Communicate and Relate

Hip-Hop culture has, and continues to be, a forum through which people can express opinions, raise issues, and have their voices heard. In Australia, hip-hop offers artists from diverse backgrounds with important conversations to start, a platform to promote hip-hop’s core values of respect, inclusion and individuality. Year 10 students enrolled in the Communicate and Relate specialism 'Don’t Stop the Music' enjoyed a fantastic Hip Hop Lyric Writing Workshop with N’fa Jones (formerly of 1200 Techniques). In the workshop, students were encouraged to think about issues that affect them and impact their lives. Working with N’fa, students were led in crafting those ideas into lyrics.

Here are some reflections from students on the workshop:

“It helped me understand the ways to structure a song so it flows.” – Chloe

“I found the Writing Workshop to be extremely beneficial and entertaining at the same time, as he introduced us the fundamentals of lyric writing.” – Connor

“I found it useful as it helped me write an interesting and great song that I think would be perfect for our future PBL.” – Jade

“I think the writing was very informative and he taught us lots of different techniques and ways to write our music. He taught us how to beat count and how to use these beats to let the songs we wrote to flow. N'FA not only taught us his techniques, but he also gave us a lot of background information about himself. We learnt about his upbringing, and how he got into his career of rapping.” – Marley

“I enjoyed learning new techniques to write a song. It was interesting listening to him talk about how he got into writing music.” – Toby

“I think that it was informative and was interesting how he made the words on a beat instead of writing it with only certain parts being on the beat.” – Wilson

“I liked N’Fa’s attitude and I found it easy to learn from him.” - Ethan