Work of Rider’s hip-hop scholar expands into memoir, fiction and biography

The books written by Rider English professor Mickey Hess cross several different genres, subjects and styles. His memoir reflects on his humbling experiences as an adjunct professor before he finished his Ph.D. His novel explores how nostalgia can make even bad times seem good. And his biography tells the story of one of hip-hop’s most colorful characters, Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan.

Each book has one thing in common: “They were all hard to write, but in different ways,” says Hess, who imparts the lessons he’s learned from working on so many projects to his creative writing students.

Hess, who began teaching at Rider in 2006, has to balance the writing of his books with his teaching duties, which include creative writing and American studies. Teaching and writing go hand in hand, he says. “When I teach, my students and I have so many good conversations that make me rethink my own writing,” Hess says, adding that because his students often approach writing with little regard for rules and conventions, they tend to make him reconsider his approach to his own work.

Before Hess’ writing began to branch out into multiple genres, he focused on his academic work, specifically in the study of hip-hop. He had loved the musical form since hearing the Beastie Boys and Run DMC on the airwaves in the 1980s.

During a class on the history of country music when he was an undergraduate  at the University of Louisville (where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees), Hess realized how the stories of struggling to succeed told  in classic country songs mirror the ones told in contemporary hip-hop. “I began thinking about how Americans tell stories about who we are and who we used to be. That’s so much of what hip-hop is about,” Hess says, citing Jay Z’s journey from corner drug dealer to CEO as a prime example. With that idea, he hit on what would become his doctoral dissertation, which he completed by analyzing hip-hop songs and lyrics and interviewing rappers.

Around that time, hip-hop was beginning to crest as the dominant form of popular music in America, as well as becoming a topic for academic study. A Brown University professor named Tricia Rose published Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America in 1994, during Hess’s first year of college. The New York Times called Rose a hip-hop theorist for the way she unpacked and analyzed the culture, meaning and themes of rap music. Hess delved into books by Rose and other hip-hop scholars, the first step into turning his passion for the music into an academic career.

“I was into the subject from the start,” he says. “I spent a lot of time in the college library and as the new books came out, I was fascinated by them.”

In his American studies course, hip-hop and American Culture, Hess guides students as they examine one of the country’s primary cultural exports. He helps them understand the historical roots and social context that nurtured the creation of hip-hop and what has and has not changed since those initial conditions in the 1970s.

Hess also facilitates bringing hip-hop scholars and practitioners to campus. In 2010, he invited Buddha Monk to visit his class as a guest speaker. A rapper and producer, Monk was close friends with eccentric Wu-Tang Clan founding member Ol’ Dirty Bastard (or ODB), who died in 2004 from a drug overdose.

Though he died two days before his 36th birthday, ODB was a colorful character who left many outlandish stories to be told about his life. His story was ripe for the telling, but when one of the first ODB biographies came out, Hess says “no one was happy with it, and Buddha didn’t feel like Dirty’s story was really in there.” He adds: “If there’s only one book about a topic and people are generally unhappy with it, there’s always space for another.”

Hess worked with Monk on what became The Dirty Version (2014), the first ODB biography to come from someone within the rapper’s inner circle. “The book is Buddha’s stories filtered through me,” Hess says. “The goal was to keep everything in Buddha’s voice.”

Working on The Dirty Version and his other books, Hess has learned time and again how unreliable memory is as a source of fact. In pursuit of telling the best story while remaining true to life, Hess made Monk return to his stories so he could ferret out the most colorful, yet accurate version of events.

Hess relied on his own memory while writing Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory (2008), a memoir of piecing together jobs before becoming a full-time professor. The topic of memory then became the subject of a novel, The Nostalgia Echo (2011). “My memoir led me right into the novel,” says Hess, whose idea for his first work of fiction sprung from an observation that people sometimes express nostalgia even for memories of difficult times.

Hess isn’t immune to feeling nostalgia for hard experiences. Despite admitting how difficult each book has been to complete, he also says, “I’ve always loved to sit down and write.”