About the artist
A.D. Carson is an American rapper, poet, and scholar known for pioneering hip-hop as academic scholarship. He gained wide attention for submitting a rap album, «Owning My Masters: The Rhetoric of Rhymes and Revolutions», as his doctoral dissertation in rhetoric, and has continued to release full-length mixtapes as peer-reviewed scholarly work throughout his academic career.
Carson teaches hip-hop studies at the University of Virginia, where his role bridges the classroom and the recording booth. His music is explicitly political and historically engaged, tackling systemic racism, policing, gun violence, and the legacy of slavery and Confederate monuments in the American South, often set against production that draws on boom-bap and Southern rap traditions. Tracks such as «Second Amendment [Shoot Back]» and «Broken Windows» exemplify his direct, essayistic approach to lyricism, treating verses as arguments rather than simple narrative.
Beyond his own catalog, Carson has become a prominent voice in conversations about hip-hop pedagogy, arguing for rap's legitimacy as a mode of scholarly and civic discourse. His work sits at the intersection of academia and independent rap, making him a distinctive figure who releases albums through university-affiliated projects as much as through traditional music channels.