Kyle Smith Takes the Helm in Levien Gym - Columbia College ...

Columbia CollEgE Today DR. JOHN CLARKE ’93
Over the next few days, Clarke started gathering information
and writing lyrics, and a month later he recorded the song.
In August 2009, while searching for a government agency that
might like to use the piece, Clarke stumbled across the video
contest on flu.gov. With four days to go till deadline, he dusted
off his video camera, called his cousin, a photographer, and
traveled to Columbia to shoot the piece on the walkway over
Amsterdam Avenue.
By the end of August, the video had climbed to the Top 10 on
YouTube, and the talk shows began calling. Clarke appeared on
The Wendy Williams Show and then flew to Los Angeles to appear
on The Doctors. The night before the taping, he was stopped on Hollywood
Boulevard for an autograph. “We just laughed,” his wife
says. A few days later, Secretary of Health and Human Services
Kathleen Sebelius called to congratulate Clarke, and he traveled to
Washington, D.C., to accept his prize.
Clarke was a member of the first generation to grow up with
hip-hop and spent most of his formative years in Queens, where
LL Cool J and Run DMC were becoming household names. He
tried to emulate the complex rhymes of Big Daddy Kane and Rakim,
and in high school often memorized
vocabulary words by setting
them to rap. Still, his parents viewed
his hobby nervously. “They didn’t
like it,” he says. “I had to assure them
I wouldn’t allow it to jeopardize
medical school.”
At Columbia, Clarke was pre-med
and did a double concentration in music
and sociology. But he also found
time to rap at talent shows, cut hair for classmates and neighborhood
pals, and bring activists to campus to speak, including Rev. Al
Sharpton, Ralph Nader and Dr. Ruth. “He was the only other person
I knew at school who really appreciated early ’80s Jamaican dancehall,”
says his friend Michael Goldwasser ’93, a Grammy Awardwinning
reggae producer. “While I could not have predicted that he
would later rap about medical issues, it definitely makes sense that
he would rap about issues that are important to society.”
Clarke recorded his first demos from Goldwasser’s dorm
room and his first songs in Professor Brad Garton’s “MIDI Music
Production Techniques” class, where they experimented with the
synthesizers and sequencers used by hip-hop artists at the time.
“We encouraged everyone to really explore their creative side,”
says Garton. “I guess it paid off for John.”
Clarke took Music Humanities with Kitty Brazelton, and for
his final project, he transposed a piece of classical music that
would later help him compose musical tracks. He aced the class,
and Brazelton wrote him a recommendation for medical school.
During his 1997 residency at Mount Sinai School of Medicine,
from where he also earned his M.D., Clarke composed his first
medical-rap, “Asthma Stuff”:
NOvEMBER/DECEMBER 2010
23
Two puffs of the asthma stuff,
Twice a day,
Stops the wheeze and helps you to breathe!
Asthma sufferer LL Cool J introduced the song in what became
an internal hospital video. Since then, Clarke has self-produced six
albums about diabetes, sickle cell anemia and even allergies (one
song is playfully titled “So Many Tissues”) that he sells mostly to
school nurses and other health professionals. His wife and son often
contribute vocals while Clarke puts down the layers of synthesizer
and drum machines himself. He plays the clarinet, piano, bass guitar
and recorder, but says it’s faster and easier to rely on synthesizers.
Clarke’s most ambitious album, Health Hop Music, is geared
toward teenagers. On that Sunday at Grace Cathedral, he interspersed
songs from the album with statistics and the occasional
scripture. The big risk in rapping about medicine, he says, is coming
off as preachy or worse, corny. To avoid that, he tells stories.
In “Playaz Klub,” a young woman infected with HIV hides her
status from her sexual partners, a true story Clarke learned about
from a school social worker. Part of the song is told from the guy’s
point of view, and as Clarke rapped, several
teenagers smiled at the words.
He took her back to the crib to hit a homerun,
In his mind he said, ‘This ho’s dumb.
I didn’t buy her drinks or take her to a movie,
didn’t spend a cent and still I got the booty!’
But getting lucky leads to a life-changing mistake; the song ends
after the guy tests positive for crabs, gonorrhea and HIV.
After the lecture, the crowd stood to applaud. The teenagers
mingled in the lobby on their way out and gave Clarke positive
reviews. “He had a nice flow,” says Jelissa Dacosta, a student at
Nassau Community College who is studying to become a nurse.
“We hear about this stuff all the time, but hip-hop is a good way
to get the message out.”
To see Clarke’s music videos, go to college.columbia.edu/cct.
Clarke spends many
weekends touring
Long Island in his
minivan, performing
at churches and
other venues.
PHOTOs: KIM
MARTINEAu ’97J
Kim Martineau ’97J is communications manager at Transportation
Alternatives, a walking, bicycling and public transit advocacy group in
New York City. She is a former science writer at Lamont-Doherty.