“Of course we don’t listen to hip-hop, we go to UVM.”
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It’s a line I heard more than once as a first-year, at dorm hangouts and during dinners with friends. One particular interaction sticks out: just after spring break, at a late-night gathering in UHeights North. As we lounged around on beds and a dorm hammock, I asked the room if anyone had listened to the new Playboi Carti album. In four seconds, they shot me down, said they wouldn’t listen to it because it wasn’t real music, and returned to their conversation.
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I asked them why, after months of being a student here, talking about music, majoring in music, I hadn’t met anyone interested in rap that wasn’t MF Doom or Mac Miller. The host of the kickback grinned boyishly and said, as if teaching me a lesson, “If you like rap, you shouldn’t have gone to school here.”
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I didn’t get it. I like hip-hop and I go to UVM. I was always down to hear the music that they loved—Leon Bridges, Noah Kahan, 2010s indie-pop and ’90s alt-rock—but that respect only seemed to go one way. Over and over, the unspoken assumption was that most hip-hop wasn’t up for consideration as “real” music.
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At UVM, belonging works differently than it does at most schools. Here, there’s a fixed idea of what it means to be a UVM student, a clear picture of who fits that identity, and a shadow that swallows everyone who doesn’t. That night, I looked around me and deduced something important: If you want to understand UVM’s culture, don’t look at what it includes—look at what it leaves out.
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Because if you haven’t caught the drift, that moment wasn’t just about hip-hop. It’s an indication of the ways our campus culture decides who counts and who doesn’t, who gets to feel at home and who learns to live on the margins. And that culture has a name: granola.