Tauheed Rahim II (Marco Pavé) “Soundtrack for Life” event Oct. 30 explores music in film
Georgetown University’s first hip hop artist-in-residence continues his work with the Music Program and the community
Now in his second year as Artist in Residence at the Georgetown University, sponsored by the GU Music Program and the Department of African American Studies, Tauheed Rahim II (Marco Pavé) offers his first event of the 2020-21 “Critical Frequencies: Live from the Southern Hip-Hop Stage” residency, titled “Soundtrack for Life: Sync Licensing, Music Supervision, & Film Composing.”
Held virtually on Friday, Oct. 30 from 6 p.m-7:30 p.m. EDT, the “Soundtrack for Life” event will explore the world of film through the lens of music, including performance and discussion with Rahim, who has collaborated with Grammy Award-winning producers and has been featured on outlets including NPR, The Source, The Root, and MTV News. Rahim’s music was recently featured in the movie “Uncorked,” which premiered on Netflix in March 2020. Written and directed by Prentice Kenny, director and showrunner of the HBO show “Insecure,” “Uncorked” is set in Memphis, Rahim’s hometown, and features two of his songs, “Sell” and “1 Hunnid.”
The event will include discussion with Emmy and Grammy-nominated music supervisor Kier Lehman, whose film credits include the Academy Award-winning animated 2018 feature “ Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse,” “The Lego Movie,” “21 Jump Street,” and “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and Morgan Rhodes, music supervisor for “Selma,” which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song “Glory” by John Legend and Common, and Golden Globe for Best Song as well. Rhodes’ credits also include Netflix’s “Dear White People” and “Self-Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker.” Film/TV critic Rebecca Theodore-Vachon, who has published for Entertainment Weekly, Forbes, and the New York Times, moderates the discussion.
Film composer and GU Music Program faculty member Prof. Carlos Simon, winner of the prestigious Marvin Hamlisch Film Scoring Award in 2015 and Sundance/Time Warner Composer Fellow in 2018 as a part of the Sundance Institute, will also discuss how music composition goes hand-in-hand with music supervision. The event will close with performances from Rahim and DC native Beau Young Prince, a Def Jam recording artist who wrote the song “Let Go” for the “Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse” soundtrack.
“The October 30th event excites me because I get to bring so many cool people together to discuss their careers and help shine a light on all the avenues creatives can take,” Rahim says. “It will also be a chance to perform all the new music I have been working on while in residence.”
In fall 2019, Rahim led three free events blending discussion and hip hop performance on Georgetown’s campus, including a talk with award-winning music scholar Dr. Charles Hughes, author of “Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South”; a “Sneakers and Speakers” panel discussion examining sneaker culture’s roots and intersections with hip hop, and an “Everyday We Hustlin’” panel discussion with activists, entrepreneurs, and scholars.
Anthony R. DelDonna, Prof. of Music and Director of the Music Program, says that the University benefits significantly from Rahim’s residency. “For the music program, it broadens the focus on American Musical Culture bringing together not only contemporary voices in hip hop but also scholars, critics, promoters, and artists in related fields. The residency provides our students with direct mentorship, guidance and expertise in how to enter the music industry whether as a performing artist or behind the scenes.”
Though the pandemic affected some of Rahim’s other recent projects–truncating his spring 2020 cultural diplomacy work as a Hip Hop Ambassador to Bolivia with the U.S. Department of State’s Next Level program, and cancelling a planned April performance of his collaboration with Georgetown College’s Persian Studies Program on a 12th-century masterpiece of Persian poetry “The Conference of the Birds”–Rahim has stayed busy planning other Critical Frequencies residency work for Georgetown to come, including additional discussions and work with classes. He also dropped a new EP this fall and is working on a scripted podcast for Spotify. Rahim, who was the librettist for Memphis’s first hip-hop opera, “Grc Lnd 2030,” which debuted in 2018 at Opera Memphis’s Midtown Opera Festival), is also collaborating with Prof. Carlos Simon on a new evening-length multimedia work, “Requiem for the Enslaved,” which draws textual inspiration from historical documents detailing the sale of 272 slaves sold to pay the debts of Georgetown University.
The Oct. 30 “Soundtrack for Life” event is free and open to the public, and individuals can register through Eventbrite to receive the link to view the discussion and performance.