnik says with a smile.

What’s important to him now is the empowerment patients can get while rapping freestyle over music or setting beats to spoken words they wrote.

By way of example, Sadovnik played a few raps from actual patients at the inpatient psychiatric hospital where he works. Their range, in tone, content and delivery, was a reminder that rap is many things to many people.

“I like corn on the cob just like I like tight beats,” came one lyric. “Enemies full of sparks, enemies full of flames,” came another.

“I have patients rap about awful things, but this is what is going on their minds, in their lives,” Sadovnik says. “As a therapist, how can you not acknowledge that and give it credence?”

Source: Matthew T. Hall/The San Diego Union-Tribune